by Alex A King
"I thought this was the kitchen," she says. As far as precautions goes, her babble isn't a good one. The heat spreads anyway, from his hands to her skin, to that faucet that switches her on.
"Small apartment. Everything doubles as something else."
"Good thing the kitchen doesn't double as the bathroom."
"Very good thing."
His hand moves, but not far. The fire moves with it.
Logic kicks in, tells her this isn't the best time—not for her, but for him. "Are you sure now is a good time?"
He lifts her off the counter, turns her so she's facing away.
"What did I say?" His voice is burnt around the edges, raw.
"You need me."
"I need you," he whispers. "And you need this."
This turns out to be Leo. All of him.
107
Leo
He keeps his secret for a couple of days. On the third, he's ready to share Kiki with the rest of his world. But she doesn't look convinced.
"Your family is grieving. The last thing they need is to feel like they have to entertain me."
They're not like that, and he tells her so.
"Okay." She looks at his pathetic excuse for a kitchen. "I'll go with you. But I have to be useful."
"What did you have in mind."
"Your father is Greek, isn't he?"
* * *
"Leonidas! What's all this?" Dad is in Greek mode, hands and shoulders shrugging at the bags Leo's carrying.
"What's it look like?"
"Food. What do I need with food?"
"Who says it for you? Maybe it's for me."
His fathers laughs. Good. Feels like it's been a lifetime since Leo heard his dad laugh. Then he notices Leo brought company.
"Who is this?"
"Kyriaki Andreou, Lefteris Karas. Dad, meet Kiki."
"You are Greek?" He looks at Leo. "Is this the one?"
"She's the one."
He shines his light back on Kiki. "So you're the reason my son made it home when he did."
"It was nothing," Kiki says, offering her hand. "I'm very sorry about your wife."
Funny, because to Leo it was everything.
Dad pulls her into his arms, hugs her like she's one of his.
His old man won't leave Kiki's side after that. He lingers in the kitchen, drinking coffee while she cooks. This is good for him, it's what he needs—something from his first home.
Leo lets the two of them do the talking. She catches him up to fifteen years of scandals and stories, culminating in the adventures of Socrates and Laki. By then, all three of them are howling with laughter.
Feels like a family. Except there's more than just his mother missing.
"Where's Soc? He get tangled up in groupies?"
Dad shakes his head. "On the dock. Always he is there."
108
Kiki
This house …
"It's beautiful." Very American with its large, bright rooms and two-point-five bathrooms. Everywhere she turns the walls are shades of white. Not the furnishings; those are bright, bold, the antithesis of sedate.
Leo hasn't stopped watching her since he saw her on his doorstep. "You're beautiful."
Kiki laughs. "What, are we in a romance novel? It is, as Americans say, cheesy."
"Hey, I like cheese. I love cheese."
"I like cheese, too."
Kyrios Karas wanders into the living room. He nods at Leo.
"Son, a moment?"
"I'll be right back," Leo tells her.
* * *
Leo's brother is sitting at the end of the dock alone.
Kiki sits, too. She doesn't speak. He's heard enough words—he doesn't need more.
There is a rumor that Greece and Florida share the same sun, but Kiki isn't sure. This sun is a more forgiving sun. A cooler, yellow sun.
In time, he says, "Where do you think she is?"
Kiki points at the sun. "There." Then at his chest. "And here."
109
Leo
Floor length sheers. White shutters thrown open to catch the breeze—the opposite of the way Greece does it. A queen-sized bed with matching furniture in the cherry wood Mom loved. Over the bed, a painting of flowers immortalized at their peak.
Everything identical to how it was, yet it's not the same, is it?
Dad sinks into the bed's edge.
"You do not look stupid, Leo, so why are you acting like a vlakas?"
Say what? Dad's looking at him like he—Leo that is—pitched his marbles overboard.
"Huh?" Very eloquent. His education really paid off.
"Why are you here?"
"I came for Mom. And for you and Soc."
His old man nods. Sometime between losing Mom and today, he shrugged on ten extra years. They've settled on him like a thick winter coat. "I know, I know. And that was the right thing to do. But now?"
"The family needs me."
"No. The family needs your mother, but she is gone. Now … now we go on alone, without her—me, your brother, and you. None of us can do anything but remember her and be the best men we can be for her." He sighs. "I want you here, but if you stay, the life you are meant for will move on without you."
"What else am I going to do, Dad?"
"Go back to Greece. A man gets one chance at a good woman. I know. That is why we left Greece." He nods at photograph on Mom's vanity. The camera caught his parents cuddling at the end of their dock last summer. Leo knows, he was the photographer. "Your mother hated Greece. The family … it is not that they mistreated her, but their way was not her way. You know how they are with their questions and their gossip and their interference. Every day they wanted to be in our business and dictate how we lived and raised our family. You were young, and you did not see how hard it was for her or how much we fought. She asked me to choose." He laughs. "What a silly woman, your mother. There was no choice. They were family, yes, but she and you—and in time, your brother—were my family. So we came here. And I have no regrets, other than not walking away from Greece sooner.
