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Paul-September 5, 1982

Many years from now, whenever he thinks back to Dita Kronon’s murder, Paul Gianis’s memories will always return to the start of the day. It is September 5, 1982, the Sunday of Labor Day weekend, a lush afternoon with high clouds lustrous as pearls. Zeus Kronon, Dita’s father, has opened the sloping grounds of his suburban mansion to hundreds of his fellow parishioners from St. Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church in the city for their annual celebration of the ecclesiastical New Year. Down the hill, in the grassy riverside meadow that serves as a parking lot, Paul arrives with his mother and his identical twin brother, Cass. The next few hours with both of them, Paul knows, will be an ordeal.

On the driver’s side, Cass is out of the old Datsun coupe instantly.

“I need to find Dita,” he says, referring to his girlfriend, Zeus’s daughter.

Their mother climbs from the passenger seat with Paul’s assistance, watching her other son sling his suit coat over his shoulder and bound up the hill.

“Theae mou,” she mutters in Greek and quickly makes the sign of the cross after invoking God in dismay.

“Mom,” Paul says, now that his brother is gone, “what are we doing here really?”

Lidia, their mother, condenses her thick eyebrows, as if she doesn’t understand.

“You refuse to come to this picnic every year,” he says, “because of how much Dad hates Zeus. ”

“No more than I,” quietly answers Lidia, who rarely concedes priority in anything. Together, with Lidia hanging on to her son’s arm for support, Paul and she start up the gravel path toward Zeus’s vast white house with its low-pitched gables and Corinthian columns. “This picnic is for the church, not Zeus. I’ve missed many of our former neighbors, and I have not been face-to-face with Nouna Teri in months. ”

“You talk to Teri every day. ”

“Paulie mou,”-literally ‘My Paul,’-“I didn’t make you come here.

“I had to, Mom. You’re up to something. Cass and I both know it. ”

“Am I?” asks Lidia. “I didn’t realize that when you received your law degree, you also became a mind reader. ”

“You’re going to make some kind of trouble about Dita. ”

“Trouble?” Lidia snorts. At sixty-three, their mother has grown somewhat stout, but she retains a regal manner, a tall woman with fierce dark eyes and a wide spray of graying hair pushed back from her brow. “Dita makes enough trouble by herself. Even Teri admits that, and the girl is her niece. If Cass marries Dita, your father will never speak to him again. ”

“Mom, that’s just old-country nonsense like believing in the evil eye. Cass and I aren’t going to carry on your crazy feud with Zeus. And we’re twenty-five years old. You have to let Cass make his own decisions. ”

“Who says?” answers Lidia, adding a sudden chuckle and a squeeze of Paul’s bicep to lighten the mood. That is their mother’s idea of wit, laughing when she says something she means.