Page 29 of Slanting Towards the Sea
TWENTY-SIX
WHEN I FINALLY RETURN home that evening after giving Dad and Sa?a my ultimatum, my phone is still resting where I left it on the dining room table. There are two new messages. The first one is from Sa?a. It says simply, “You win.”
Meaning, go ahead and sell the property since you can’t be reasoned with. Meaning, he disagrees, but apparently not to the extent of shouldering the burden of Lovorun Heritage Hotel himself.
You win , it says.
At what, I have no idea.
For days, Dad speaks to me only when he can’t avoid it.
When he needs me to get him something from the store, or to take him to the doctor.
Our lunches together are long, silent marathons, punctuated only by cutlery hitting the plates and overly polite requests to pass him the salt.
The rest of the day, he takes to his bed, as if my decision is making him physically sick.
A constant need to apologize sits amid my chest, but if I do, I’ll have to backtrack on the words I finally found the courage to say. And I’m not willing to do that, even while I’m still questioning them myself.
My mom often comes to mind, those moments of quiet after her fights with Dad, when the two of us would be kneading pizza dough.
“Sometimes, we have to make sacrifices for the greater good,” she’d say.
She never elaborated on what she meant, but it was implied she was referring to her staying married to Dad so that Sa?a and I would have a normal family.
A sacrifice I was grateful for because I couldn’t imagine being a child from a broken home, not in a time and society that still stigmatized divorce.
But now I see the truth neither of us could see back then.
Our home wasn’t any less broken just because we lived in one household.
It begs the question, then, where is that fine line between sacrifices that make sense and those that don’t? And how do we tell them apart?
At night, I lie awake in my bed, wrestling with myself.
It’s always so much easier to question oneself in the dark.
I’m split in two—the person wanting to apologize, and the person observing the person wanting to apologize.
It could be a good life , the Apologizer says.
You could be your own boss, finally earn a decent salary.
You could even keep the olive grove. It’s a sensible thing to do.
But even as I’m saying these things, my very essence screeches and bolts as if it were a car careening into a wall.
I spent years watching the upstream swimming my father had to do just to keep his business afloat.
I saw his frustration over the shifting regulations, the quagmire of indecipherable codes and bylaws, needing connections that he never seemed to have or that were never as strong as other people’s connections.
How all of it had made him first miserable, then angry, then bitter, until it took the worst kind of toll on his health.
Many people start businesses in Croatia , the Apologizer protests.
Yeah , the Observer retorts, but maybe their skin is thicker than mine .
But when all the other arguments fall silent, there is this: an amorphous feeling of doom for tethering myself even more tightly to a life I don’t want. A life where I have no say.
A position in which I am the executor of someone else’s dreams.
The ultimate concession.
There’s so little of me left. If I stretch myself any thinner, I will disappear.
The other message I received that night was from Asier. “The board is interested,” the text said. “Let’s set up a viewing.” And then, “I’m really looking forward to seeing you again.”
For a couple of days, I didn’t answer.
“Everything all right?” he asked then, but I haven’t answered that either. I’m being childish and unprofessional, but if I answer him, I’ll have committed to a particular course of action, and I’m not ready to do that yet.