My Father Sold Me to His Oldest Enemy to Play House, and the Old Man Bought the Only Witness Against Him novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Keys
Thalia, sold by her father to the Pallis house, takes his car keys from the hook in front of nine men and drives herself to the Pallis dock; the Old Admiral turns around and says he did not buy a wife, he bought the girl at the christening.
I stood in my father's foyer in my dead mother's good black coat with one suitcase at my feet.
Nine of his men watched me from the stairs.
My father stood in the doorway of his study with a cup of coffee, smiling at me.
"Don't look so grim, Thalia," Petros Mavrakis said to the room. "She's going to a good house."
It was the morning of the cross dive.
Everyone in town was down at the bayou waiting for the priest to throw the cross into the water.
At the back table of the kafeneio, eleven days ago, my father had told these same men that I refused an order.
I had refused it at a christening, in front of the church hall.
He said a closer who refuses is no use to him.
He did not raise his voice.
He never does when he has already decided.
Yesterday his lawyer brought the paper.
On that paper I was not his daughter.
I was the wife of Aristides Pallis, who was sixty-three years old.
The docks called him the Old Admiral.
He was the one man on the Anclote who hated the Mavrakis name more than my father hated losing.
"She'll learn to pour coffee," my father said, warmly, to the stairs. "She'll learn to keep an old man's house."
A few of the men laughed.
"A wife is only a closer who stays home," he said.
More of them laughed at that.
I looked at the faces on the stairs.
I knew every one of them.
I had sat in cars with them at four in the morning.
I had stood beside them while a man was told what he owed.
Not one of them would meet my eyes, because every one of them knew what I could do.
I put my hand on the handle of the suitcase.
"You made me what I am," I said.
My voice came out the way it always does, flat and level.
"Nobody tells you what you made until it is in your house," I said. "He'll find out."
My father's smile did not change.
"Go on, then," he said. "Pallis is expecting a girl who cries in the back of a car."
I picked up the suitcase.
His car keys hung on the hook by the door, the heavy ring with the silver anchor on it.
I took them down.
Nobody on the stairs moved.
"Thalia," my father said, pleasantly.
"The driver is off for the cross," I said. "I'll take your car."
I walked out the front door and shut it behind me.
The car was a black Mercedes, and it started on the first turn.
I drove out through the iron gate with all nine of them watching from the windows.
I did not cry.
I had not cried since I was fourteen, and I did not plan to start in his car.
I thought about the man at the font, holding a baby in a white gown.
I thought about how he had looked at me over its head.
I had told nobody whose face that was.
The road to the Pallis compound ran along the Anclote past the packing sheds.
The cold lay on the river in a thin white skin.
It was an hour before anyone expected me.
I wanted that hour.
I wanted to see the old man's face before anyone had told him what I was.
The Pallis gate stood open.
A house stood up the lawn with every shutter closed.
Down at the water there was a long boathouse with a pier running out from it.
I left the car at the boathouse with the keys in my pocket.
My shoes rang on the planks.
At the end of the pier a man stood with his back to me.
He was broad, with a white beard, and he carried a boat hook over his shoulder.
He wore a navy peacoat with the collar turned up.
He favored his left leg.
He had heard the car and he had heard my shoes, and he had not turned.
I stopped three paces from him.
He kept looking at the river.
"You're early, Miss Mavrakis," Aristides Pallis said.
His voice was low and even, with a rasp in it.
"I was told you would arrive in a car with a driver," he said, "and cry."
I said nothing.
A gull sat on the piling and looked at me.
It lifted off across the water.
He turned around then.
He was older than his photographs, and bigger.
His eyes were grey.
They went over me once, slowly, my coat and my hands and the suitcase.
They did not stay on my face.
They stayed on my hands.
"Good," he said. "I did not buy a wife."
He held out his hand for the suitcase.
I looked at the hand.
It was scarred across the back and square at the knuckles, and it did not shake.
I let him take it.
His fingers closed over mine on the handle for the space of one breath.
They were warm in the cold, and I felt it all the way up my arm.
"I bought the girl who was at the christening," he said.
I took the suitcase back out of his hand.
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