"But you, Leo, I think maybe you belong in Greece with your Kiki. She has heart, strength—" He holds up his fist. "—and courage. And if she is not already in love with you, she will be soon. Go back with her. Finish your time in the army. And do not forget to call and visit us, eh?"
Leo stares at the photograph, at the moment he captured. He can't quit thinking about the woman in the other room and how he wants to frame her on their wall.
"Fine. Cast me out into the street." But he's laughing as he says it.
Dad slaps him around the back of the head. "Maimou!"
"If I'm a monkey, I get it from you."
"So my son is a comedian, eh?" He nods at the open door. "Come on, let us go find your woman. I want to know what else she can cook."
* * *
Time. There's never enough of the stuff.
He's in bed, curled around his woman, both of them fully dressed. So it's summer, so they're sweating—so what? He'll get her naked soon enough.
"What are we going to do?"
She tangles her fingers in his. "I'll go back to Greece. School starts in a week. And I have to be back before that."
"What about me?"
What about him? Jesus. He sounds like a petulant kid. What about meeeee?
"We are impossible. I belong in Greece, and you belong here."
"You see a problem. I see a challenge. C'mon, Ariadne, throw me some string and I'll find a way out of the labyrinth."
"You want string?" She glances back at him. "Okay, here's your string. If you come, I'll be waiting."
"Oh, I'm coming." He hooks his fingers under her dress's slender strings, pulls until his mouth is warm against her ear. "I'm coming with you."
110
Helena
Helena is still broken—that will never change. But the cracks are thinning. Time cannot move backwards, but it can move forward. This is not the mercy those who grieve hope time will give, b
ut it is something.
"Have you spoken to the girl?" Dr Triantafillou asks. Today, she is the silver-green of the olive leaf.
"Drina? Yes. I thought she would hate me—she should hate me—but every day she comes. She is a good girl. I can see why Stavros cared for her."
"You have lost a son, and while she has not lost a mother, her mother cannot be there to mother her. I'm not surprised she has turned to you. You need each other."
Drina's mother is in jail. Detective Lemonis had been watching the encampment for some time, trying to hammer and chip his way in. Soon there will be a trial, but not a long one. The woman confessed. She was almost proud of what she had done for her daughter.
In a quiet place deep inside her, Helena thinks that she would have done the same for a daughter—she who almost killed for her dead son.
* * *
It is a penitent woman who bakes the galaktobouriko. She covers the golden top and walks her gift to the Andreou house.
Margarita's mother is in the yard, supervising her daughter's sweeping.
"I know how to sweep!" Margarita snaps. "I have been sweeping for many years now."
"Yes, and always you do it wrong. Sweep away from the house or the bad luck will come in."
"I am sweeping away from the house!"
"Then you do not understand the meaning of away!"
Margarita grabs her mother's wheelchair, rolls it—and its passenger—into the house, slams the screen door behind her and gets back to the business of sweeping.
"You are still doing it wrong," her mother bellyaches.
"Margarita?"
The woman stops. "Helena."
She came unprepared, without words, hoping the right ones would follow her here. But they haven't, and now she is standing on the wrong side of Margarita's gate, alone.
"Take this and give me the broom," she says, finally. "Your mother is right, you're doing it wrong."
"Oh?"
Inside the house, the older woman cackles. "Even the stupid woman knows you're doing it wrong. What does that make you, eh?"
Margarita and her broom come to the gate. There, the women swap. Helena takes the broom and Margarita takes the tray of custard pie.
Not all apologies contain words.
Sometimes food is enough.
111
Leo
The plane is breathing heavy, and Leo expects any moment now the military police will elbow their way aboard and drag him away.
But they don't. Nice guys—they don't pounce until he's pulling their luggage off the conveyor belt.
"Hey, malakas," his old buddies say. "Do you know what time it is?"
"You better go," Kiki says.
"They look like they mean it," he tells her.
"They do look like they mean it."
"We mean it," the MPs tell him. "Passport?"
He slaps his new passport into Yianni's outstretched hand. "Add it to the collection." Then he gets down to the serious business of saying goodbye to Kiki—again. This was his idea, coming back now, doing his time in green. After that he's a free man.
"As soon as they give me leave, I'll be back."
Tweedledum nudges Tweedledee. "Very funny man, he thinks he's getting leave."
"Leave or no leave—" Kiki scowls at them. But when she looks up at Leo all he sees is her sunshine. "—I'll be waiting."
112
Kiki
It's an empty house, but her heart is full of Leo.
