Let Me Explain You

  “Neither do you.”

  Rhonda shrugged. She wasn’t willing to say so.

  “He just tells you the version he wants you to hear, and you eat it right up.”

  Rhonda stood, finally. “I know how to read between the lines with people like him. And people like you, too.”

  Litza dumped her coffee into the sliver of a garden bed next to the stoop. There were no people like Litza, cunt.

  Rhonda poured her coffee out, too, in the same spot. But then she said, “He wants the best for you. That’s what any parent wants. Even the shittiest ones can’t help themselves, and believe me, I would know.”

  “How does it feel to know he’s tired of you and moving on?”

  That was true. The letter spoke that truth. The mistress had been left out completely.

  Rhonda smiled. It was real, insofar as that it saw right through Litza. “Honey, if I had the time to wait around for your father to catch up, we’d be having this same conversation, only you’d be calling me Mom.”

  A snort. “Yeah, that’s not what I’d call you.”

  Dear Dad: Did you leave it all to this cunt?

  Dear Dad: What could she possibly see in you?

  Litza was driving in circles. There was no one else to call on, because there was no one he was good or loyal to. She didn’t contact Ruby or Mother. She had not told them he was missing, and she was willing to bet Stavroula hadn’t, either. For the last two days, Stavroula had been holding the knowledge of their father’s disappearance at arm’s length, away from herself. Litza felt she could keep the truth of her father’s disappearance in a cage, bottle-feed it, make it hers. She would be first to find him. She was owed. She would face him, whatever state he was in, and demand to know, Where have you been?

  Litza did not expect to run into her father’s oldest and possibly only friend playing tavli in an ice-cream parlor owned by a young Greek. Hero, who only played with bosses, let Litza in on a game once or twice in her life, because he saw she was a boss. She had not seen him since her wedding. He had gained a few pounds, and he had finally given his hair up to gray. The mustache was gone, but the skin looked heavy there, like a horse’s lip. Her father’s would look the same, no doubt, if he shaved.

  Hero shook his die, said, “Are you bringing good luck, or bad?”

  “Always bad.”

  “Who needs you, then?” He stood, kissed each cheek but landed on her ears. Pulled out a chair. He had always been sweet with her, fair. If he had been her father, he would have been more forgiving. But, maybe not.

  “Ice cream changes your luck,” the other Greek said, no accent. “Have some with us.” His hair was a stiff wave. His red shirt was uncollared but crisp. His father had probably given him this shop, easy. Like Hero, he was probably one of the lucky ones, no ICD code to his name.

  Litza did not sit, because she knew it would obligate her. “I’m looking for my father.”

  “That’s an easy guess,” Hero said. “Your father is working.”

  “He’s not. He’s missing.”

  “Your father’s missing?” The boy sat, straddling the back of the chair, his shoes slipping from their brown dress socks. The pants stiff, as if never worn before, just like the shiny, uncreased belt. Stavros Stavros would have said, How can a man who dresses like this know the cold of his own ice cream?

  “Stavros is not missing, re. If his diner is here on earth, he’s not going anywhere.” He took the die, shook it, but didn’t toss it. “How long he’s missing?”

  “Four days now.”

  “You’ve called the police?” the boy asked.

  Litza looked down on Hero’s head. She remembered her and Stavroula, young girls, trying to hide packets of sugar in his blond hair. Now it was so thin she could brush it away with the back of her hand.

  “You are worried, koritisi mou?”

  The boy pushed back his chair. “We can help you look.”

  “I’d rather go alone,” Litza said.

  Hero stood. She didn’t see it coming, his warm, padded hands on her face. He was whispering something possibly meant to be reassuring, but she couldn’t make it out. She could not look up.

  Mercifully, he let go.

