The family secret.
Whatever.
Finally, as they wound down on discussing the latest goalie’s errors on the field, Athena jumped in.
“Father, you just came from California. Did any of the Skoros family attend the new consul’s welcome party in San Francisco?”
Blinking as if seeing her for the first time, he came over and wrapped an arm around her shoulder. “Sorry, my dear, we’ve been ignoring you. Just had to catch up on the football news. Mobiles and whatnot are not the same as talking in person.” He glanced over at Chris and exchanged a typical male, time-to-share-the-wealth kind of look.
“I’m just curious,” she said mildly, “about the Skoroses.”
“They all came—well, all except the two eldest and their families. And the youngest son, the sheriff’s deputy. He was on an emergency rescue operation somewhere in the mountains. You and Chris’ll like them. The elder Skoroses, well, they’re rich as Croesus. He’s into real estate development, owns shopping centers all over northern California. He’s very Greek and she—Lorena, your mother’s cousin—is very Italian. The four sons, well, Chris will love the two younger ones, Alex and Kas. We didn’t meet the two older boys. They’re married, involved in running the Skoros empire. I imagine Alex and Kas will be showing you two about. They’re both good-looking ladies’ men, my darling daughter, so watch out.”
“Father, they’re too old!”
Her father suppressed a smile with a smirk aimed in Chris’s direction. “Thirty and twenty-eight, I believe. So, that’s hardly too old. That’s when men, if they’re not already married, become dangerous predators. They know enough about women to charm and disarm them.”
“Yeah, right out of their panties,” interjected Chris, smirking.
His father shot him a censorious look. “I met your mother when she was twenty-one and I was thirty-two. Anyway, they said they’ll take you out on some adventures, skiing in the Sierras or Jet-skiing on the lake, which is practically in their back lot. From the Skoros estate in the Sierra foothills, you can go from Jet-skiing on Folsom Lake to snow skiing in the Sierras. You’ll both have a jolly good time.”
“I don’t know,” she demurred. “I hope it’s worth missing three days of work and class.”
“Hey, I go for that, Dad,” enthused Chris. “I’d better pack swim trunks. You, too, ’Thena, unless you don’t want them to see your thunder thighs.”
She fell for her brother’s bait. “I don’t have thunder thighs, cross-eyed Chris!”—a rather lame retort, she felt—“I’ve lost five pounds in the past month, I’ll have you know.”
“Yeah, how? You eat a ton on the weekends.”
“I do not,” she shot back. “I work hard. Which is more than I can say for you.”
Chris sneered at her defensiveness, which sparked an old rivalry for their father’s attention. “Still no boyfriends, eh?”
A quick glance at her father told her he’d heard that a million times before.
“Come now, Chris, you know your sister has discriminating tastes. Which, by the way, I heartily approve of. We wouldn’t want just any bloke hanging around, would we?”
“Any ol’ bloke, Dad, would be a welcome sight compared to zero, zilch, nada, rien. I’ll have to hook her up with some of my high school pals before long.”
Athena grabbed the nearest pillow and threw it at Chris’s head, which prompted him to throw it back. And thus ensued their thousandth pillow fight while her father vanished into the relative peace and quiet of the master bedroom suite and closed the door.
****
Twenty-four hours later, as she and Chris left the jetway at the Sacramento International Airport, Athena spied her mother first, waving and smiling broadly. Apparently, her mother, looking relaxed, was having a good time with the Skoroses.
Through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the terminal, the sun shone brightly, not a thunderstorm or snow-bloated cloud in sight. Excited, Athena felt in her hobo bag and found her sunglasses. Ah, California! They were right, it was sunny, and everyone, including her mother, was wearing cropped pants or Bermuda shorts and colorful tops. She could get used to this.
Chris nudged her as they approached their mother. “Remember, I’ve got dibs on the Jet Ski!”
The three hugged and kissed as though they hadn’t seen each other in years. This was her mother’s custom, very Italian, which they relished following.
“Are you alone, Mum?” Athena asked. There was not a Greek-American nearby, from the looks of it.