She closes the door, shutting out the sound of her family and all their craziness. Yeah, they're crazy, but they're her lunatics. And for that, she loves them.
It is time to open that one gift, time for absolution.
She's ready.
The lid comes off easy. With one finger, she parts the lavender tissue paper. Nestled inside is a sheet of paper, a photocopy of wedding certificate. Stavros and Drina Boutos.
Nothing she didn't already know, although now she understands why Lemonis told her to keep clear of the encampment.
The paper's not alone. Underneath is a white stick with one pink line blazing in its small window.
113
Kiki
Sometimes the best place for absolution is at the bottom of the garbage, with the other secret things.
114
Drina—the final word
A person can only lose so much before they shatter. Good thing a Roma woman is steel, not glass.
It is a steel woman who staggers into the hospital's emergency room on her father's arm when night is at its thickest. It is a steel woman who understands her love killed her husband, and now her grief has murdered their unborn child.
Thank God she did not tell Helena she was pregnant. The glass woman has lost enough.
The End
Not ready to leave Greece yet? You don’t have to! Stay in Agria with Freedom the Impossible, book 3 in the Women of Greece Series.
Long before she was the judge Greeks love to hate (and Germans love to love) on Greece’s Top Hoplite, Effie Makri was hurling rocks at flashers and falling in love with Nikos Lemonis, the local police detective’s son. Now she’s about to answer the most important question she’ll ever be asked. Yes or no, everything will change …
Turn the page for a sneak preview of Freedom the Impossible.
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Freedom the Impossible Preview
Dora looks at the lie on the paper. It's a big one. The lie, not the paper. The paper is small, but it's stacked on other small, lying pieces of paper.
That man takes her for an idiot.
Dora Makri is not an idiot.
Uneducated, yes, but not stupid. It is Haralambos Kefalas who is the fool if he thinks she is so simple.
"What is the problem?" he says to her now. "I see nothing."
She stabs the paper with her finger. Which triggers a fresh round of "What?"
The man is starting to sound like a scratched Jenny Vanou record: What, what, whhhhaaaat? It is all she can do not to slap his head. If his mother and father were alive, they would beat him for his stupidity.
But maybe, knowing the Kefalas family, they would applaud his swindling. Before they were olives, the family was ouzo, and before that, disorganized crime.
"You are blind or stupid or a crook," she tells him. "Which is it?"
Two palms up. "I don't see the problem."
Haralambos—Harry—Kefalas is a cheating man—in life and business. A man who lies to his wife, sneaks another woman under his desk, will think nothing of pinching drachmas from his workers' pay envelopes.
And that is what has happened. Harry Kefalas, who owns the biggest olive factory in town, steals from the people who help make him rich.
Look at him in his expensive clothes, with that chunk of gold on his little finger.
How did he pay for it, eh?
With stolen wages, that is how.
"You are stealing," she tells him. "And from people who can not afford to be stolen from. You steal from someone rich … okay, that is not so bad."
He leans against the desk, arms folded. His face stays serene. "Yia sou," he says. Goodbye. Although maybe he is saying hello. That is the problem with yia sou. It is ambiguous, unless somebody is coming or going.
When people first meet Harry they think he is a handsome man. He is one of the fortunate ones, modeled after the gods, they say. Fifty-something, but he is tall, fit. His clothes are always expensive, designed by French and Italian poustis, but stitched in third-world countries by hungry children.
They don't see the weasel skulking around in the man-skin. She knew he was no good when her George worked for him. But George was a good man, a loyal man. Kefalas gave him a respectable job and George repaid him with hard work. And what did Kefalas do? He did not throw out that batch
of olives—that is what he did not do.
He pushes away from the desk, opens the office door.
"Oh no, no." She wags a thick finger in his face. "You cannot say yia sou to me! I quit. I will not work for a thief."
He points to the office door. "Go."
"Maybe I will see you in church this Sunday—yes?"
His eye twitches.
"Maybe I will see you in church and I will watch how much you pay for the candles you light, eh?"
Dora storms out, but only because it is noon. Any earlier and she would hide in the factory's shadows. She does not want Effie to know she has lost her job. The girl works too hard, worries too much. Not once has she complained about leaving school to work.
What a brave girl she and George made.
Too bad her mother is a disappointment.
* * *
It's the 1990s and Cyndi Lauper still won't shut up about girls and how they want to have fun.
If she's even singing about that. Apostolia told Dina who told Katerina who told Effie. And Effie knows Apostolia is half English, which isn't American.
And Cyndi Lauper is American.
So how does Apostolia know what Cyndi's singing about?
(For the record, Effie isn't the sharpest rock on the beach.)
Apostolia (she of the Greco-English breeding) laughs. "It's like you're an idiot, Effie." That mean little laugh dies when Effie slams her bumper car into Apostolia's and the blonde girl takes a bite of her own sharp tongue.