Page 213 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

that bad. But she won’t hear it. We walk right up to the door and there’s my

father, in the doorway, and Odie raises the barrel and shoves it against his chin
and says, Do it again and I will come back and shoot you in the face with this
rifle.
“My father blinks, and for a moment he’s tongue-tied. He can’t say a word.
And you want to know the best part, Markos? I look down and see a little circle,
a circle of—well, I think you can guess—a little circle quietly expanding on the
floor between his bare feet.”
Madaline brushed back her hair and said, to another flick of the lighter, “And
that, my dear, is a true story.”

She didn’t have to say it, I knew it was true. I recognized in it Mamá’s
uncomplicated, fierce loyalty, her mountainous resolve. Her impulse, her need,
to be the corrector of injustices, warden of the downtrodden flock. And I could
tell it was true from the closemouthed groan Mamá gave at the mention of that
last detail. She disapproved. She probably found it distasteful, and not only for
the obvious reason. In her view, people, even if they had behaved deplorably in
life, deserved a modicum of dignity in death. Especially family.
Mamá shifted in her seat and said, “So if you don’t like to travel, Thalia, what
do you like to do?”

All our eyes turned to Thalia. Madaline had been speaking for a while, and I
recall thinking, as we sat in the courtyard with the sunlight falling in patches all
around us, that it was a measure of her capacity to absorb attention, to pull
everything into her vortex so thoroughly that Thalia had gone forgotten. I also
left room for the possibility that they had adapted to this dynamic out of
necessity, the quiet daughter eclipsed by the attention-diverting self-absorbed
mother routine, that Madaline’s narcissism was perhaps an act of kindness, of
maternal protectiveness.
Thalia mumbled something.

“A little louder, darling,” came the suggestion from Madaline.
Thalia cleared her throat, a rumbling, phlegmy sound. “Science.”
I noticed for the first time the color of her eyes, green like ungrazed pasture,
the deep, coarse dark of her hair, and that she had unblemished skin like her
mother. I wondered if she’d been pretty once, maybe even beautiful like
Madaline.

“Tell them about the sundial, darling,” Madaline said.
Thalia shrugged.
“She built a sundial,” Madaline said. “Right in our backyard. Last summer.
She had no help. Not from Andreas. And certainly not from me.” She chortled.