19
“Malaka,” I muttered to myself, forgetting for a moment that my dad was the one on the other end of the line, and he could well understand I had just called him an—
“Did you just call me an asshole?” he snapped at me. I rolled my eyes, tempted to point out that the word didn’t have a specific English translation, but playing the smart-ass was only going to land me in a heap more trouble. As if it wasn’t bad enough as it was.
“No,” I lied swiftly. “Look, are you sure you can’t get back sooner than that? You need to be here, Dad. It’s my wedding.”
“I know,” he replied tersely. “You think I don’t know that? I’m as annoyed about it as you are.”
“Then why won’t you just make the effort and actually come back home?” I pointed out. “This is ridiculous, Dad. Even you must be able to see that.”
“I didn’t plan it this way,” he snapped back, but I didn’t believe him. I knew my dad well enough to know he had everything in his life carefully planned out. If he was stuck in Greece right now, it was because that was exactly how he’d wanted it.
“You knew we were going to move the wedding up a little,” I reminded him. I didn’t tell him, of course, that it was because Amaya was pregnant and she wanted to look as unpregnant as possible in her dress, but he didn’t need to know any of that. All he needed to know was that I, his son, wanted him at my fucking wedding, and he was going to be halfway across the world, not giving a damn. I was tempted to make a snide comment that I only intended to have one wedding in my life so he might not want to miss mine while he was probably already planning his next divorce and remarriage.
“Yeah, but I didn’t know it would be a couple of weeks away,” he protested weakly. “You can’t just expect me to drop everything for you, Kristo. We’re both adults. You know how life goes.”
“I know that I’ve been to every single one of your weddings,” I reminded him sharply. “Including the one you threw in Greece a month after you met her. Remember? We were all there for that. We all made it out.”
“I remember,” he shot back, and I could hear the irritation in his voice. Well, it was nothing on how pissed I was feeling. I was supposed to be focusing on work while Jolene got settled in with her nurse next door, but here I was on the phone fielding phone calls from family members who couldn’t even be bothered to make the trip out here to see me marry the love of my life.
“It’s one night,” I reminded him. “That’s it. And everyone’s going to be there. If you don’t come, everybody’s going to think you don’t approve of the marriage and you don’t like Amaya. You really want that kind of gossip running around the family?”
He fell silent for a long moment. He knew as well as I did how gossip made its way through the Balaban clan, and if he didn’t turn up, there would be questions about his absence. I would be all too happy to stoke some fires of disapproval around him if I needed to, if that’s what it took to get him there.
“Look, I’ll see what I can do, but I have business out here,” he fired back, voice taut with tension. “I’ll let you know.”
“Fine.” I hung up the phone, and I ran my hands through my hair and tried to steady myself. I felt like I was going to flip the fucking table over right there and then. I couldn’t believe he was doing this to me. I couldn’t believe he was pulling this shit right before my wedding, of all places. Maybe I should have expected it. He had always been this way, irritated at being anything other than the center of attention, but I thought he might put that aside so he could come to see me marry the woman I loved.
Business? He had business in Greece? I knew exactly what was going on with the company, and I could say for damn sure there was nothing in the way of business in Greece that needed to be taken care of. He had forgotten that I worked for the company, and I could pick apart his lies with more certainty than before. He was probably on the prowl for his next wife, knowing him. I still couldn’t believe he and Karen were together, no matter how happy they had seemed when I’d last run into them.
I took a deep breath, planted my hands on the desk, and tried to center myself. There was no point getting upset about this. At the end of the day, either he was going to make the effort and come to my wedding or he wasn’t, and there was very little I could do to change his mind if he didn’t want to. Short of flying out to Greece and dragging him by his collar back to Nonna’s house to be there for the ceremony, if he wanted to skip it, he would. And I had a feeling he was going to. Amaya wouldn’t want this to be a stressful time for me. She wanted our wedding to be full of joy, peace, happiness, not me yelling into a phone to my father from half a globe away.
I focused on the voices outside the room. Well, they weren’t saying anything, but they were laughing, and that was enough to get me feeling a little better. After a slight delay, Jolene’s nurse Pamela had arrived this morning, and the two of them were getting to know each other. I had offered to stay at home that day to work in my home office and make sure the transition went smoothly while Amaya went down to the library, but it seemed I shouldn’t have bothered as they were getting along great. Amaya and I had put a ton of effort into finding the right nurse for her sister, and I’d known Pamela was the one as soon as we’d laid eyes on her—smartly-dressed with a kind smile and eyes that glinted with playfulness. She was an older woman, brisk and to the point, with a bunch of experience helping out people in Jolene’s condition. Plus, she just so happened to love food to boot, her brother running a restaurant in the center of the city. I knew she and Jolene would have so much to talk about regarding that.
I headed to the kitchen to grab myself a beer, but then I remembered I had cleaned us out of booze a couple of days before. I’d cracked a beer and then seen the look Amaya had given the bottle, as though she was struggling not to retch at the sight of it, and I swore right there and then that we wouldn’t have a drop of alcohol in the entire apartment if it made the pregnancy even a little bit easier for her to cope with. But where I would normally have gone to some booze for stress relief, I didn’t have that choice any longer. What was I going to do? I felt like the anger was still fizzing through my system, and I needed to do something to work it out before I exploded.
I heard them laughing about something from in the living room, and then it hit me. I should cook something. I would have laughed in my own face had I suggested that just a few months ago, but now I was drawn to the idea. I loved to cook, and I hadn’t had a chance to really throw myself into a recipe in a long time. Since my father might spend the wedding in Greece, it was only right that it be something classically Greek, right?
I emerged from the office, and Jolene turned to me with a concerned expression on her face.
“I heard you talking to someone in there,” she told me. “You sounded upset. Is everything all right?”
“Everything’s just fine,” I lied to her with a big smile on my face. Last thing I needed was her passing this along to Amaya and stressing her out about something she had no control over. “Now, how are you guys getting on?”
Pamela glanced at Jolene and smiled and then looked back to me.
“I would say things are going in a positive direction,” she replied calmly. She had this soothing presence to her, so intent that I could almost forget about that bullshit that had happened with my father a few minutes before. I took a deep breath and let it out, managing a smile.
“I’m really glad to hear that.” I nodded. “I’m going to do some baking. Do you two want to join me?”
“What are you making?” Jolene asked keenly, wheeling herself over to the kitchen. Pamela followed behind her.
“Baklava,” I told her. “It’s a traditional Greek dessert. It’s not hard to make, but it’s much quicker with many hands. You guys up for it?”
“I’m really not much of a baker,” Pamela warned me gamely as she washed her hands. “I think the most I managed is boxed cake mix, and even then, I’m likely to burn the whole thing.”
“As long as you can layer filling and pastry, we’ll be fine,” I assured her. I began to gather the ingredients and instantly began to relax. There was something so calming about baking, so practical and soothing. Everything my father had said to me felt as though it was dropping away, pointless and silly in retrospect. I was going to spend the rest of the day baking with Pamela and Jolene, and I was going to forget about my father and his thoughtlessness and have a good day despite him. I could feel it.