  Litza sat in the parking lot of the funeral home. She stared at herself in the vanity mirror. She dipped a crumpled tissue into an old water bottle and dabbed at her cheek. She brushed her hair. She tried three times to open the car door. Gabriel had promised to be there, if she needed him. She pictured herself as part of a painting that Gabriel was both creating and inside of. She thought about his eyes, which were parchment. He would be standing inside the funeral home with his hands behind his back; he would comfort her, smelling of bath and broth, and offer refreshments intended not to fill her but to bring warmth.

  She adjusted her chair, reclining, trying to feel what it would be like to lay her head against his chest, and she felt her fingertips graze To Live Until We Say Good-bye.

  She opened the book, somewhere in the middle. She turned the page, the one after that. The pictures of people dying, chapter after chapter, were like watching a bonfire slowly succumb to a scalloped sky—watching the brilliant breaking down of wood, the wood fiercely facing its moment of burning even as it crackled and ashed into less than it ever thought it could be. And the color gray. How brave, and yet scared all these people were. They were all experiencing the greatest betrayal of all: the body’s refusal to forgive, the body unable to remember and protect, and, ultimately, the body abandoning the body.

  I used to wish for death A lot of the time. Then I died. For a little time. Now I wish to die Some of the time. But, now I know, I know It will be For all the time. The woman on page 48, this beautiful model whose face at once stood up to and became disgraced by cancer.

  Whatever they had been in life—the woman, everyone—they were all 000.0 now. Nothing but a fading memory, a faint bit of writing.

  CHAPTER 22

  * * *

  Stavroula heard a commotion outside. She dropped two lids. She threw the dish towel over her shoulder and flung open the back door, half expecting to see her father at the bottom of the stairs, Marina having missed the spot in the apartment, as if he were a loose hamster. Stavroula searched the blackness for something she could assign to the noise. A strangely tall man, taller than his shadow, stood with the goat. He petted its horns. Nearby were barrels and some clay pots, knocked over.

  Stavroula shut the door behind her and called, nervously, “Is this your goat?”

  Her eyes adjusted to the light, and she saw that the man was tall, but not as tall as she first thought. His hat made him look taller than he actually was. “Hello?” She came off the step. “Are you here for your goat?” He continued to pet the goat’s horns, something she did not think people did. He was clucking at the goat. She came close and he stopped. She saw that he was wearing a black cloak as well. That he was a priest. He lifted his head and smiled at her and looked familiar.

  “This is not my goat. My goats are the ones you can’t see—the ones maybe your father has told you stories about. The elusive kri-kri.”

  “No, he never told us.”

  “Ah, well. Elusive. At least your father shared with you his big nose.”

  She realized how she knew him. He was Marina’s father, from the face.

  “But not the eyes,” he said. “They must be yours alone. They are not your mother’s, either.”

  “You know my mother?” She didn’t like to call Dina that, but with this man, it seemed that they were speaking of history that predated her.

  His face was pockmarked all the way down to the neck, looking the way a firecracker sounded. “Eczema.” He rubbed where she was staring. “Got me in my best years. Marina does not look so bad as me, I hope?”

  “No, she’s just fat these days.” Marina, calling from the top step. She said, “What’s wrong with you, you can’t use a telephone anymore?”

  “Ela, I was already on the plane when that thinking cam
e to me,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Thoughts take their time to get to the old.”

  “Liar,” Marina said. To Stavroula, “He knows I would have told him to stay home.”

  “She doesn’t let her poor pateras visit, so close he is to making death a professional acquaintance. To kicking the dust.” He twittered his fingers. “Come here, little bird.”

  Marina came out, but not as far as he beckoned. “You don’t know to use a front door? You creep around the back like a thief?”

  “The things you learn from a man’s back door are valuable. For instance, I discovered this goat.”

  They did not hug. Marina gave the pappas two obligatory kisses. Then she gave two more. She kneaded his hands. She said in a chiding voice, one Stavroula had never heard before, “You did not tell me in your emails that all the time I was getting old, so were you.”

