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“Frank’s pulling one of those ‘do it for me’ deals.”
“It’s obvious he can’t do it himself. How long will he be in rehab?”
“At least a month, he said, and God only knows how long it’ll be before he’s back to normal.”
“If you take the job, how long will you be gone?”
He was silent, and her heart sank. A long time, then. “I could go with you,” she offered, though she hadn’t meant to. If he wanted her with him, he would say so. Surely he did, didn’t he? He said “I love you” every day, several times a day. He showed it in the obvious enjoyment he took from being in her company, in the attention he paid to her, the way he touched her.
“You can’t,” he finally said. “If I take it, that won’t be an option.”
That was that, then. “When do you have to decide?”
“In a few days. Not right now, at any rate.” He cupped her chin and turned her face up, studying her features in the growing twilight as if he were trying to memorize them. His blue eyes were darkly intent. “I don’t know that I can do it,” he whispered. “I don’t want to leave here.”
“Then don’t,” she said simply, and he laughed.
“I wish it was that easy. Frank . . . well, he’s a hard man to turn down.”
“Does he have something on you?”
He laughed, though the sound was more wry than humorous. “It isn’t that. He’s just one of those persuasive people. And I hate to admit it, but I trust him more than any other man I know.” He shivered suddenly, as the dropping temperature finally got the best of him. “Let’s go inside. I can think of several things I’d rather be doing than worrying about a job I might not take.”
He didn’t mention it again, and because he didn’t, Lily left the subject alone. They went inside to a simple supper of new potatoes cooked with di
ll and capers, feta cheese in olive oil, bread, and Boutari wine. They had hired a woman from town named Chrisoula to come up and do the cooking for them every day; at first she had wanted to prepare large evening meals, in the Greek tradition, but they had impressed on her that they preferred to eat more lightly at night. She didn’t like it, but she complied. For one thing, this meant she got home at an earlier hour, where she could enjoy the long evening meal with her own family.
The house had no television, and neither of them missed it. In the three weeks they’d been there, Swain had bought a newspaper twice. That lack of outside interference had been just what she needed, a chance to just be, no pressures, no looking over her shoulder. On the warmer days she sat on the terrace for hours, soaking up the sunshine, letting her psyche heal. She had put one of Zia’s pictures out in the bedroom where she could see it, and a day later Swain had taken the pictures of his kids out of his wallet and propped them up beside Zia’s. Chrisoula thought all three kids were theirs, and they didn’t disabuse her of the notion, which wouldn’t have been that easy in any case, because neither of them had a good grasp of the Greek language and Chrisoula’s English wasn’t much better. They managed to eventually communicate on most things, but it was an effort.
That night, knowing that Swain might leave soon, Zia was very much on Lily’s mind. Some days were like that, with memories ambushing her at every turn, though now she would go days without crying. And because she was thinking so much about Zia, she wondered if Swain had days when all he could think about was his kids.
“Don’t you miss them?” she asked. “Chrissy and Sam?”
“So much it hurts,” he readily replied. “I figure it’s what I deserve.”
She had known he felt guilty about his kids; she just hadn’t realized he embraced the guilt. “Instead of wearing that hair shirt, why don’t you move closer to them? You missed most of their childhood, but that doesn’t mean you have to miss their adulthood, too. One of these days you’ll be a grandfather. Are you going to keep yourself away from your grandchildren?”
He turned his glass of wine around and around, staring thoughtfully at it. “I’d love to see more of them. I just don’t know if they’d like to see more of me. When I do see them, they’re friendly, they’re fond of me, but maybe that’s because I’m on the periphery of their lives. If I try to horn in . . . who knows?”
“So ask them.”
He gave a quick grin. “A simple answer for a simple problem, huh? To a little kid, nothing matters as much as just being there, and I let them down. That’s the hard truth.”
“Yes, it is. Are you going to let it go on being the hard truth for the rest of your life?”
He stared at her for a long minute, then drank the rest of his wine and set the glass down on the table. “Maybe not. Maybe one day I’ll work up the nerve to ask them.”
“If Zia was still alive, there’s no way I wouldn’t be there.” That was another hard truth, and implicit in the statement was She isn’t alive, but your children are. She didn’t know why she was hammering at him about this, except that she’d been thinking of Zia and Swain might not be here much longer for her to say this to him. They had covered this ground once before, but it didn’t seem have to sunk in with him—either that or he was so acutely aware of the mistakes he’d made that he was punishing himself by staying away from his kids. The more she knew about him, the more she suspected the latter.
“All right,” he said with a wry smile. “I’ll think about it.”
“you’ve been thinking about it for years. When are you going to do something?”
The smile turned to a bark of laughter. “God, you’re as bad as a snapping turtle.”
“Turtles nag?”
“The old saying is that if a snapping turtle bites you, it won’t turn loose until it hears thunder.”
