Page 125 of Night of Shadows
Maeve, at this moment, is asking Cathleen if she’ll fly back up for the wedding, and Cathleen is saying ‘I am not flying back, Maeve. I am moving back. I have been thinking about it for a year. I am moving back to Boston before the wedding. The Florida apartment is going on the market in March.’
Maeve drops the dish towel.
Cathleen catches her in a hug.
My mother, beside them, puts a hand on each of their shoulders.
The three matriarchs stand at the sink for a long moment, holding each other.
I watch them from across the room, and I think: ‘now. The family is in the room. The blessing is in the air. The ring has been in my coat pocket for forty-six days. Tonight is the night.’
Chapter 35
Lex
Agapi Mou
The next evening.
Maeve doesn’t know what is coming. Maeve has not known for two days. I have been arranging the shape of this evening since approximately 11:00 PM the night before grand jury, when I lay awake in our bed watching her sleep against my ribs and I decided that the proposal would happen the day after the family dinner, after the testimony, after Brigid's letter, after my mother's silent ‘now’ across her kitchen, when the brownstone would be empty and Maeve would be home and the chapter of our life that had been building for fifty-eight days would be allowed to close into the chapter that comes after.
Nora is at my mother's apartment.
She’s been there since 4:00 PM. My mother picked her up. My mother said, in front of Maeve, that she wanted Nora overnight to make ‘kourabiedes’ for tomorrow's lunch and that she would not take no for an answer. Maeve, who has been in the calm aftermath of grand jury for thirty-six hours and who is wearing a sweater Eleni quietly delivered to the brownstone two days ago, didn’t ask why. The sweater is dark blue. The neckline is wide. Maeve's collarbones are exposed, and the small gold chain I gave her on Day thirty-one sits at the dip at the base ofher throat, and Maeve has, in the precise way of a wife who has been listening, decided to let the evening happen the way it is happening.
Cormac is in the lobby. Declan is on the sidewalk. They are not here for security in any operational sense; the threats are dispatched, Karpov is in federal custody, Foley is in federal custody, Reznikov Sr. is in St. Petersburg and not coming. Cormac and Declan are in the lobby because they want to be near the building when it happens. They asked me yesterday. I said yes.
Nico, Siobhan, Sofia, Stavros, and my mother are at her apartment. They are waiting for my text. The text will read ‘yes’ and nothing else.
Maeve doesn’t know any of this.
? ? ?
I make dinner.
My mother's ‘stifádo,’ the slow-braised beef with pearl onions and red wine and bay leaves and a clove of garlic studded with allspice, the recipe she wrote out for me on an index card in October and which I have been making once a week for two months. I have been making it the way you practice scales. The first attempts were tolerable. The current attempt, this evening, is the closest I have come to my mother's version. The pearl onions are perfect. The wine has reduced correctly. The meat has fallen apart the way it falls apart when it has been treated correctly for three hours.
Maeve sits at the kitchen island with a glass of red wine.
She watches me work. She’s been watching me cook for two months. The watching is the settled habit of a wife who has settled that this is one of her favorite things in her life now, which is the husband who is at the stove with a cookbook on the counter and the small frown of concentration he wears when he’s trying to do something correctly.
"What are you making?”
"‘Stifádo.’"
"You made ‘stifádo’ on Tuesday."
"This is a better version."
"You are competing with yourself."
"Yes."
Maeve smiles. Small. Real. She drinks her wine. The candles I have lit are at the dining table, the kitchen island, the window over the sink, and the small sideboard near the hallway. There are seven candles in the kitchen and three more in the dining room. I have been lighting candles since 5:30 PM. The brownstone is, by 7:14 PM, when I plate the ‘stifádo,’ lit the way my grandmother's apartment in Brookline was lit on Sunday evenings in the 1990s, with the steady warmth of a house that has been deciding, for the last hour, that the evening is going to matter.
I plate the ‘stifádo’ in the small white bowls my mother gave us when we got married. The bowls have a thin gold rim. They are from the set my grandmother brought with her from the village outside Thessaloniki in 1948. There are seven of them in the cabinet. Two are on the counter. The other five are stacked behind the everyday plates.
I bring the bowls to the table. Maeve follows.