  Stavroula recalled a single photograph, a memory she did not know was hers—and maybe it wasn’t, maybe it was her father’s or Marina’s—of the pappas at a wedding. In the picture, he had weepy eyes and a robust black beard, and he looked as if he were celebrating everybody. In his arms, tucked against his black robe, were four spotted baby goats, all staring at the camera, all squeezed together in a hug. This man in front of her was just like him but more svelte, and the beard white, not so insistent. The skin of his eyelids was finely cracked.

  They were trading some words in Greek that Stavroula could not follow. Their voices turned crucial. Then the pappas leaned over, reminding Stavroula of a swan, and folded Marina into his arms. He put the bottom of his cheek to her forehead. His eyes were wet. He said, “My fat Marina.”

  Marina took Stavroula’s arm and pulled her near. “This is his oldest. A beautiful girl.”

  Stavroula put out her hand, and he took it in both of his. She said that she was pleased to meet him, and she felt shy. He said, “Hairo poli, hairo poli. Your father should be proud.”

  “He is,” Marina murmured.

  “You know what happened to him?” Stavroula asked. She felt the pappas searching her, understood instantly that he did not. He and Marina traded more quick words.

  “But I am here for the final rites. I was sent a package, a very specific package.”

  They brought him inside. With a wet cloth, he wiped his arms up to the elbow. He refused to sit in the dining room. He said that dining rooms were for outsiders, kitchen for everybody else. He chanted some prayers over the stove, accepted a metal chair. He wore blue jeans under his cloak, also sneakers with Velcro, and his ankles looked mossy and thin. Like a girl’s. Marina fixed a salad and toasted some bread—he didn’t want hot food. The pappas took an olive with his long fingers. He tucked it into his mouth.

  Stavroula brought coffee. He said, “At my age, this is not what a man drinks.”

  Marina pulled a bottle of raki from the freezer. She poured a shot and said, “We will get to the truth faster this way, anyhow.”

  The truth was that the pappas had received a letter in the old-fashioned way. Not through email, the way Stavros periodically wrote him, which he checked every few days at the internet café. No, the letter came by donkey. An old farmer, as old as the pappas himself, rode sidesaddle to his porch to deliver it. It was a surprise, what the letter shared with him and what it kept from him. It included a packet of some money and a plane ticket to the United States.

  “Stavros Stavros and his letters,” Marina said. “You’d think Marina would receive one by now.”

  “Can you tell us what it said?” Stavroula asked.

  The pappas reached into his pocket and pulled out the letter, which had tired of traveling days ago. “The letter is private, like a man’s soul. It says things like a confession. So I cannot read it to you.” He skimmed the letter, which was in Greek. “He whines a lot, the whiny malaka.”

  “Say what it really says,” Marina said. “Say what it means.”

  The pappas read:

  “ ‘So, Pappas, I ask that you deliver this man, who is both more and less than a son to you. I ask that you guide me to the next place, where the soul can fit inside a palace instead of a shoe. I ask that you forgive my sins, which are more than I am capable of admitting. My family, my daughters, they will need you. Marina, and, yes, even my ex-wives. You have always told me, Stavro, you can be reborn. Well, Father, this is what I am asking you. I am asking, Can I be reborn?

  “ ‘The plans are in place. The arrangements are made. It is urgent you come now.’ ”

  Stavroula entered her father’s office. The papers on his desk appeared both important and outdated. She revisited the yellowed articles and dollar bills on the wall. She unpinned them to see what was beneath. One of the pieces of yellowed paper she recognized—her own handwriting, the phone number of a Mr. Cown—from when she was fifteen or sixteen. She could not believe it still hung here. Why was it not in her father’s Rolodex or, more recently, his phone? She remembered him demanding to know everything she had said to the caller. Had she made herself sound like salt during the conversation, or pepper? Stavroula could still feel how nervous she was then, worried she had embarrassed herself and the diner in front of someone very important in the food business, someone who would write about them and publish it. Days later, her father told her it was a plumber. Only a plumber! But did that matter? Shouldn’t she always make herself with as much dignity for an idiot as for a king? Because who does she think the king takes for company when he wants to laugh?

