Page 37 of Slanting Towards the Sea
THIRTY-FOUR
I PHONE MARINA EARLY the next morning, and she doesn’t pick up, and then I go to work and when she calls, I’m unable to answer, and then when I get off work, she doesn’t pick up again, and so the whole day passes, until she just texts me, “Coming back from a tour. Vlaho will be making pancakes tonight. Come over and we’ll talk. ”
So now I’m sitting at their large glossy-white dining table, Marina slumped in the chair across from me, visibly tired and already tan even though it’s only the beginning of May.
Vlaho is flipping pancakes with a practiced flick of his wrist on the other side of the kitchen, and Maro is sitting next to him on the kitchen counter, “helping.” No matter how many times he spills the batter onto the floor, his pants, or Vlaho’s T-shirt, Vlaho never says a thing.
He bows down to clean up the mess, then gives Maro the ladle again, and guides his hand as Maro pours the batter into the pan that Vlaho twirls around so that it spreads.
Tena is behind me, perched on a step stool, braiding my hair.
Marina has a short bob, and my hair has recently grown under my jawline, so I’m the only person Tena can play hairdresser with.
She pushes her chubby fingers into my scalp, her focus comical on her round face, and she tugs, and pulls, and jerks her comb down my tangled strands, and even though sometimes she yanks too hard, I don’t protest. There’s something nice about being preened this way.
“So?” I ask Marina.
She hasn’t said a word yet about her text from last night. Her eyes glint with satisfaction. She’s intent on ratcheting up tension before her big reveal. “You’re gonna love this. After our talk on the boat, I called my cousin Tome,” she finally starts. “The geodesist.”
She says it as though I’m supposed to know who Tome is.
Marina has cousins left and right, in every conceivable line of business.
Unlike my family, who moved here only two generations ago, hers originates from a nearby village, and there is always a cousin or an acquaintance who knows someone who does something you need doing.
“Anyway, I told him about your problem with the hotel, and asked him to look into it. He didn’t have trouble finding the exact plot number, given that it’s the only settlement in a two-kilometer radius.”
A geodesist. Looking into the plot of land the hotel is built on. I sit up, but Tena yanks my hair back.
“Did you ever talk to your dad about dividing the plot in two?” Marina leans in for more emphasis.
“We had a conversation years ago about whether it could be divided. My dad said that as per urban and spatial plans, the hotel needed at least triple the land it occupied—”
She is shaking her head before I’m even finished. “Tome consulted the maps and the urban plan, and you can divide the plot in two. Right where the small gate is.” She draws her finger across the table and the lacquered surface squeaks.
All the different facets of this problem overlap as my mind tries to parse them out.
That Dad lied and deliberately hid this from me.
That I have already shown Asier the whole plot, including the olive grove.
That to retain the grove, I would have to initiate the procedure of dividing the plot, but the bank would surely move into foreclosure before that procedure was finished.
I clench my eyes shut.
“I thought you’d be happy,” Marina says.
“I am! I am.” Though I’m not sure if happy is the right word.
I’ve only just accepted the fact that I’m losing the grove, and this turns everything on its head.
Worse still, it sparks a new hope, and I’m not sure if I can endure another disappointment.
Sometimes new hope only makes the loss twice as hard.
Vlaho puts a plate with the first batch of pancakes on the table and squeezes my shoulder before he returns to the stove.
Marina slathers marmalade onto one and curls it into a roll, then offers it to Tena.
“I’ll give you Tome’s number. If you give him the green light, he’ll do the prep work and start the procedure with the Urbanist and Spatial Planning Office.
It might take a while, but maybe you could find a way to stall the foreclosure?
” She says this looking at Vlaho, asking for confirmation from the banking side of things.
“Maybe ask that investor of yours for an advance on the hotel sale and then put that toward covering a couple of installments just to buy some time?”
Tossing a pancake in the air, Vlaho says, “It could be done.”
Marina claps her hands in an all-solved fashion, and this irks me, because it’s not solved, it’s a set of new roadblocks in the new path that I need to figure out just when I thought I was finished figuring this out. I’m so tired I could cry.
“Where were you, by the way?”
“Huh?” I only half heard Marina’s question, and when I replay the words, heat rises up my neck and cheeks, all the way up to my hair follicles.
Because where I was when she called was near naked, in a hotel room, in a bed with said investor, and there’s no way I can tell her that, especially not in front of Vlaho.
“Last night.” She slathers marmalade onto another pancake, then rolls it and puts it on the plate next to a heap of others.
“Maro,” she yells. “Come get your pancakes.” She looks at me, sliding the plate in his direction.
“I called you like a dozen times,” and somewhere in the middle of that sentence, her face, upon seeing mine, goes Oh .
“I was busy,” I say, and don’t offer more, but I can see her piecing together what she knows from before. That the investor was visiting this weekend. That it was well past ten p.m. when she called. That I am burning like a damn blowtorch.
“I see,” she says.
I worry she’ll pose more questions, questions that I’ll need to find sloppy answers to, because I can feel Vlaho’s attention from across the room.
It’s one of those instinctual things, like catching a stranger staring at you from a far-up balcony as you walk down the street, even though you had no reason to look up.
Vlaho pours the pancake batter into the pan, and it sizzles.
I make a point of not looking at him, but Marina is casting a glance his way.
The room echoes with everything that’s unspoken between the three of us; between Marina and me, between Vlaho and me, between the two of them, but I can’t, for the life of me, figure out what any of it is.