butter or olive oil. My mother nudges her plate of spaghetti away but forces down a glass of whole milk, hopeful the baby still might need the calcium.
Worry has taken over all of us. It keeps us in the same room when usually, after dinner, we scatter. Instead of sprawling out on the family room floor, just inches from the TV, the way my father always does right after dinner, he sits on the couch beside my mother. One arm is behind her on the cushion, and he gently rubs her neck. With the other, he holds out the remote, channel surfing. Rhea collapses on a black and white polka dotted beanbag she brought in from her room, and I take a couch pillow and lay belly down on the floor.
My father decides on Magnum P.I., my mother’s favorite show because it takes place in Hawaii. We’d planned a trip there this summer before we learned my mother’s due date is in late September.
Halfway through the program, Kevin Cooper’s face suddenly appears on screen. It’s the same mug shot my mother and I saw the night we first heard he escaped. She turns up the sound.
“Paul.”
There’s no need for her to call out to him since he’s just in the kitchen, right next to the family room, and he can hear everything.
The female reporter is standing in front of a jail in Santa Barbara where Cooper has been arrested for raping a woman at knife point. My father comes back into the room, leaving the bag of popcorn he’d just popped in the microwave. After two months of running, Cooper has been captured. He was working as a deckhand for a couple and their five-year-old girl, with whom he’d sailed from Ensenada, Mexico, to Pelican Cove, just off Santa Barbara.
“I told you people he ran to Mexico,” my sister pronounces.
What she says isn’t what makes us laugh. We laugh for other reasons. We laugh in relief that Cooper’s finally been caught. We laugh that we’ll no longer have to blockade our sliders with big dining room chairs. We laugh at the awful dinner we just ate. We laugh at how I boiled the noodles for too long, how we didn’t even need to eat them with a fork since they stuck together in clumps like finger food. We laugh at how all of us ate the salad Rhea made even though she forgot the dressing.
My mother holds her belly and that’s when she cries out she feels it, buried deep inside the womb, the baby roused and agitated by the first sounds of family.
WHAT THEY TOLD ME AFTER HE DIED
I turned your father down three times for a date. I had to. He was a football star and girls gave him anything he wanted. First he asked me when we were at a dance, then after he ran into me with my girlfriends at the drive-in. Finally, at the park while I was practicing with my drill team, he got my attention by nearly ramming into the fender of my powder blue M.G.
It was the way he apologized that got to me. Both of us were sorry it had come to that.
—June Priamos, ex-wife
I don’t care what anybody tells me. That stripper chick was in on it. You don’t get it. I know she was.
—Rhea Priamos
Your father showed up here once with a real pretty girl. Sorry, I can’t remember her name. She reminded me of Halle Berry. Smooth skin, short dark hair. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. Man, neither could I.
—Luis Martinez, manager of Boca Grande
You watch out for Gil. I mean it. With your father gone, there’s no telling what he’s capable of. He wanted your father’s approval like he wanted your pappou’s. He never got either. How could he? Everybody knows he’s a psychopath. You know what he said while standing over his own father’s grave? “How long will it take before the maggots come.” Nobody said a word. Maybe they were too shocked, so I told him, “Apparently not long. One’s already here.”
—June Priamos
It’s not uncommon to begin the embalming procedures on the same day the deceased is brought in, especially if requested by the family.
—Antonio Sanchez, funeral director at Chapel of Remembrance
THE INSANITY DEFENSE
My brother is born all yellow like his room. Two weeks overdue and with a bad case of jaundice, he is extracted from my mother’s body with the help of giant metallic tongs and a scalpel. By this time even her liver wants him out because it’s stopped cleaning red blood cells. Only my father is able to watch the birth. My mother is out cold.
Nicholas weighs in at nine pounds even with a tuft of dark wet hair and puffy little hands. My sister and I catch a glimpse of him from behind the glass in the nursery. The nurse cradles him as if we should be impressed. But his face is still unrecognizable, still swollen and squished from fitting for so long inside the walls of our mother’s uterus. His ears are pointy like Dr. Spock’s, and his tiny mouth is twisted in terror at being cut out and cut from her body. He’s my baby brother.
“He looks like an alien baby,” I say.
My sister shrugs me off. She doesn’t seem too concerned that our new brother is sick. It bothers me enough for both of us. Two other babies, two healthy babies are red-faced and squirming in their plastic bubble basinets. Especially under the fluorescents, I can see that Nicholas is the wrong color.
“I hope Mom’s okay,” Rhea says turning toward the hall. “Dad shouldn’t be the only one who gets to see her.”
Neither of my surviving grandparents is at the hospital. My mother didn’t want my yia yia or Uncle Gil here. Can’t say I blame her. Yia Yia’s face could scare the life out of any newborn. Her wrinkles are deep and unforgiving, from a lifetime of holding grudges. She was widowed young at forty-four; her husband fifteen years her senior had been hand-picked by her father one summer on a trip to the islands. Their love was learned, practiced over time through the birth and raising of three boys. But his heart was bad and when he was taken from Yia Yia too soon, it made her old and bitter beyond her years. This is how my mother explained it to me one night after she caught me dipping into her Oil of Olay night cream, slopping it all over my cheeks and forehead. Since I was half Greek, I figured I’d better start early, seeing I stood a fifty-fifty chance of one day looking like my yia yia.
In order to be fair and avoid my father sulking, my mother also didn’t ask her mother to be present for the birth. Both of their fathers passed early, my mother’s father from cirrhosis of the liver and my father’s from a heart attack. “It’s a man’s job to provide for his family, then die before retirement,” my father often says, usually when paying the bills.
He appears from behind the swinging doors. The paper booties he wore in the operating room still cover up his dress shoes. This morning he had been called out of a bail hearing after my mother’s water broke.
“Have you seen Nicholas?”
My brother is named after our Greek grandfather, our pappou, a man my father still mourns decades later at holidays, especially Christmas. Pappou delivered more than fresh fruit to the Central Market in downtown L.A. for his wealthy brother-in-law who owned a produce company. He delivered the best one-liners that kept his family both in hysterics and in check. He had a practical habit of using a bar of Ivory soap on his head full of white hair, claiming the suds were why he never went bald, a habit my father eventually picked up.