“How was your flight? Oh, I’m so happy to see you both! You’ll have such a good time! No, I’m not alone. The boys are downstairs in the baggage claim area, waiting to meet you.”
The boys? Did she mean, the two younger Skoros brothers?
Athena nudged closer to her mother as they followed the disembarking passengers down the escalator to the floor where revolving conveyor belts disgorged all shapes and sizes of bags and boxes. “What are they like?” Her mother indicated with a gesture to the base of the escalator.
Two dark-haired men stood slightly apart from the others, and immediately fixed their attention on Athena’s family as they approached. Both were tall, broad-shouldered and handsome, and obviously brothers, so alike in appearance there could’ve been no doubt. One wore a wide, rakish grin, and was the slightly shorter and cuter one. He wore khakis and a navy polo shirt. The other, slightly taller and huskier, more rugged with dark stubble, wore jeans and a plain, black, short-sleeved T-shirt under a brown leather, bomber-style jacket. Athena recognized him immediately. The sheriff’s deputy, whose portrait she’d painted for his mother.
His dark gaze locked onto hers, and he frowned.
Most men she encountered didn’t react that way to her. It was just the opposite, in fact. Usually, they stared with eyebrows raised, as if speculating about her. It wasn’t until much later that they frowned.
Her mother made introductions.
“Alex, Kas, my son, Chris. My daughter, Athena.” The cute one, the ready charmer, Athena thought, bumped Chris’s fist and took her hand in both of his.
“Very nice to meet you, Athena,” Alex said. “Athena, Greek goddess of war, knowledge and wisdom.”
She opened her clairvoyance channel and held his hand a second longer. What surprised her was the image of a brick wall—red brick, solid, high, and thick. In surprise, she looked into his light brown eyes. They glittered with merriment. This was some kind of a joke.
“And this is Kas,” her mother continued, indicating the taller, more rugged-looking brother. Shyly, although she didn’t know why, she held out her hand but couldn’t look him in the eye. Again, all her mental channel gave her was a vision of a high wall, this time, a gray, fieldstone one, covered with pale green lichen.
“War, knowledge, or wisdom? Which one are you, Athena?” Kas asked. He held her hand firmly as if he had no intention of ever letting go. She could not penetrate that gray, fieldstone wall. His dark brown brows deeply furrowed, he stared her down. Athena broke the stare and glanced at her mother.
“They know about you, Athena. The Skoros brothers have had years of practice with their mother, who’s like you and me, dear. If they don’t want you to see into them, they’ve learned how to block us out. With, literally, mental walls.”
Finally, Kas let go of her hand and stepped back. Both men smiled at their ruse, Alex tucking his hand around her arm and sidling up to her. He lowered his baritone voice to almost a whisper.
“Hope you don’t mind, but we’ve learned over the years how to keep our private thoughts to ourselves.” He winked at her. “We can do a wall for minutes at a time. At least, until our mother gives up and lets go.”
Athena liked Alex’s breezy smile and easy way of disarming her. The other one, Kas—the one whose portrait she’d painted—kept his distance and walked ahead to the baggage carousel.
“So, pretty girl, you never answered Kas. Which are you, Athena? The goddess of war, knowledge or wisdo
m?”
“At this point in my life, I’m afraid, none of the above. Certainly not the first, working on the second, and wondering if I’ll ever attain the third.”
Alex laughed, and Chris scoffed. “Wisdom, Athena? Huh, never in a million years.”
Overhearing her, Kas turned around at the baggage carousel and shot her a lopsided grin.
When this taller brother smiled, he became better-looking, less intimidating, though from the back, his shoulders appeared even broader and more solid. She found herself studying him while he had his back turned, watching the carousel. There was something about him, a quality of integrity and reliability that held her interest for a few moments. And something else she couldn’t define.
Her mother tucked her hand into Alex’s other arm and smiled at them all before giving Athena the look.
Ooh, no, Mum. Don’t even try. He’s gorgeous. Alex is a cute charmer, but still way too old.
