My Brother Left Me With the Man He Told Me to Stay Away From, and Then Didn't Come Back novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Gate

At his grandmother's iron gate Laz takes the tote strap off her shoulder and neither of them moves; he says his rule aloud, and through the wall she hears him pace until he stops at her door.

Despina Stavrakis's house stood at the end of Tarpon Avenue behind an iron gate that had been painted black every spring since before I was born.

I parked behind the Suburban and sat there with my engine ticking and my brother's text open on my knee.

Thalia, do NOT let Laz read the laptop.

I typed back: Where are you?

I typed: What is on this?

I typed: Who is watching our house?

I deleted all of it.

Then I wrote: I'm fine. Eat something yourself.

I sent that one, and I put the phone face down on the passenger seat.

If he wanted me to know he would tell me.

If he did not want me to know, he would see that I had not asked.

It was a thing I had learned from four years of being Nikos's little sister at a table full of men: say less, and listen more.

I got out.

The evening had gone blue.

Despina's grapevine hung over the gate, heavy with young leaves, and the yard smelled of hot sand and oregano.

I came around the front of the car and found Laz holding the gate open.

He had not gone in ahead of me.

He was waiting.

"My grandmother's been cooking since noon," he said.

"She'll feed you whether you're hungry or not."

"I'm hungry," I said.

"Good," he said, and went on holding the gate.

I went through the gate.

My tote caught on the latch.

It was a stupid, small thing, the canvas strap snagging on a rusted hook, and I tugged at it and it did not come.

"Hold on," Laz said.

He stepped close.

His fingers lifted the strap off the hook, and then they stayed on it, and he slid the strap from my shoulder.

The whole weight of the bag came into his hand.

"Heavy," he said.

"I've got it," I said.

I did not let go.

I had hold of the bottom of the tote with both hands, and his hand was on the strap, and we stood there at the gate with the bag between us.

It held a laptop I was not supposed to let him read.

He looked at my hands on it.

He looked at his own.

His knuckles brushed the side of my arm through my scrub sleeve, a little above the elbow.

It was nothing.

It was the back of a man's hand against my arm in the dark.

But I felt it down the whole length of my body, and I knew he felt it too, because he did not move.

Neither did I.

A cicada somewhere in the grapevine started up and stopped.

"Thalia," he said, very low.

"Yes?" I said.

He let go.

He took a step back and put his hand in his pocket.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"I thought it was heavy."

"It's a laptop," I said.

"It's got work in it."

"Of course."

He did not ask me what work.

He went past me up the path and held the front door.

Inside the house was warm and yellow and loud.

The radio was playing a bouzouki song, and every burner on the stove was lit.

Despina Stavrakis turned from the sink with a wooden spoon in her hand.

She was seventy-four years old and five feet and an inch tall, in a black dress and a white apron, with her hair in a bun so tight it pulled her eyebrows up.

She had buried a husband and a son and I had never once seen her sit down at a meal she was serving.

She looked at me for a long time.

"You have your mother's mouth," she said.

"Thank you, Kyria Despina."

"It wasn't a compliment.

"She talked back to me in this kitchen when she was nineteen.

"Sit."

I sat.

She put a plate in front of me before I had finished sitting.

Lamb with lemon potatoes, and a spanakopita the size of my head, and a salad with so much feta in it that it was mostly feta.

Laz stood against the counter with his arms folded and did not eat.

"You too," his grandmother said without turning.

"I ate."

"You drank coffee.

"Sit."

He sat across from me.

I ate and he watched me eat, and neither of us said anything for a while.

When I looked up, he was looking at my hands.

He saw me see it.

He looked at the wall.

Afterward Despina took me up the stairs herself, with the tote over her own arm because she had not asked.

I held my breath.

She did not look inside it.

She set it on the chair in the room at the end of the upstairs hall, a small room with a brass bed and a white quilt and a window that looked over the grapevine.

There was a key in the lock on the inside of the door.

"Lock it," she said.

"Or don't.

"The boy won't come in either way."

"He told you that?"

"He didn't tell me anything.

"He's been my grandson thirty-four years."

She put her small dry hand on my cheek and patted it twice, hard, and left.

I turned the key.

I stood in the dark room listening to the old house settle.

Somewhere downstairs Laz's low voice said something and the radio went off.

Then I heard him on the stairs.

His steps stopped in the hall outside my door.

I stood very still.

"Thalia," he said through the wood.

"Yes," I said.

"I want to say one thing, and then I'll go."

I did not open the door.

I put my forehead against the wood.

"I keep my hands off you," he said.

His voice was perfectly flat.

"It's the one promise I made your brother that I'm certain I can keep.

"You don't need to be afraid in this house, and you don't need to be careful of me."

I closed my eyes.

"I'm not afraid," I said.

"Good."

"Is that all?"

A long pause.

"Yes."

His footsteps went down the hall.

A door closed at the other end of the house.

I got into the brass bed in my scrub top with the laptop under my pillow.

I did not open it.

I lay awake and listened through the wall.

He was pacing.

I could hear it in the old floorboards, back and forth, unhurried, a man walking a short line.

It went on until two in the morning.

Then it stopped, outside my door.

I lay there with my heart going and my hand curled around the edge of the quilt, and I waited for him to knock.

He did not knock.

After a very long time I heard him go away.

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