by Alex A King
“You and your phone,” he said to his wife. “I am the man of this family and I say that phone is a problem. From now on, no more ‘caw, caw, caw’ into the phone.”
Marika let me go. She slapped the back of her husband’s head and then eased back into the booth just in time for the server to slide a brownie stacked with ice cream in front of her.
“Where is he?” I asked. Arms folded, I leaned against the booth.
Takis face went blank. “Who?”
“Elias.”
“In Greece.”
I stared at him. Hard. He didn’t back down. Takis is pure henchman, despite his linguini figure.
“Here, boss.”
I swung around to see Elias behind me, dressed in the black the men in the family copied from Xander because they all wished they were that cool. My former bodyguard started out as an assassin hired to kill me, but he switched teams mid-job and Grandma hired him to protect me. He’s not a big man but he can easily melt into the background and hurt bad guys when they need hurting.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” I said, trying to be mad and failing miserably.
Elias shrugged. “Where you go, I go. Whether you know it or not.”
I threw my arms around him and squeezed.
“Do that and he will fart,” Takis said.
“None of you are supposed to be here.” I poked Marika. “And you—my best friend—you lied to me.”
“I wanted to tell you the truth, but Takis made me promise not to tell,” Marika said.
“True story,” Takis said proudly.
“But it cost him,” she said.
Less proud: “Also true.”
“Tell me everything,” I said.
Takis pointed his finger at his wife. “Tell her nothing.”
I pushed Marika’s brownie sideways across the table. She followed, leaving me enough room to fit in beside her. For funsies, I kicked Takis under the table.
“Talk,” I said. “Why are you here? What are you doing? Where are you staying? How long have you been here?”
“We got an AirBnB instead of a hotel,” Marika said, “and a maid. I think when we get back to Greece I will get a maid.”
“No maid,” Takis said. “What for do you think I give you shopping money?”
“It’s me,” Stavros said, appearing behind Elias. “I am the maid.”
Stavros is one of my myriad cousins and one of Grandma’s favorite henchmen. He’s what gay culture refers to as a bear, and when he’s not breaking kneecaps and cuddling Elias, he’s a domestic god.
“He is an excellent maid,” Marika said. “Almost as good as me.”
Greek conversation swirled around me. I’d forgotten how loud and overwhelming my family could be …and how much I had missed them. “An AirBnB? Where? What neighborhood?” My gaze traveled around the table, pausing on each face. “Is it my neighborhood?”
Three sets of eyes went shifty. Not Elias and not Xander. They folded their arms because apparently this was wildly entertaining.
“In a nice neighborhood, very clean, although the sound of the garbage trucks and the street cleaners … po-po … who can live like that?” Marika said between spoonfuls of brownie and French vanilla ice cream.
“Where. Are. You. Staying?”
“Could be the house behind Theo Michail’s house,” Marika said.
Theo is Greek for uncle.
“Marika!” Takis barked.
Nobody looked at us. Beaverton is heavily multicultural and brimming with characters living off-center lives. We were nothing more than a few more stitches in a colorful rug.
“You’re squatting in the house behind my place?” I said.
“It is an AirBnb,” Marika said.
“I doubt that,” I said. “It’s been empty for a while because the owners want too much for it.”
Bones ground against bones as Marika’s head rose slowly from the brownie, until her laser gaze focused on her husband’s face. “You told me it was an AirBnb. That is what you told me.”
“Did I? Who can remember? I say a lot of things, mostly to drown out the sound of your caw, caw, caw.” His hand opened and closed like a puppet.
“Dead man walking,” I muttered. “What are you all doing here?”
“Baboulas sent us, of course,” Marika said.
“I told her not to,” I said sulkily. “When did you get here?”
“Two days ago,” Marika said. “But—”
“Skasmos, woman,” Takis said.
She ignored him. She did that a lot. “—Elias and Xander have been here for weeks.”
“Well …” I pulled out my purse and dropped several of Dad’s twenties on the table. On payday I’d replace them along with the others I’d borrowed. “You can go home. There’s no reason for you to be here.” Except the vaguely malevolent notes and the sudden overabundance of fire in my life. “I’ve got a house, a new job, and a guard bear.” A guard bear that had, thus far, failed at eating intruders.
“You know what you need?” Marika said. “Food. You do not know what you are saying because you are not eating properly.” She looked at the menfolk. “Sit!” she barked in her mom voice. Everyone quickly scooted over. Xander squeezed in next to me. I definitely didn’t think about his penis. Elias pulled up a chair and planted himself at the open end of the booth’s table.
“I’m not ordering until you tell me why you’re here,” I said, thinking food sounded like a great idea. “If Grandma sent you there had to be a reason.”
Takis wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Of course there is a reason, but do you think she would tell us that reason?”
I snatched my phone out of the bag on my lap. “I’ll ask her myself. She’ll tell me. Okay, maybe she won’t tell me at first, but I’ll make her crazy until she spits out the truth just to shut me up.”
I jabbed Grandma’s name on my Contacts list.
“Come,” she said almost immediately.
“Grandma, it’s me.”