What was Alex, thirty? He looked twenty-five. The other one, Kas, looked like a weary Atlas, carrying the burden of the world on his very broad, capable shoulders. He was the youngest, but he looked older than Alex. World-weary. Dark and mysterious, but too mountain-man, too serious.
Funny, how just being around the Skoros brothers evoked a lot of the Greek myths she’d learned in high school. If Kas was Atlas, who was Alex?
Her heart skipped a little.
Ah, yes. Adonis.
Chapter Ten
Later, Athena would recall their sojourn in California as a blurred series of scenes and conversations. With the Skoroses providing the opportunities, the next four nights and three days passed eventfully. The first evening, Athena and Chris met the family patriarch and matriarch and tried not to show how overwhelmed they felt by the family’s trappings of wealth. Her father had provided them with an upper middle-class upbringing and lifestyle, but the Skoros family showed her what real wealth was. More than a rented townhouse condo in Alexandria or an old, family townhouse in a venerable neighborhood of Kensington, London, the Skoroses had acreage and a mansion that would rival the Duke of Marlborough’s country estate. Well, not quite. Athena soon learned that all the golden and tree-dotted hills surrounding the Skoros mansion did not belong to the family, only fifty or so acres. All the rest were part of a state preserve.
Lorena Skoros was petite, her short, curly hair kept dark brown and stylish, as were her clothes, befitting a woman a little younger than seventy years of age. Her dark eyes, like her younger sons’, were lively and penetrating. Athena got the impression that she never missed a thing. She was especially warm and cordial with Athena, a possible reason made clear by Alex the next day as they were sightseeing in Napa Valley among the wineries. He was playing guide around the Castello di Amoroso, the newly built castle and headquarters of a popular winery. Meanwhile, he expanded on his family’s dynamics.
“Mom’s prescient, a prognosticator, or as she calls it, an old-fashioned seeress. She said she had a dream that Kas would someday marry a tall blonde and have children, at least one daughter who would carry on the psychic gift. Well, I never argue with Mom but Kas challenges her predictions all the time. He said in so many words that he’d never marry a blonde, no matter what she looked like. Blondes weren’t his type, blah, blah, blah. No one’s going to influence him. Free will and all that. Mom just smiled and said, ‘You’ll see’.”
While her mother didn’t look surprised, Athena was stunned. All she could murmur was, “No wonder he avoids me like the plague.”
Alex laughed and said that he wondered if she’d picked up on that.
“He’s avoiding all tall blondes, so don’t take it personally.”
“He’s not my type, either,” she retorted smoothly. “He’s too rough looking. You can tell him that for me.”
Alex laughed, a boyish kind of laugh that reminded her of playgrounds and ice cream cones.
“Papu, he’s the brains of the family business, but now that George has taken over as CEO and Leon’s COO, he’s not involved in the day-to-day operations. With Mom’s guidance, Papu plans where the next big project is going to go. We do the rest. He appointed me CFO, thanks to my major in accounting and economics, so I work the numbers and set up the financing.”
The two older sons, George and Leon, would join them on Thanksgiving Day and bring their families with them. The younger generation of Skoroses was all involved with Skoros Enterprises, and all of them shared the work, responsibilities, and the financial gains.
“What does Kas do? Besides being a deputy sheriff?” Athena looked at the tapestries hanging in the medieval-looking dining hall, trying not to appear too interested in the Skoros’ family business. She’d never met a family of multi-millionaires before.
“He’s on call with the sheriff’s Search and Rescue Team, but it’s voluntary and part-time. His job with the family business? He’s a hands-on kind of guy and former military police, so his day job is liaison with the architects, contractors, and construction crews. He doesn’t take bull from anybody and knows how to juggle details. After a shopping center or commercial building is built, he supervises the site managers for Leon.”
The entire family impressed Athena. Philip Skoros, the eighty-year-old patriarch of the family, was taller than his wife, and chubby. Although, when he hugged Athena, she could feel his firmness as if there was more muscle than fat behind his rotund belly and barrel chest. He was American-born but loved to hold to Greek traditions and food. Their first evening at the Skoros estate—the evening before their Napa wineries tour—the dinner meal wafted the scent of garlicky dishes like hummus and pita bread, tzatziki sauce and lamb kabobs, and tabouli and rice pilaf. There were two cooks and two servers who kept the dishes coming over a three-hour period. By the time a tray of baklava was brought out and sent around the large dining table, Athena’s throat had clamped shut, and Chris looked like he was going to barf up half his meal.
