An in-home hospice nurse was on duty, but Eleni kept her out of the room except to administer and regulate the morphine. Eleni talked to Van as he slept. She slipped popsicles into his mouth and wet his lips with a washcloth when he could no longer drink. On the last night of his life he looked up at her, sitting beside him.
“I’m a failure,” he said hoarsely.
“What do you mean?”
“Where are my children?”
“Leonidas is on his way.” She squeezed his hand. “You’re no failure. Don’t ever think that. You did nothing but good. You’re a good man.”
He drifted in and out of morphine dreams. Leonidas came into the room. He hugged his mother roughly and went to the bedside, where he knelt on the hardwood floor and kissed his father’s hand.
“The best day of my life was the day that lawyer put you in my arms,” said Van, and Leonidas lowered his head as hot tears ran down his face.
“I love you, Pop.”
Van’s cracked lips twitched up into a smile. “Cool Breeze,” he whispered.
Those were the last words he spoke. He died the next morning, just before dawn.
Years passed. Eleni adopted a second dog, called him Yuma, and walked him and Cheyenne twice a day. The outings took a long time, as she stopped to talk to many neighbors on her route and sometimes sat up on their porches and shared tea and, in the evenings, glasses of wine. Deep into her forties she had gotten looks on the street, but now in her sixties she seemed invisible to men. She was still a handsome woman, but she was old.
Eleni no longer had a need for sex, but she was often lonely and would not have minded the companionship of a man. Her attitude was, if it happened, fine. She had her neighborhood friends, her church, her garden, her dogs. And her children.
Her two younger sons called her almost daily. They visited a couple of times a week, mostly at dinnertime, because they liked her cooking and because they knew she loved to feed them.
Leo was a high school teacher in the D.C. public system. Spero did investigative work for a defense attorney down by the courts. When she looked at her sons, she saw Van, and she thought: We did well.
Ours was a life well spent.