“I know that. The photograph of your face told me. What are you doing?”
“Can you believe it, I’m having dinner with family. Isn’t that surprising?”
“Huh,” she said. “That is lucky. Family is gold.”
“So lucky. By the way, I think you know them. Takis, Stavros, Marika, Xander, Elias … Do those names ring a bell?”
“Bell? What bell?”
Things get lost in translation between Greek and English all the time. This was one of those times. But I never put it past Grandma to misunderstand on purpose. She thrived on others underestimating her. That’s how she maintained her dual lifestyle, Wyatt Earp one day, Don Corleone the next.
“I know you sent them, so don’t deny it.”
“Do you hear me denying anything?”
“Why did you send them here?”
“They wanted a vacation,” she said dryly.
In the background, someone asked Grandma for two thousand dollars.
“Are you shopping?”
“For my kitchen. A few things that I need, eh?”
I know Grandma’s kitchen. There isn’t enough room to swing a dead cat—although what kind of unhygienic sicko swings dead cats in kitchens anyway? Grandma can’t fit two thousand dollars of anything in her kitchen.
Then it hit me: the person asking for money spoke English—American English. They had requested dollars, not the euros Greeks used to replace drachmas.
“Buying them where?” I asked suspiciously.
“A place you do not know.”
“What place?”
“A kitchen place.”
I looked at the others. They were occupied with something on Takis’ phone. That left Marika, who was the most likely to leak when squeezed. “Marika, how did you get here?”
“In a van?”
“I mean, to this country.”
She looked uncertain. “On a plane?”
I raised an eyebrow. “A regular plane?”
“On
Baboulas’s plane?”
There were way too many question marks in this conversation. “Did she get off with you? And stay behind? And go shopping?”
“Maybe. It was dark. I do not remember.”
“Think carefully.”
In my ear Grandma said, “Marika does not know her mouni from a hole in the wall in the men’s bathroom, so there is no point asking her.”
“We call those glory holes over here,” I told her.
There was chilly silence on the other end of the phone.
“The hole in the wall,” I said. “Not Marika’s lady garden.”
“I went to a lady garden once,” Marika said brightly. “There were only women allowed.”
My eye twitched. “Grandma?”
“Fuck my Virgin Mary with a horn,” Grandma said. “Your aunt is trying to pay this woman but the woman is too busy staring at her.”
“She loves my dress,” Aunt Rita said in the background.
Probably that was true around here. We saw all kinds, even the colorful, fabulous Aunt Ritas of the world who’d started out at someone’s uncle.
“Aunt Rita is here, too?” I closed my eyes. Colors swirled. Dots dotted. “Did the whole family come?”
“Do not be silly,” Grandma said. “Papou and your father are still in Greece. I left your father in charge, and Papou refused to hand over his eagles to the customs people so I had to send him back.”
The dots dotted harder.
“Why are you all here? I’m fine. I have a house. I have a job.”
I didn’t have friends because I hadn’t told anyone I was home yet. How do you say, “I came home because I murdered my cousin, and by the way my family is the Greek Mafia,” on Facebook? Half my friends would leave a surprised emoji and the other half were technically family so they’d be loving my status all over the place.
“There was a credible threat,” Grandma said.
“And several incredible ones,” my aunt said. “Like the man who wants to kidnap you so he can use you as the model for his own high-end sex doll.”
I said nothing for the longest time. Then: “Were the others better or worse than that?”
“That was the best one,” my aunt said. “The others were more creative, though. There is something very wrong with those people.”
Christ on a cliff. I had to hand it to weirdoes; they really maxed out their life goals. “What was the credible threat?”
“Vre, one of your jobs exploded and the other one caught fire,” my last remaining grandparents said. “That is a credible threat against your life, yes?”
“Where are you?”
“The shop with a name that makes no sense. A man’s name,” Grandma said. “Why did they name it after a man when more women do the cooking?”
Williams Sonoma at the Washington Square Mall. Fewer than ten minutes away.
“Stay right there.”
“I cannot do that. Your aunt wants to go to heaven.”
“Sephora,” Aunt Rita said over Grandma’s shoulder. “I told you five times, Mama, it is called Sephora. It is French.”
My eye twitched. I held the ticking nerve still with one finger. “I knew that.”
“You cannot trust the French,” Grandma said. “They eat snails.”
Xander came with me. First I tried escaping out the bathroom window at McMenamins, but it didn’t have window, and the poster on the wall wasn’t covering an escape route. So much for my Shawshank moment.
The Washington Square Mall and I had seen too much of each other this holiday season. Avoiding it like ground zero of a zombie breakout was the best course of action during December, and yet this was the second time I’d wound up parking out in the boonies when I wasn’t even here to shop.
We found Aunt Rita with one of Sephora’s black baskets looped over one arm and Grandma carrying a second basket on the verge of overflowing. Aunt Rita swooped me up in her perfumed embrace and hugged the toothpaste out of me.
“I have missed you so much!” she gushed. She reluctantly let me go when Grandma said, “Let me look at her.”