  In their search for answers, she had not been honest with Litza. She had not really been looking—was it really just three days ago? Litza had been the one ransacking his office, Stavroula had only been playing. Now, using her father’s birthdate, she opened the safe. She knew where he kept the cash in case anything should happen to him. Inside, three thousand. Also, his passport. He had not run.

  Her father’s sweater was draped over the back of his chair. It felt worn and familiar, scratchy but warm. Or almost warm. It must have been the smell that was familiar, because it stank of Saratogas. He only ever wore this sweater in the office. He didn’t even hang it on the hook behind the door but left it on this chair. He wanted to be a man who only ever appeared in a suit jacket, but as he got older, he found sweaters tending. Stavroula could tell this embarrassed him.

  What did it say about her, a daughter who knew for days—in her gut—that her father was gone? What did it say about her that she declined his invitation to dinner, knowing he truly believed it to be his last?

  Marina and the pappas were loud, suddenly. She peered through the portal to see them arguing. The glass blurred their faces, but she could see waving arms. In disputes, all Greeks become their hands.

  Stavroula leaned back in the chair. She pulled the sweater around her shoulders but did not put her arms in the sleeves. When her father’s voice came to her in a furling accent, it said, I don’t like to be so chilly.

  She closed her eyes to that voice, but smelled it anyway. The smoke.

  The day he caught her and Litza in the office with the will, he cornered her. Litza escaped, taking her copy of the book on grief, but Stavroula stayed to see what he would say to her face. In her own way she was being confrontational, because she made herself a brick wall. What she got was Oh, Stavroula, your poor father, Oh, Stavroula, help me pick out my coffin, it is nothing more than a box and would take only a few minutes of online shopping together. Then you be my date and we go to a special restaurant for octopus and you can whisper to me if the cooks are as good as us. She simply said, No. No, I can’t help you. He tried this, he tried that. Kindly, severely, each time she said no. She would not give him what he wanted. Her reasons were unclear even to herself. Old redresses, things she could not or did not want to remember.

  Part of her considered saying yes, the part of her that had always wanted a father, someone who knew what she liked to eat and encouraged her to pick the place. Though, of course, he did not realize that octopus was her favorite: coincidentally, it was also one of his
favorites. Nonetheless, part of her was thawing, warmed by pity and concern. This man—her father, she told herself—was so sad at this stage in his life. So alone. He was cured meat, but still you could tell what he once was. That he once had roiling hot blood in him.

  Are you on your Woman Thing? he asked. Don’t be bitter, I only ask because your No is like an ax to my face.

  “Your mistress got rid of you, huh?”

  She was not trying to be hostile, but this was how he took it. Well, yes, she was trying to be hostile, and that’s what made him get mean. He said, Do you know what is a man? No, just because you look like one you think you do. You are not a man, you are only a woman with mannish hair. He had said things like this all her life, so she knew how to be brick. He shouted, but she did not relent. That was the victory, not giving in, and he saw she was winning. The only thing she could not help, the smile that uncurled itself. It made him mad. Out of the kind of desperation she had seen in animals giving their last futile kick, he shot back at her, I should have walked away from you in your box, re, left you for good from the day you were born. It did not surprise her to hear this. It made it easier to walk away, herself. She was glad—so glad—she had never taken anything from him.

  But these were a father’s last words to his daughter? Even he would regret them. Or did she just want to believe so?

  Stavroula touched the mouse for his desktop, gently. The screen came to life. She did not know his password. She thought for a moment, then typed STAVROS. That was all she needed, the computer took her to his email account.

  There was a message already open. It was from the day before his disappearance—Day 6, according to the subject line—but had never been sent.

  It was addressed to her.

  Dear My Oldest, My First. My Stavroula.