Becky got up, with difficulty, and pulled me aside then. “I should have asked you this sooner.”
“What?”
“Would you be with me when I go into labor, Thea?”
“Rebecca, that should be your own mom.”
“But it’s up to me,” she urged me. And her mother also lived out of state, and what if this all happened suddenly? So I agreed. Everything was on track, Becky told me. The baby was due any day. Her doctor said Becky just had to follow along. I knew she would remember that comment ironically someday.
I finished my book and turned it in. Stefan got ready for school to start in a couple of weeks. Jep began his quiet season, with hours at home with me, big meals, movie nights together.
All the other shoes had dropped. All the cats were out of the bag. We had lived innocently in Beforeland and suffered our sins in Afterland. Perhaps, this new land, Tomorrowland, was where we would live from now on.
16
At first, the snow on Greek Orthodox Christmas spun down in big lacy pinwheels that looked like something that would taste of pineapple. Then afternoon brought in a rock wall of weather, and the world disappeared. We ate early, with candles, the kind of meaty, stuporous meal that rightfully should be followed by two hours of baling hay. Instead, we topped it off with the ekmek kataifi that Amelia made to perfection and drank Greek coffee from demitasse cups. We would then ordinarily do something antique and embarrassing with the kids, like team charades, but Phoebe and Amelia wanted to leave for home earlier; and my parents decided to stay overnight. We had celebrated what my aunt Elena called “American” Christmas like most of the secular Christian world but Greek Orthodox Christmas in January was still a religious holiday for my parents, like “Greek” Easter, with its red-dyed eggs baked into tsoureki. It was celebrated when Americans celebrated The Feast of the Epiphany, if they celebrated it at all, the day when the three kings finally arrived at Bethlehem, after all those days of GPS-ing by that one outrageous star. I loved Orthodox Christmas, especially this Christmas—which I thought of as the first Christmas out from under—and it was especially thrilling because what Stefan had done to our decked-out house made me feel like I was living in a Viktor&Rolf perfume bottle. So after American Christmas, I might have been downcast when my sisters left, drawing all the chatter and teasing after them like a crown of ribbons, had I not known we would be together in a short while for another groaning meal and more presents. After they were gone, the five of us left broke holiday protocol by turning the television on, not to the Vienna Boys Choir but to 13 AccuWeather. By four, the front door was so drifted that Jep couldn’t open it.
“I have to plow,” Stefan said regretfully. “I should be ahead of it. What did I think it was, Christmas?” He told us he understood now why people worked in offices.
“I’ll come with you,” Jep said. “We can share father and son bonding. I can tell you lore from Christmases of old, stories of ancient Scandinavian drunks who are your forebears.”
“No, Dad, I’m not dragging you out in this. You nap by the fire, elder, with your new suede slippers,” Stefan told him. “I’ll be back in a couple of hours. The big issue is Luck’s apartments and her new condominium complex. People are always outraged by snow. It’s like they think they live in Miami.” Most of his regular landscaping clients needed him, and I didn’t think a couple of hours would do it, but he assured me that, except for a couple of places, he would leave the hand shoveling to his teenage helpers after all that snow was down. It was only his third or fourth time driving the new truck—a massive red Ford only a few years old that came with a tough heavy-duty blade, a splurge he allowed himself because we were covering his schooling. The Whole Blooming World design burst from the doors. The first few snows of the year were sugary flirtations, but they’d taught him how to operate the plow. I could tell that he was eager to put his truck through its paces against some elements. He filled the biggest thermos in the house with hot sweet tea and set out, first scraping our own driveway to perfection. Jep and I geared up and tackled the walks with more will than success. Since it wasn’t cold, it was exhilarating to be out in it, such a dramatic storm with lightning that seemed to shatter among the stars. You could see how people would be tempted to read in it the message of some epic event. There were strange sights. A woman all in green fleece went power walking through the drifts. Two houses down, a white owl sat mythically on a mailbox. The neighbors across the street were toasting marshmallows near one of those free-standing fireplaces. Burly as buildings, the municipal plows roared down the street.