For the next thirty seconds I stood still while Grandma inspected me for bruises and other defects. In a Greek attic somewhere, there’s a portrait of Grandma in her prime that grows prettier and perkier each year, while the flesh and blood Grandma battles gravity’s callous effects and loses. Probably she used to be my height, but time used her as its own personal concertina and now she’s almost a foot shorter. Because she’s a widow, her wardrobe is exclusively black, and she wears her steel gray hair trapped in a bun at the back of her head. Next to her, Aunt Rita is a giant. Aunt Rita used to be my uncle until she switched teams. As a woman she’s downright fabulous, and today she was fabulous in a slinky black dress that made JLo’s famous green Versace dress look demure.
“I feel like a watermelon,” I said.
“If you were a watermelon Mama would be cutting you open to take a look,” Aunt Rita said.
“Then I’m glad I’m not a watermelon.”
Finally, Grandma seemed to come to a decision. “You are too skinny. You should eat. Here.” She thrust a container of koulourakia at me; they magically appeared from inside her large black handbag. I peeked under the lid. No green flecks. These weren’t Grandma’s infamous cannabis cookies.
“No pot?”
“That was one time.”
“What about hallucinogens?”
“That was one other time,” she said.
I grabbed one of the twisty orange-scented cookies and stuck the end in my mouth. A sales associate appeared at my elbow. Every product sold in the store was simultaneously on her face or fingers.
“You can’t eat in here,” she said.
Aunt Rita held up both baskets. “How about now?”
“Would you like a chair to go with that cookie?” the sales associate asked me.
Despite her change of heart, I pocketed the koulouraki for later. I had respect, damn it. I wasn’t one of life’s rule breakers. That’s why I’d come home: to stop an impending death spiral into utter lawlessness.
“I told you not to come,” I said to Grandma.
“Did I listen? No. You do not get to my age by listening to everybody who speaks.”
“Ignore her,” Aunt Rita said. “I do. Mama was worried that you would spend Christmas alone. We were planning to show up on your doorstep on Christmas morning with gifts. This is the first year I have been able to spoil you. Michail was hiding you away for so long.”
My inner child was bummed out that I’d missed decades of presents.
“Where are you staying?” I asked them.
“In an AirBnB,” Aunt Rita said carefully—too carefully.
“Would this be the same AirBnb where Marika and the others are staying?” I swung around to look at Xander. “Is that where you’re staying?”
He did nothing. He was good at it.
“Xander has been sleeping in your attic for the past month,” Grandma said.
“My attic! Are you kidding me? We don’t have an attic—we have a crawlspace. And what, you’ve been coming down to use the bathroom and shower when I’m not around?”
He did nothing some more.
I wagged my finger at him. “No more sleeping in the crawlspace. If you insist on sleeping under my roof I’ll make up the spare bedroom.” I turned back to Grandma and Aunt Rita. “Talk to me about this alleged AirBnB, because when I asked Marika and Takis about their AirBnB, it turned out they were squatting in the house behind me.”
“They are not squatting,” Grandma said. “I bought the house behind you.”
“You bought the house?” My voice reached paint-stripping levels. “Save yourself some time and just tell me everything.”
“There is nothing to tell. I own many properties around the world. Real estate can be a decent side business. I liked that house so I bought it.”
“And the one in your street,” Aunt Rita said over Grandma’s shoulder.
“The o
ne in my street,” I muttered, my eye twitching. “Which house?”
“Around the bend in the road so Elias can keep an eye on your place.”
The eye twitching didn’t stop. I pushed my finger hard against the occipital bone. “How much of Portland did you buy?”
“Two houses, that is all,” Grandma said.
“Are you responsible for all the Christmas decorations and the tree? I know Xander did it but were you the instigator?”
“That was Xander’s idea,” Grandma said. “He overheard you talking to that crude man who lives next door.”
Aunt Rita gathered me up in her perfume-scented arms—all the perfumes and their eye-watering notes. “Christmas is coming, and Christmas is all about family. Shall we go to see Santa Claus? You can tell him what you want and I will get it for you.”
“You know I’m almost thirty, right?”
She released me long enough to slip her arm through mine. “Indulge me. I missed out on your childhood.”
Chapter 9
From mid-November, Santa took up residence in a grotto located under the food court between the two escalators. School was in for a couple more days so I wasn’t about to die of old age in line. A snack sounded good though. Maybe some Goldfish.
I eyed a toddler sucking a juice box. Grandma and Aunt Rita had temporarily ditched me for Starbucks. They’d be back, but when? Xander and Elias were on bodyguard duty, but at a distance because I didn’t want them freaking out parents. One took the entrance while the other took the exit. They scanned the crowd continuously.
The lined moved. My number was up. Now it was me and the man in red. He looked behind me for a child.
“It’s just me,” I said. “I’m not a creep, just a woman with a complicated and overbearing family.”
“Sounds like it’s coal for them this year.” Santa’s eyes twinkled. “Have you been naughty or nice?”
Good question. On the one hand I was a decent human who’d never had so much as an overdue library book. On the other I’d recently shot a man dead. A bad man, yes, but to Santa Claus, dead is dead. I’d be lucky to get coal.