“See this part here?” He touches some lines on the paper. “I added it last week—just for you.” He walks over to one of the walls and spreads his arms wide. “Right here I’ll be building a reading nook with bookcases all the way around it so you can sit in here and read. And out there, where the dormer window used to be, will be your own personal deck.”
Greg goes blurry as my eyes fill with tears, and I feel both happy and sad at the same time because I want to deserve this, but I don’t feel as if I do. Not after everything I’ve done. He comes over to me and takes me gently by the shoulders. “You have always been a part of my family, Callie. Always a part of my plans.”
“I didn’t mean what I said about the Airstream,” I say. “I like it a lot.”
He smiles. “I know.”
“But this is …” I close my eyes and imagine a wall filled with books.
“C’mon.” He walks between wall studs out onto the beginnings of the deck and sits, his legs dangling over the edge into the empty air below. I join him.
“Here’s the thing,” Greg says. “I am so completely out of my depth when it comes to you that I don’t know what to do about last night. Tucker and Joe are easy because they’re little. Whenever Tuck figures out a way around one of our parental roadblocks, Phoebe and I are still smart enough to think up a new one. But you—” He shrugs. “I remember being a teenager, so having to parent one scares the hell out of me. Especially one who has done a pretty good job of taking care of herself.”
I shade my eyes and look out at the bayou. It hardly seems possible that this view could be mine. That this room will be mine. “I didn’t mean to stay out that late.”
“It’s not only the staying out too late, Cal,” Greg says. “You left with Connor Madsen and came home hours later alone, without a single call to anyone to let us know where you were. How do you expect me to feel about that?”
“It’s just—this is new for me, too,” I say. “Mom always worked nights, so I’ve never had to answer to anyone. I wasn’t purposely ignoring your rules. I just lost track of time.”
“Where were you?”
“I, um—I was with someone.” The words surprise me. I wasn’t expecting to reveal anything this personal to him.
“Someone who is, apparently, not Connor.”
“Right.”
“Do you—are you—?” His face is pink and he pinches the bridge of his nose. “God, this is not a question I ever thought I’d have to ask, but if you’re, um—are you being careful?”
My own cheeks get warm. Mom and I had the sex talk years ago. It was after Frank, so she was kind of too late, even though he didn’t have actual sex with me. But it’s a never-in-my-wildest-dreams scenario to be discussing birth control with Greg. Despite the weirdness of the moment, it feels, maybe for the first time since I got here, as if he’s really my dad. “Yes.”
“If you need Phoebe to take you to her doctor, I can ask her.”
I nod. “That would be good.”
Greg hoists himself to his feet, then helps me up. Right there, where it’s as if we’re standing in the sky, he hugs me and tells me he loves me. My cheek against his T-shirt brings back a thin slice of memory, of him hugging me when I was little. I was jumping off the porch steps of wherever we were living when the three of us lived together. I had no trouble on the first step or the second, but when I tried from the third, I fell and skinned my knees and palms. Greg was there to pick me up and wipe away the tears. My arms circle around him and so quietly that I’m not sure he’ll hear me I whisper into his shoulder. “Thank you.”
He kisses my forehead, which makes me think maybe he did.
I follow him back down the plywood staircase, trying harder now to picture what this house—our house—will look like when it’s finished. He talks about drywall and bamboo flooring and other things that mean nothing to me, but I don’t mind.
“So this boyfriend of yours—” he says, as we walk our bikes out to the street.
I climb onto my bike. “Just trust me, okay?”
Greg sighs. “I’m really not comfortable with this, but—okay.”
He turns off at Ada Street—after telling me that he plans to install a propane tank this afternoon so I can shower in the Airstream—and I ride on alone to Georgia’s house. When I coast to a stop at her front walk, she’s already puttering in the yard, wearing floral gardening gloves and a pair of rubber clogs. When she hugs me, she smells of dirt and grass and lipstick. It’s a pleasant combination.
“Did you get yourself all sorted out the other day?” The gloves she hands me are blue and much larger than the ones she’s wearing, and they’re a little scratchy inside. She leads me to a stack of mulch bags.
“I guess so.”
“If I can throw in my two cents,” she says, “I suspect you’re not much like your mother at all, Callista. You may go off on your own to work through your thoughts, but the difference is—and this is important—you come back.”
I never thought about it that way.
“You’re like your father in that regard, and”—she gestures at the top bag and indicates that I should spread it around the low shrubs along the front porch—“I suspect that you’re not running away so much as you are running to something. Or, someone.”
My thoughts go immediately to Alex and, as if she can read my mind, Georgia smirks. She reaches up and puts her gloved hands on my face. “Your cheeks give you away, matákia mou.”
“What does that mean?” The bag of mulch is heavier than I expected and I stagger over to the shrubs with it.
“It means ‘my eyes,’” she says. “Not literally, but—it’s like saying you are the apple of my eye.”
“What about ‘korítsi mou’?” I ask, repeating the words Greg used at the sheriff’s office in Illinois, as I tear open the bag of mulch and upend it on top of the old mulch. I’m not sure I’m even saying the words correctly. “What does that mean?”
“The literal translation is ‘my girl,’” she says. “But it implies that the girl in question is loved and held dear. It’s used by parents. Now, if a young man were to say latría mou, which means ‘my darling,’ he loves you … or he’s trying to charm you out of your underpants. Either way, he’s serious about something.”
I distribute the dark and earthy-smelling mulch around the bushes and laugh that Alex didn’t need to trot out Greek terms of endearment to get me out of my underpants. But it’s a good laugh, not one rooted in I’m-shit-in-the-back-of-someone’s-truck shame. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
The work is sweaty, but it doesn’t take long before the mulch is spread and the weeds are pulled. Georgia did most of the weeding herself and confessed she paid a neighbor boy to mow the grass so I wouldn’t have to do that part. I feel as if I got off pretty light on my punishment, but—I don’t know. I guess I get what Greg was trying to tell me.
“I’m having lunch today with my friend,” my grandma says, as we peel off our gloves. “Would you like to come with me?”
“I don’t want to impose.”
“I wouldn’t invite you if it was an imposition,” she says. “And Evgenia wants to meet you.”
The name feels familiar, but I can’t place it. “Okay.”
I wash up in Georgia’s bathroom, finger-combing my hair to work out the tangles and sniffing the underarms of my T-shirt to make sure I don’t smell foul. I look as if I’ve been working in someone’s yard and the end of my nose is a little pink from the sun, but I hope her friend won’t mind.
The tiny stone house with an old-fashioned sailing ship carved into the wooden front door is within walking distance, and not far from the sponge docks. On the way, Georgia teaches me how to say hello and thank you in Greek, making me repeat the words over and over until I have the pronunciation down cold. We’re greeted by a salt-and-pepper-haired man, barrel shaped and broad enough to nearly fill the doorway.