She pushes off with her foot, making the porch swing sway. “Then it can’t be that bad, can it?”
Fresh embarrassment blooms on my face. “I thought we were, so, um—I took off my shirt.”
“Seriously?” She stops the swing with both feet. “Wow. No wonder he freaked. I mean, I’m a little surprised he didn’t rally in the face of”—Kat gestures toward my chest—“those, but I think he wanted to ask you out on a date first, not go straight to hooking up.”
It never occurred to me. Not once. “Oh.”
“You didn’t know that?”
“No.”
“Wait. You’ve never had a boyfriend? You?”
“No.” When you don’t stay in any one place very long, there’s not much opportunity to be someone’s girlfriend. Also, not much opportunity to meet the kind of guy who wants you for anything more than sex. “I’ve only …” I trail off, but Kat picks up on what I don’t say.
“Whoa.” She sounds surprised, and I envy having the kind of na?veté that assumes if you’ve never really dated, you might still be a virgin. If I had grown up here, I might be. Or at least I wouldn’t have lost my innocence when I was eight years old. “Well.” She starts the swing again. “I think you should try again with Connor. We could double-date.”
“Maybe.” Connor will be a great catch for someone, but I’m pretty sure it’s not me. I don’t know how to be that kind of girl. He’s sweet, though. Cute.
We sit a minute and Kat starts giggling. “I wish I could have seen Connor’s face when you took off your shirt. I don’t think he’s met real live boobs before.”
“Well, he has now.”
She’s cracking up laughing when Georgia comes out onto the porch. “There you are, girls. Callista, the dolmades are ready. Come in. Try them.”
She hustles me away from Kat to the dining room, where the table is laden with a variety of Greek foods, as well as ordinary holiday fare, like turkey, cornbread stuffing, and mashed potatoes.
“Dolmades”—Georgia says, scooping an enormous portion of little green bundles onto a plate—are rice and meat wrapped in grape leaves. When you were a baby, I would feed you this and you would open your mouth the way a new bird does, wanting always more, more, more.”
As if I’m still that baby, she severs off a piece with a fork and brings it to my mouth for a bite. The rice tastes like rice, but the flavor of the leaves is minty and sour at the same time. It’s unpleasant, and I chew quickly to rid myself of the taste. I try not to let her see that I don’t care for her dolmades, but disappointment settles in her eyes and at the corners of her mouth, and I feel as if I’ve failed some secret granddaughter test.
Grandchild, daughter, friend, a girl a normal boy would date—a growing list of people I don’t know how to be.
“Ah, well.” She smiles and she hands me a fresh plate. “We can’t stay babies forever, can we?”
I fill my plate mostly with foods I can identify and grab a can of Coke from an ice-filled plastic tub in the kitchen. As I make my way through the living room toward the porch, I hear someone say “Veronica.” In a short hallway that leads to the bedrooms and bathroom, two older women—not as old as Georgia, but definitely a lot older than Greg—huddle, talking softly about my mother. I linger close to the doorway so I can hear what they’re saying.
“Kidnapping is a federal offense,” the fat one says, with such certainty that I wonder if she’s right. “She’s going to jail for a long, long time, and I can’t say she doesn’t deserve it.”
“If you ask me, she should be committed,” the second woman says. “If it wasn’t for the crazy disease, she would have never done what she did.”
Crazy disease?
“I’ll never understand what Greg saw in that girl.”
The first one snorts. “He was thinking with his poutsa.”
I don’t need to understand Greek to understand what she means, and I want to tell them that it wasn’t about sex. That Greg saw what other people didn’t. But my mind snags on the words “crazy disease,” and I remember what Ancilla said about Mom getting the help she needs. And the words the man in the leather jacket yelled after me when I ran away from him. I’ve lived with her my whole life. Wouldn’t I know if my own mother was really crazy?
I deposit my plate and soda on an end table and seek out Greg. He’s drinking a beer and talking to Theo, the cousin who runs the gift shop at the docks.
“We need to talk,” I say.
Greg looks as if he’s going to protest at first—because we’re in the middle of a party—but I guess he sees the seriousness on my face because he nods. “Sure.”
Outside on the porch, I ask, “Is my mom crazy?”
“No.”
Greg levels his index finger at me. Defensively. As if he’s had this conversation one too many times. “Veronica suffers from borderline personality disorder, Callie. It affects her moods, and can be treated with therapy and medication, but she’s not crazy.”
I remember an amber prescription bottle in her purse, but there were no pills in it. Just coins. Quarters fit in it just right and she’d let me put them in whenever we got change. “I never saw her take any medication.”
“You probably wouldn’t have,” he says. “Her doctor had her on a mix of antidepressants and antianxiety medications, but she complained they turned her into a zombie. She said they made her feel as if she was made of nothing. But without the meds she’d swing from one extreme to another. One day everything would be fine, and the very next day she’d accuse me of not loving her enough and try to bait me into telling her I wanted to break up with her. She’d cut friends out of her life for no apparent reason. She’d get unreasonably angry about the smallest offenses. And she absolutely hated being alone.”
Like the last number on a combination lock, the tumblers of my life fall into place, and all the different mothers my mother has been finally make sense. The anger inside me makes my skin feel too tight and I need to get away from here. I start down the front-porch steps.
“Callie, where are you going?” Greg asks.
“I just—I’ll be back.”
My sandals are too slow, so I take them off. The sidewalk is warm as I run and I don’t mind the sharp bite of tiny stones against my soles. How could my mom be so selfish? Taking the pills would have kept us here. Taking the pills would have kept her from hooking up with Frank. All she had to do was take the goddamn pills and her life, my life, would have been ordinary. Happy.
I end up at the sponge docks. Mostly because it’s beautiful so near the water, but also because I don’t know any other places to go. The place where Alex Kosta’s boat should be is empty, but so is the bench where I met Kat. Around me, sightseers study brochures and discuss what they want to do next. The sponge-diving tour boat pulls away from the dock with a load of tourists aboard. An old couple wearing sandals with socks take turns photographing each other in front of a bronze statue of a man wearing an old-fashioned sponge-diving suit.
I reach the bench and try to sit quietly, but my head is too loud. It takes me to the Super Wash, where the tall man with the leather jacket said Mom and I were both crazy, and a brand-new fear overtakes me. What if I am just like her? Is borderline personality disorder hereditary? Am I crazy, too? And if I am, how would I know for sure?