WILY OLD UNCLE PETROS

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

Her beliefs remained docked in the same place, no matter how “wormy with decay” or “barnacled with inanity,” both fragrant phrases of her old Uncle Petros, a lawyer who in early middle age began to fancy himself a theatrical impresario and spent the last half of his life operating a repertory company in the town where he lived, which was also the town where she had been born and raised, the town where she had first tasted ice cream, the town where she had first tasted disappointment, the town where she had first let a boy taste her, the town where she had married, mated, mothered, the town she had eventually left, waving, from the rear of a departing railway car, after which she was off to the city, for a time as a wife and mother and then, rudely, shockingly, as a newly single woman, at once proud of her freedom and terrified of what might happen if she used it, and from that vantage her hometown was mostly a memory, real only when she called Petros, a weekly event of an hour’s duration that was devoted mostly to a digressive account of local events, which actors were giving him a headache, which ones were giving him hope, how he came more and more to see that the theater and the courtroom were one in the same, how he missed her, and here he always performed a pause and asked her if she missed him, by which he meant home, the shift in meaning not just hinted but made explicit, “by which I mean home,” he said, then performing a second pause, and each time the phrase made her misty, put her on the tip of tears, and she forced herself to say something harsh or sarcastic to fend them off, something about how he would soon die and she wouldn’t even visit for his funeral, and he laughed and told her that she didn’t mean it, that she was the same girl she had been at thirty or twenty or ten, that her beliefs remained docked in the same place, no matter how wormy with decay or barnacled with inanities, and then she was laughing too, and still crying, harder now, and while the call eventually ended, she had only a week until it all happened again, the same thing or something close to it, his gazette, his question, her sharp answer, his parry. The old man really had her pegged.