While Alex kept a continuous and entertaining stream of conversation going all day Tuesday, as they wine-tasted among the vines and then had lunch at Castillo Amoroso, he wrapped up his summary of the Skoros family. He then shocked Athena by bringing up the topic she had studiously avoided mentioning.
“You don’t have to feel squeamish about my mother’s dreams,” he said good-naturedly. “Even though she’s been accurate about ninety percent of the time. We take her precognitive dreams in a philosophical way. If it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be.”
The three of them were having lunch in the vintner’s castle, built in 1985, as a replica of a parador the owner had stayed in while traveling in Spain. Chris had run off with Kas into the mountains to ski. Although the weather had turned warm and sunny that week, the month before had seen at least six inches of snow drop in the Sierras, and avid skiers were taking advantage of the cold nights and snowmaking machines to get an early start on the season.
Athena glanced at her mother, who was gazing at something across the large banquet hall. Well, there was no way to broach the topic but to plunge into it.
“Alex, what do you and Kas think about your mother’s dream? The one about you and your brother?”
“Oh, the one she told Anna about,” he said, attracting the older woman’s attention. “Don’t feel upset about it. Kas doesn’t usually take any of Mom’s predictions seriously, but this one, he is. He’s making sure we don’t fulfill Mom’s prophetic dream. She hasn’t told Papu, for fear it’d give him a heart attack, which it probably would. The old man has gotten frail these past couple of years, and he’s a lot like Kas, worries about everything, every detail. She told us, though, so we could avoid fate, as she calls it. How’s that even possible? Avoiding fate? Me, I don’t worry about it. I live in the moment, or at least try to.”
Alex took a sip of his syrah and shrugged. “Here it goes. She saw one of us dying in a car crash, but I was driving, and Kas was the only other person in the car with me. Well, naturally, that creeped us out at first, and we questioned her. Was she sure I’m t
he one driving? Do I hit another car or does the other car hit us? Do I lose control, that kind of thing? She was kinda vague on the details. Her dreams come in a flash, from God-knows-where. Some other dimension, she says. None of us have the Sight, y’know. She says it’s just handed down in the female line and she’s had no daughters. So here we are, with a mother”—he paused and looked first at Anna, then Athena—“as you well know how it feels, Athena. With a mother who has these powers of Sight and Prophecy and none of us guys can see beyond what we’re doing this very minute. It’s strange, but we’re used to it.”
Athena saw her mother nod in understanding. “Yes, I can imagine how my husband and son feel about me and Athena.”
Hating her freakiness, Athena’s stomach roiled. It was like hating the color or texture of your hair. What could you do about it? Ignore the freakiness? Or embrace it?
“So, this prophetic dream of your mother’s? Do you believe you can keep it from happening? The car crash and…everything?” she asked bluntly. Alex stared back at her as if weighing for a moment how he was going to reply. She hoped he would choose total honesty, for she hadn’t much use for people who sugarcoated reality.
“Kas believes we can. So that’s good enough for me.” He gave a short laugh. “Just like he can avoid falling for blondes.”
Anna smiled at Alex and toasted him with her glass of wine. “Here’s to tolerant, open-minded husbands and sons. God bless them. And here’s to cheating fate. Our powers aren’t etched in stone and God knows, we’re anything but infallible.”
Joining in, Athena raised her glass of wine and tapped the other two. “Yes, that’s so true, Mum, we aren’t. But I doubt we’ll find open-minded men outside the Skoros family. They’re in a unique position, don’t you think? They’ve grown up with a mother who shares our powers. Same with Chris and Father. They’re the only other men I know who don’t let it bother them. At least, not all of the time. Which is probably why I’ll never get married. Finding men who don’t mind me reading their minds is impossible.”
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