The Trouble with Bliss

It takes more than eight phone calls to track her down, but Morris finally gets his Aunt Christina’s number. His aunt and her husband and son, who’s a few years younger than Morris, have moved back to Greece, to Christina’s home island of Kos, the island that holds half of Morris’s heritage.

  Morris gets the international code wrong twice before the phone finally rings its odd foreign ring. It’s after eleven p.m. in New York and Morris hadn’t even thought about the time there, if it’s morning or evening or dead of night.

  A woman answers. “Malesta?” she says.

  Morris pauses, uncertain what to say, uncertain he’s dialed the right number. Uncertain he’s even talking to someone in Greece and not someone in Guyana or the Gaza Strip. “Yes, hello,” he says.

  “Hallo?” the woman says. “Yes?”

  “Yes, is this Christina?”

  It is.

  “This is Morris Bliss,” he said. “Your sister Stavroula’s son.”

  A cry sounds across the miles of wire. “Stavroula’s baby,” his Aunt Christina says, overjoyed. “My sister’s baby.”

  They speak for nearly two hours. Christina wants to know all about him, all about his life in New York. She tells him about how they’d returned to Greece, and how her son, Christos, is running a parasailing business for the English and German tourists that visit during the summer months. “You must visit,” she tells him.

  “I’d like that,” Morris says. He would. But he fears her joy is false, fleeting. Where has she been all these years, all his life? He flatly asks her.

  Christina makes the sound all Greeks make when something is either too simple or too complicated to explain. “I called many, many times many, many years ago,” she tells Morris. There was a crackling on the line, a pause. “Then I called no more,” she says. “Did your father not tell you I called? Did he not tell you I called and he hung up each time?”

  “No,” Morris says, clearly seeing his father doing that. Once he’d cut someone from his life, they no longer existed. Stavroula’s family was dead to Seymour. He’d have nothing to do with them.

  Christina’s tone shifts, turns cheerful again, glad. “You must come,” she tells him. “Come now. You’ll have a place to live, food, family. Stavroula’s baby. You can come and live here with us, work with your cousin Christos.”

  “I’d like that,” he says. “Maybe this summer.”

  “This summer’s good. But now, come now. Come tomorrow,” she says.

  “Unfortunately, right now is—” He stops. Right now is what?

  It’s nothing.

  It’s perfect.

  “Okay. I’ll come,” he tells her, already planning. “Tomorrow.”