I’d barely had time to say goodbye to any other friends. Or keep doctor’s appointments. There would be time for all of that in Boston, right?
Now I was leaving. Today, as it were. And I hadn’t told either of my parents—dead or alive—what was happening.
“So…” With one finger, I traced the curling edges of her name on the headstone. Antonia Karolides Fisher. Beloved wife and mother. The words felt inadequate for everything she’d been.
God, just spit it out.
“I’m getting married,” I told her. “Well, I got married, to be exact. Almost weeks ago in Vegas, if you can believe that.” I continued to run my finger over the A of her name, which was larger than the other letters. “I know, I know. It’s not in a church or in Greece, like we always imagined. Or ‘daughter of the year’ behavior. Don’t tell Dad. I still don’t even remember doing it. But…” I sighed. “He’s something. I don’t know. A little crazy, but in a good way, I think. But, Mom, I just… I have to do something, you know? Things have to change. Dad’s totally checked out. The shop is fading. You’ve been gone for a whole year now, and until I met Ronan, life was like walking through mud. Slow. Not going anywhere. Then I met him, and it’s like he is life.”
I smiled to myself, remembering the conversation I’d just had with him yesterday. Although we hadn’t seen each other since Ronan had spent that one night in my bed after the wedding, we usually talked multiple times a day.
He liked a good video chat more than texting—to see my face, he always told me. To make sure my face wasn’t actually a figment of his imagination. What we couldn’t discuss via our screens, he’d send me over email or text. Pictures of places in Boston he thought I would like. Passages from whatever book he was reading (usually something to do with the ancient world). Once, an entire essay he’d scribed at two in the morning aboutWhy Zeus Was the Worst(it mostly rested on an exegesis of “Leda and the Swan”, of which the first line read: “Dear Zeus: No one wants to fuck a bird. Just ask the girl out if you like her”).
Yesterday, I’d answered his FaceTime right after teaching my final yoga class. I’d been red-faced from spending the final ten minutes of class in an inversion with my students, my hair wasspringing out of my bun in a thousand different directions, and sweat was dripping down my temples.
His immediate greeting was, “What in the actual fuck, Ari? Who looks that good after sweating like a pig?”
I had only been able to laugh. I’d been doing that more with Ronan that I had in a long time. It felt good. It felt right.
I hoped.
“You’d like him, I think,” I told my mother’s grave. “He’d make you laugh, too, just like Dad used to. And he knows almost as much about Greek history as I do, so he’d love hearing your stories about home. Maybe one day I’ll take him to Paros so he can meet your cousins. Show him where you were raised.”
I could almost see us there. I’d visited Paros several times when I was growing up, and it was easy to imagine Ronan enjoying wine and salad under the grapevines at the house where my great uncle still lived with his family. His face would be freckled even more by the Aegean sun, curls wayward in the breeze while he smiled at me in a rumpled linen shirt.
I blinked. Well, that was vivid. And oddly specific, though I had absolutely no reason to think he would ever want to go there.
Did I?
Why not? I could practically hear my mother demand. Is this a real marriage, Delaney, or isn’t it?
I swallowed. It was, right? It had to be. He said it was. Or at least that he wanted to find out.
What did I have to lose in finding out with him?
Nothing, right?
Or…everything?
I pushed the fear away.
Now, everything was done except for one last conversation I needed to have—and not with the person on the other side of this gravestone.
I’d tried calling my dad several times since Megan’s wedding. Our conversations were as clipped as ever, confined to brief moments when he was on his way to a pickleball game or after a mountain bike ride in the desert.
When he asked how I was, I deflected. The truth always stuck to the tip of my tongue, and I sensed he didn’t want it badly enough to press.
But, really, how do you tell your own father over the phone that in one drunken night you robbed him of walking you down the aisle? And that now you’re leaving Seattle, his dead wife’s shop, and everything else in a sudden and deeply uncharacteristic burst of spontaneity?
Maybe he would understand, I thought. After all, hadn’t his move to Arizona been similarly impetuous?
As if the universe were trying to answer my silent questions, my phone rang in my purse. I tugged it out to discover my dad’s face on the screen.
I swallowed and looked again at the grave. “Time to fess up. I’m out of time, anyway.” I answered the call. “Hi, Dad.”
“Laney bug! You’ll never guess what I shot today at the course. Seventy-eight, kid! That’s my course record!”
His voice blared through the speakers, loud and jovial, at odds with the peaceful cemetery.
