I am crying.
I am not wiping them.
I do not want to.
I want him to see them.
The tears are the first thing I have given him without an operational reason.
Kostas does not speakfor a long second.
When he speaks, his voice is not the architect's voice. It is the voice of the old man whose wife was alone in a house with black mold in the walls.
"You have been very fortunate, Ms. Ferraro."
"I know."
"Most of us do not get to say what you have just said. My wife and I had three weeks. After Demetrios was born. Before she died. Three weeks in a hospital room in Astoria with a newborn she could not nurse and a three-year-old who slept on the chair beside the bed because he would not go home without her. We said it. We had time to say it. I have not said it to anyone since."
He looks at the oxygen tube.
"I will not be saying it to anyone again."
"Mr. Stavros."
"Yes."
"You are going to have a chance to say one thing to my Sean when he walks through the door. Make it count."
He does not answer. He does not need to.
"I have something to tell you," he says.
"Yes."
"I knew Maria. She came to my son's memorial in January 1988. She sat in the back. She was heavily pregnant with the twins. She was glowing. I had been a little in love with her for years. I never told anyone. Vittorio did not know she was there. Maria saw me. Maria did not say anything to anyone. She went and lit a candle that morning for the boy we had lost. She lit it for Demetrios. She did not know yet that I was going to take her son three weeks later. She lit a candle for my son anyway."
He looks at me.
"Tell him his mother lit a candle for Demetrios. Tell him that is who she was. Tell him to be the kind of man who lights candles. Tell him not to be the kind of man who takes the sons of women who light them."
I am crying again. I am not wiping these tears either.
"I will tell him."
"Thank you."
"Mr. Stavros."
"Yes."
"I have one more thing to say. I am going to be the woman he comes home to. I am going to be the woman who makes him laugh on a Sunday and the woman who carries his children and the woman he is going to bury when one of us is older than the other one."
"Yes."
"I am not going to bury Sean Donovan. Sean Donovan is going to bury me."
He breathes.
