My father takes off his sports jacket and drapes it over my shoulders. The weight of his hand on me feels reassuring, like things are finally under his control. His greeting with Yia Yia is short, which never seems to bother her. In fact, she seems to prefer it that way. I’ve never seen her hug any of her children.
Her affection is reserved for her grandkids, as if she must be one step removed from her offspring in order to show any.
Her hair, dyed black and shaped in fashionable old lady helmet style, is dented in the back as if she’d been lying down when she got the call. She’s wearing one navy blue open-toed sandal and one black. What has just happened with my sister is probably furrowing new ground on Yia Yia’s face, and I try not to stare at her wrinkles.
She doesn’t say much except to point me in the direction of the restroom where I can wash up.
When I return, she tells me not to worry.
“You know this crazy part is coming from your mother’s side,” Yia Yia explains to me. “Your mother’s father was a barstool drunk. Unfortunately for your sister, she’s taken after that side. She’ll always be weak.”
She grabs my chin and scrutinizes my face. Her fingers are tough from working with steel parts at a factory that manufactures automobile thermostats for the second half of her life, after my pappou died. The first half, she took in the neighbor’s ironing to help put her three boys through college.
I try to hold still. I try not to show how much she’s hurting me.
“Nobody has to worry about you, Paula,” she says. “You’re a Priamos. You look like one. And you’re strong like one too.”
Whether Yia Yia’s blessing me or damning me, I can’t decide. Only after my eyes tear up does she finally let go.
Later, as my parents come off the elevator, I notice my father fall behind my mother. The boom box is gone, and he’s talking with a man in a white coat, a doctor. The man appears flattered as he takes my father’s card and shakes his hand.
“I’m looking forward to meeting with him,” the man says. He’s younger than my father by a few years.
They’re doing business. My father must’ve seen an opportunity to ask this doctor, no doubt my sister’s doctor, to be an expert witness in Bared’s upcoming trial. I’d overheard my father talking to Bared’s wife after the court hearing. He was looking for a psychiatrist from a respectable hospital.
My father has killed two birds with one stone, and I can see my mother must be thinking this same thing because it looks as if she’d like to hurl a rock straight at his head. And even though this is just a fleeting look she gives him, a look he doesn’t even catch, their marriage has suffered yet another blow.
WHAT THEY TOLD ME AFTER HE DIED
Yeah, I think I saw him in here before. He’d come in around seven, stay’til closing. Tipped big even though he only drank straight Coke. Swear to God. Not sure how anybody can stay sober in a joint like this. Maybe he slipped his own brand of choice in here. Would make more sense, I guess. I’m kind of surprised, though. I didn’t think he had a daughter. He seemed like a lonely guy with no family.
—Greg Douglas, bartender at the Kat Nip
I know he’s your father and all, but facts are facts. The son of a bitch had it coming.
—Rex O’Dell, former client and business partner
You have it wrong. He had no plans of moving out. Those boxes were there because he was trying to move more of his stuff into storage. That’s a small room, you know.
—Yia Yia
Never seen him before. You’re sure you have the right place?
—Nigel Watkins, owner of the Kat Nip
There will be no obituary. It’s bad enough word might leak out before he’s in the ground.
—Uncle Dimitri
I took nothing from that man. He was the fucking thief. Aren’t most lawyers?
—Rex O’Dell
You best stop duckin’ my calls, motherfucker. Or I’ll come see you personally.
—Unidentified man, left on the voice mail of my father’s cell phone
I could’ve gone to dead. Your father, he saved me. May God rest his soul.
—Bared Garratta, former client
How do you think I feel? My husband’s gone and none of you will even let me come out there to show my respects. Nobody will let me bury him once and for all.
—June Priamos, ex-wife
Why do you keep going back to Gil? Yes, he should’ve done things differently that morning. Don’t make this about what he did to you.
—Uncle Dimitri
SAY UNCLE
My sister’s new hobby is partly responsible for why I’m seated Indian style in front of the TV watching The Young and the Restless as Uncle Gil kneels behind me and hikes up the back of my T-shirt. He’s so close I can feel the palm-sized handgun he keeps in the front pocket of his seventies style OP corduroy shorts. His hands are wet with baby oil. I hear the slapping and sucking sounds they make when he rubs them together.
My arm reaches behind me because I am afraid to look.
“I don’t want a massage. My back isn’t sore.”
“Nonsense,” he says. “That was a long plane ride. Your splenius muscles are tight.”
He is no expert on the human body. He is a failed inventor who prides himself on knowing things others have no time to learn. He uses this knowledge at family get-togethers so that he doesn’t appear idle, so it doesn’t look like he’s leeching off his mother, my Yia Yia’s Social Security checks. He’s lived with Yia Yia ever since leaving his wife over a decade earlier while she was seven months pregnant. In Yia Yia’s garage, he stores Liqui-Steal, his latest invention, a spray on substance that hardens into something like metal and repels rust. With no ordinary amount of caution, he empties out those oxygen-tanks-on-wheels commonly used for the elderly and fills them with Liqui-Steal. He must do this, he says, to throw the powerful steel lobbyists off his scent.
Uncle Gil and I are alone in the house, my house in Chino. He’s babysitting me for the rest of the Memorial Day weekend while my family stays in Tennessee for a horse show my sister is riding in, her first one out of state. In less than six months, my father has bought two horses—one for Rhea, a palomino gelding, “his goldmine,” named Good As Gold. The other horse, Pride’s Contract, is a black stallion he purchased for himself.
Like a real horse trader, in exchange for the fifty grand price tag, my father has shelled out twenty-five thousand in cash and offered his legal services free of charge for the next twenty-four months to Gold’s former owners who own the Fly Bye Café near the Ontario airport. He’s defending the couple in a frivolous lawsuit brought on by a customer who claims she suffered second-degree burns from a scalding hot wiener that slipped out of the bun and disfigured her chin. The woman is asking for two hundred thousand for medical bills, lost wages, and mental pain and anguish. After all, she now has to dab concealer on the reddish nickel-sized spot on her skin left behind by the runaway hot dog.
The high-priced stallion is supposedly paid for with the hefty retainer Bared had ponied up. Defending a homicide charge doesn’t come cheap even if a plea bargain is reached and it never goes to trial. With the expert witness from Long Beach Memorial waiting in the wings to back up Bared’s claim of temporary insanity, the Prosecutor settles