Traveling Light Read Free

Guillermo was the hungry one, the ascending boss. She felt it, knew it, and he was better at it anyway. Sometimes gaining footsteps in the stairwell prompted a glance over her shoulder, wondering if he would just as soon shove her down the stairs like some nut-job in late-night reruns of Murder She Wrote.
    Turning fifty last month hadn’t helped. She’d been unexpectedly rattled. Music from the Weather Channel made her tear up. While standing behind a broad-shouldered, heavily tattooed Polynesian-looking man in McDonald’s on her birthday she’d fought the urge to rest her head against his back. It looked so nice and comfortable.
    But all hating aside, Guillermo was right. A delegator she wasn’t. He was the stronger one. She had neither the heart nor the backbone to tell her staff what to do. It seemed bossy and mean, and she’d gotten enough of that in childhood. And while Greece is long credited with being the Birthplace of Democracy, the Greek family couldn’t have been credited with its conception. She’d more “suggest” to the staff than issue directives. At first they were elated by their good fortune at getting the “cool boss.” But within weeks she’d get the stink-eye when asking them to do something that interfered with their coffee breaks.
    Roger was stronger, too. So were the flies she couldn’t kill and the recurring plantar wart on the bottom of her heel for which she lacked the endurance to follow through with the directions on the package and tend to every night.
    She smoothed back her hair and sighed. “Dendron,” Eleni likened her hair to the tree-like seaweed that washed ashore on their ancestral island within view of the Turkish coast. Her relatives had hopped from one tiny island to another only to then be stranded with eight million people between two rivers on the other side of the world. Such was her inspiration for creation of the Center—to gain understanding and perspective and maybe even to bridge the gap between grandparents who’d been shepherds on a remote island with no running water and a granddaughter with a Ph.D., who taught at a college, was married to kseni and lived in Manhattan.
    Paula’s stylist had promised transmutation through a new hair-straightening product. But product isn’t alchemy. Not the miracle tears allegedly cried from an icon of Panayia, witnessed by an old widow living on the sun-bleached island of Kos, where some still hang out the bloody sheet after a wedding night. Paula wound back her hair and clipped it even though it exposed the gray roots. Damn, there were so many things to worry about. Her bangs had spiraled like bedsprings to her hairline; it looked like her grandmother’s 1920 immigrant passport photo.
    Roger didn’t mind Paula’s hair. Curly, frizzy, straight, he didn’t care. Neither did he care if she was fat or thin or wore makeup. For months they’d avoided eye contact, and she wondered if he could pick her out of a police lineup. Sometimes comfort is born of neglect—a fine line between acceptance and not caring at all.
    Roger was the strongest yet most fragile man she’d every known. He’d take a bullet for her yet wouldn’t move the piles of crap off his bed to clear space for her. Shoulder-high stacks of astro- and particle physics journals served as his foot- and headboards; piles of clothes draped over chairs to form haystacks. The closets were packed and rendered useless long before Paula’d arrived. Yet she’d doggedly believed that the magic of those first months of courtship (along with a Greek church wedding) had formed a sacred union. Her commitment was such that she’d never once doubted that someday one of them would bury the other.
    Her first glimpse of Roger in Christoff’s living room years ago had left her thinking that he looked “humanoid.” His shiny pink head and sharp-ridged cheekbones made the skin look newly stretched—dewy, like he’d just stepped out of a pod where he’d been spawned. But,