She says, "Your mother just told me my phyllo is acceptable."
"Acceptable from Eleni is praise."
"I know. She also told me my technique is ‘Irish but improving,’ which I think was a compliment."
"That was a compliment."
She sits beside me on the porch swing. The swing creaks in the way I have heard it creak for fifteen years. The creak is the sound that means I am at the lake house, and it sounds different now that Maeve is beside me on the swing than it has sounded any of the other times.
? ? ?
Mid-afternoon. Cormac and Nora come back up from the dock. Nora is up to her knees in water because she stepped into it while trying to retrieve a particularly fine rock. Cormac is wet to the elbows because he tried to retrieve her. They are both laughing.
Maeve sees Cormac roll up his sleeve to wipe lake water off his forearm. The scratch from Ch 31 is a faint pink line now, almost healed. Two and a half weeks past the original three stitches.
Cormac sees Maeve see it. He says, in the tone of a man delivering a punchline he’s been waiting for, "The scratch."
Maeve says, "I see it."
Cormac says, "I am going to tell my future wife the story of how I got it."
Maeve says, "Cormac, you do not have a future wife."
Cormac says, "Yet."
He says it warmly. Nora, who has been listening to this exchange with the gravity of a person under three who has decided the adults are doing something interesting, says, "‘Theíos Scratch.’"
The porch breaks. My mother, who has come outside with the second tray of ‘spanakopita,’ laughs hard enough that she’s to set the tray down. Cormac falls back against the porch rail as if shot. Maeve is laughing into her coffee.
"‘Theíos Scratch,’" Cormac says, recovering. "I will accept the title with honor."
Nora, satisfied: "‘Theíos Scratch.’"
It becomes the running joke of the weekend.
? ? ?
Nico and Siobhan arrive at 8:14 PM with Sofia asleep against Siobhan's shoulder. The baby is nine months old now. She sleeps through the carry from the SUV to the bedroom Eleni has prepared with the portable crib. Siobhan stays with her for ten minutes. Then she comes out into the living room and Nora climbs her like a tree.
Dinner is at the lake house table at 8:47 PM.
Eleni at the head. Stavros's chair is empty. Declan's chair empty. Dimitri's chair is empty. The empty chairs are not pointed out, but I notice them, and my mother notices them, and I see Nico's eye go to the place where Dimitri would sit and then come back.
Cormac, with the careful tact he’s been hiding behind his clown brand for two weeks, says, "To the brothers not at the table. Stavros, who is currently writing a Yelp review of a New Bedford motel. Declan, who would not be answering his phone if I called him right now, which is why I am not going to call him. Dimitri, who is doing the work the family needs."
My mother says, "‘Stin ygeiá mas.’"
Nora, on her telephone-book chair, says, "‘Steeneeahmaz.’"
We drink.
We eat. The lamb Stavros sent up via courier this morning, the ‘spanakopita’ Eleni and Maeve made, the small Greek salad with the olives my mother carries from Boston in a Tupperware container because she doesn’t trust the olives at any grocery store within fifty miles of the lake. The lake house dining room smells like lemon and oregano. The candles are lit on the table. My mother insisted.
I look at the room.
Maeve in the chair I used to sit in alone. Nora on Eleni's lap eating bread off Eleni's plate. Sofia in a highchair next to Siobhan, who is feeding her mashed sweet potato. Nico across from Maeve, listening to her tell a story about a deposition shedid three years ago. Cormac at the foot of the table making my mother laugh. Eleni in her chair, the matriarch of three generations of Konstantinos women, in the lake house she’s not been to in eleven years.
I think: ‘I am alive. I am here. Thank you.’
