“Stavros’s girl,” she said. Not Katerina. Stavros’s girl, which is who I am here, who I’ll be here until I’m the old woman taking some other girl’s face in my hands. “Look at this. Look what you made.” She turned to the koliva and her eyes went wet, but good wet, grateful wet. “He’d be so proud, your baba. You know that? Standing there in his apron. Look at her, he’d say. Look what she made.”
“He taught me,” I said. My throat did a thing. I made it stop.
“He taught everybody.” She patted my cheek, hard, a slap that was love. “Eat something. You’re too thin. Despina—” she called across the room without letting go of me, “—is she eating? Make her eat.”
“She never eats,” Despina called back, not looking up from the spanakopita she was cutting into diamonds. “She feeds the whole parish and stands in the corner with a coffee. Like her father.”
And that was the whole of it, said by a woman cutting pie, said like nothing.
Despina had known me since I was small enough to ride on my father’s shoulders into this exact basement. She’d known him before me—they’d come over the same year, from villages a valley apart, and there was something between them that I’d never asked about and never would, a fondness so old it had gone smooth as a worn step. After he died she was the one who’d shown up at the shop with food I didn’t eat and an offer to help I didn’t take, every week, for a year, and I’d held her hand warmly across the counter and pushed her away exactly the way I pushed everyone, and she let me, bless her—she let me.
We worked beside each other now without talking much, the easy choreography of two people who’ve done a hundred of these. She cut, I plated. She knew where I kept the foil and I knew she’d want the small forks not the big ones. The room filled. The priest came down in his black and gold and said the thing over the koliva, the old words, may his memory be eternal, and we all said it back,aionia i mnimi, and the men crossed themselves and the women wept the comfortable practiced weeping of people who do this work, who keep doing it, who feed the living and remember the dead and have learned that the two are the same job.
And then everyone ate, because that’s the point. You don’t feed grief by starving. I went up and down the tables with the trays. I pressed koulourakia on the old men who pretended they couldn’t and then took three. I loaded a plate for the tailor’s grandson, a boy of maybe nine who’d never see his grandfather make a suit and didn’t yet know to be sad about it, and I gave him an extra piece of baklava and told him it was a secret. He beamed at me like I’d handed him the moon. A woman I half-knew tried to give me money, pressed it folded into my palm, and I folded it right back into hers and closed her fingers over it.
“For the church,” I said. “Not for me. I don’t take money in here.”
“You made all of it—”
“I made all of it because I wanted to. Put it in the box by the door, light a candle, we’re square.” And she did, because you can’t out-stubborn me on my own turf, nobody can.
It went like that for two hours. Stavros’s girl, look what she made. Your father would be proud. Eat something, you’re too thin, who’s looking after you down there all alone? And I smiled and deflected and pressed food into hands and took none in return, and I felt him everywhere—in the words, in the wheat, in the smell of the incense coming down through the floor, in thesmooth worn fondness of the woman cutting pie beside me. He was so close in that basement I could have turned around and handed him the foil. And he was so gone that the closeness was its own ache.
By half past noon the crowd thinned. The widow was driven home. The men went out to smoke and stayed out, the way they do. The tables emptied of people and we started the long unglamorous part, the wrapping and stacking and scraping, and Despina watched me start to fold the foil over the leftover tray and reached over and took it out of my hands.
“No,” she said.
“I’m just—”
“You’ve been on your feet since three this morning, don’t think I don’t know.” She set the tray down. “There’s a pot of coffee in the kitchen that nobody made for the parish. I made it for us. Two cups. Sit down, Katerina, before you fall down, and don’t tell me you’re fine.”
“I’m fine.”
“I said don’t tell me.” She steered me by the shoulder toward the little kitchen and the two chairs and the pot.
“Five minutes,” I said.
“We’ll see,” she said, and poured.
The coffee was strong enough to stand a spoon in, and Despina had put a little plate of my own koulourakia between us. I wrapped both hands around the cup and felt the warmth go into my fingers and didn’t say anything for a minute, and she let me not say anything, which is a skill, which most people don’t have.
“So,” she said, finally. “The shop. Tell me. And the true version, not the version for the widow.”
“It’s fine.”
“Katerina.”
“It’s the same as it always is. Slow. The street’s emptier than it was.” I turned the cup. “Half the block’s shuttered. They sold out, most of them. There’s a company buying everything up.”
“I heard. The dry cleaner’s gone. The Manolises.” She shook her head. “Forty years.”
“Yeah.”
She watched me over her cup. She’s good at the watching, Despina, better than me, and I’m the one who’s supposed to read a room. “And they’ve come to you,” she said. Not a question. “To buy you out.”
I should have lied. I’m a good liar; I’ve had a year of practice telling everyone I’m fine while the arithmetic eats me. But it was warm in that kitchen and my feet hurt and there was nobody to perform for except the one woman who’d known my father, so it came out before I’d decided to let it.
“A man came by last night,” I said. “Asking. Same as the others. I told him no.”
