“That’s for Dad!” I called.
“Well, where’s mine?”
“I didn’t make you one. I didn’t know you wanted one.”
“I worked all day!”
“So did I.”
“I mean, I really worked all day, lifting bags of potting soil, dragging hoses around…”
“So did I.”
“Yeah, dragging…verbs around.”
I told him, “You have no idea how heavy a verb can get. Go ahead and make yourself a salad.”
“It’s okay. This one’s practically gone… I’ll just stuff some more lettuce and olives in the bowl. He’ll never know the difference.”
“Well, you’re certainly saving some nickels.”
Stefan’s silence breathed affront. “Hey, I’ve got an idea. It’s Friday night. I’m looking forward to going out. You make some belittling remarks about my generation and then bitch about me eating fifty cents’ worth of iceberg lettuce. Now I’m in a great mood. You’re a real antidepressant, Theaitsa,” he said, using the Greek endearment for my name. When he was little, we called him “Stefanakis mou,” or my little Stefan. My mother still did.
I thought of that, and I felt bad, and asked him to sit with me for a moment.
“I know you feel great about the last project,” I told him. “But you know, you’re not going to get everything to wrap up so elegantly every time, right? Such a neat package? Not everybody is going to be as smart and decent as Rebecca or Tia Amelia. They’re not going to be people you know or feel comfortable with. These have been postcard moments but…”
“What’s your point?”
“Well, just that you can’t expect a big emotional payoff every time…”
“Why not?”
“Because life isn’t like that, Stefan. Life is sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Sometimes you take five steps forward, but sometimes you take two steps forward and three steps back.”
“Really?” he said. “I didn’t know that. No wonder all the great philosophers were Greek. Excuse me for feeling enthusiastic.”
“You should be. I just don’t want you to get so flattened if something goes wrong that you give up or…”
“Or what? Kill myself? Mom, how many times do I have to say I’m not going to kill myself? I could kill you, though,” he said.
I gasped. When I looked at him, I could see tears welling up in his eyes.
“I didn’t mean… I meant the way you say, I could just kill you…”
“Stefan, I know that. I didn’t think for a second that…” And I didn’t think for a second that he was actually threatening me. But I did think, for a second, of the way those words sounded, in his mouth.
I wanted to tell him that I got it, that I saw that he was trying to find a new way forward, to a sense of parity with other people, a way of being as normal as he could in the world. In a way, I think he was working his way up toward his own reckoning over Belinda.
I got up and tried to put my arms around him, but he stiffened.
“Let’s rewind this,” I said.
“We can’t.”
“We can. Let’s rewind this. Before you go, tell me about the next Healing Project.”
He snorted, contemptuous. “Well this next one, even if I wanted to, I couldn’t be part of it directly. You’ll see why. But it could turn out to be another one of those postcard moments.”
How far off the mark that description was would be evident only in hindsight.
By the time he got back with the latest letter that he and Merry had chosen, I’d made him his own salad with a few pieces of garlic bread. （“Thanks, Mom,” he said of refusing the bread. “That’s not exactly minty fresh for a nightclub. Why don’t I carry a mirror and a crucifix too?”）
The letter was from Roman Villera, Stefan’s only real friend in prison.
“You know Roman was a teacher, right?” he said and I nodded. “He taught sixth grade and it was a passion for him. He was always winning these best-teacher awards and stuff.”
I remembered meeting Roman, talking briefly with him and his family at the prison’s Christmas dinners. He was almost cartoonishly handsome, like the drawings of Prince Valiant in the old comics sections my parents used to pull from the Sunday newspapers. Sweet, soft-spoken, he was married to a girl he’d known all his life, who meant what she said about better and worse and stuck by him after Roman, who was also a binge drinker, mowed down a mother and daughter, killing the daughter, who had two children of her own. Roman’s little boy, Joey, was at one of those dinners. Roman told us that Joey was the same age as one of his victim’s children.