Honestly, We Meant Well Read online

He crouches down and drags a stick through the ants, scattering them in a frenzied, patternless mess. Quickly, they realign themselves and set about passing something—a bit of a leaf, it looks like—down their ranks. Still crouching, Dean watches them for a moment, admiring their industry and their blind single-mindedness. Then he looks back up toward the mountain. He thinks of the Pythia, the world’s most celebrated two-bit psychic, doling out fortunes to men of circumstance. Closing his eyes, he tries to see her: her purple veil, her frenzied eyes, her wild hair.

  “Tell me what I should do,” he whispers, and only hears the wind.

  Eleni

  July 19 and 20

  Aegina

  She rinses the old coffee from the briki, clearing away smears of brown from the small copper pot. Then she refills it with cold water and a heaping spoonful of grounds before setting it over the stove’s blue flame. Slowly stirring the grounds, she watches as they dissolve, melding together to turn the liquid to a thick syrup. She takes her coffee like her father took his: thick, black, and silty, with the last few swallows requiring a healthy bit of chewing. Jet fuel is what Christos used to call it. Ambrosia for the new millennium. A thick foam starts to form along the water’s surface, and she thinks back to how she used to watch him drink his coffee, back when she was a little girl. She would sit at the far end of the table here, in the kitchen, and stare as he lifted his demitasse to his mouth, taking monklike sips while he slowly leafed through the paper. It would often take him an hour to finish a single serving—an hour during which the coffee surely grew cold, congealing to a bitter gel. Yet Christos never seemed to mind; he would still bring the tiny cup to his lips and blow on it with the same careful cadence that he used when the drink was piping hot. Lift, blow, sip; lift, blow, sip. Watching him was like staring at a metronome that was set to a single, lulling speed. This, though, was her father; he had a keen ability to ritualize the most mundane tasks. Grocery shopping, sweeping the Alectrona’s floors, even filling the Volkswagen with a fresh tank of gas—the prosaicism of life became a sort of ecclesiastical procession, one that Christos performed with a deliberate exactitude.

  She swallows her coffee in a single swig: she doesn’t have her father’s patience—she never has. She tried to develop it, once. She went to yoga and read books on mindfulness. But then, in the middle of a particularly insufferable ride on the metro, that illusion faded. Wedged between two sweaty armpits, she realized—with a sort of explosive relief—that she needed her agitation. Her body craved it with the same insatiability that it craved water, or nicotine, or air. She didn’t want to breathe through her impatience as the sweltering train idled just outside the Agios Dimitrios station; she didn’t want to watch her thoughts as the men around her pinched her ass. When the doors opened at the next stop—Dafni—she shoved her way off the train and immediately lit a cigarette.

  So, no, there won’t be patience for Eleni. Instead, there will be movement and chaos—the constant clamor upon which she’s built her life. Brewing and drinking her second cup of coffee, she thinks of Christos. She misses him, and along with that she feels a pang of guilt. She imagines her father looking down at her and shaking his head. The poor son of a bitch disappointed, even in death.

  * * *

  “Okay,” Stavros says. “Where do we start?” He’s holding a four-pronged valve. Sweat glistens across his forehead.

  “Don’t do anything before I tell you to.”

  Eleni picks up the piece of paper she’s set on the bathroom sink, a torn-out page from one of her old notebooks where she’s written down some instructions for herself. Early yesterday morning she determined, after a series of blind and haphazard tests, that the problem with the showers wasn’t a leaky pipe at all (she had assumed, wrongly, that all plumbing problems were caused by leaky pipes), but rather three faulty pressure-balancing valves. For the next two hours, while the rest of the Alectrona slept, she sorted through as many do-it-yourself repair guides as she could find on Google, cross-referencing their steps and looking up the jargon she didn’t know. Then she called Stavros. She told him to be at the inn at ten o’clock the next morning and to swing by the hardware store in town on the way.

  “Remember what I told you,” he says now.

  “Remind me.” She’s had too much coffee this morning. Her focus keeps jumping, landing one step ahead of where she wants it to be.

  “Plumbing makes me nervous.”

  “It’s not rocket science, Stavros.”

  “No—it’s worse.” He’s got a cigarette tucked behind his left ear, which he reaches up to adjust. “All that water.”

  “Get a grip, you live on an island. I want to have these fixed before we close with Lugn.” She looks through the square hole that she cut away in the shower’s tile as she waited for him to arrive, a window that reveals a maze of pipes and, beyond them, a stained concrete wall. Turning back to the page, she says, “It looks pretty easy. There are only fifteen steps—”

  “Fifteen steps.”

  “—the first of which is turning off the water.” She glances up at him. “You turned off the water, right?”

  “Yes, I turned off the water.”

  “Did you turn the right main, though? There are two of them in the maintenance—”

  “I turned the one you told me to turn.”

  She arches an eyebrow, and Stavros arches one back.

  “Here,” she says, nodding to a toolbox next to the toilet. “Hand me that wrench.”

  He picks up the tool with his free hand but doesn’t give it to her.

  “Maybe I should do it,” he says.

  “Why?”

  “Because it might be tight, and I’m stronger.”

  His shirt hangs from his shoulders. Beneath its open collar, his collarbones jut at sharp, fragile angles.

  Eleni says, “I actually don’t think that’s true.”

  “You said the head and arm first?”

  She sighs. “Yes—that’s right.”

  He sets the valve in the sink and steps into the tub. Reaching up, he removes the showerhead and the pipe attaching it to its internal mechanisms. At first, things go smoothly; Stavros’s hands are surprisingly steady, and he maneuvers the wrench with a confidence that causes Eleni to think that his distaste for plumbing might have been some grand charade. This confidence, however, is short-lived. Once he reaches into the wall to unscrew the valve from the water supply pipes, he’s met with resistance—the wrench stops working, and he turns to look at Eleni.

  “Let me take over,” she says. “Or else give it a little more muscle, if you’re able.”

  She’s goading him, which is a mistake. It makes him more determined, less cautious; his eyebrows pulled together, he readjusts his stance and bears down.

  The water begins as a trickle—a tiny rivulet that Eleni figures is buildup, a bit of excess moisture that’s been caught in the dry pipes. With each quarter turn of the wrench, though, it grows; soon, water is spraying across Stavros’s forearms. She tries to stop him—she says, “Uh, I don’t think this is right”—but he’s too single-minded in his efforts. With a final clank, the old valve falls to the floor, and a geyser erupts. Stavros stumbles back and falls to his ass in the tub. A pool gathers at his ankles.

  “You turned off the wrong main!” she shouts.

  “I turned the one you told me to turn!”

  Water shoots at him and drenches his shirt. His hair—a wet mess of brown, black, and gray—hangs in front of his eyes.

  “I’m drowning,” he says. “My God, I think I’m drowning.”

  She helps him up and throws a towel at him.

  “Stay here and try to keep the place from flooding. I’ll go shut off the main.”

  Downstairs, she flips on the overhead lamp in the utility closet and cranks a rusted valve. There’s a groan, the sound of pipes clanking and emptying, and then—finally—silence. She holds her breath for a moment and closes her eyes, leaning back against the concrete wall. It’s dark in th
e closet, and cool. She wonders how long she can stay here, hiding from the mess upstairs, the flooded bathroom and Stavros’s drenched, angry face. She wonders how long it takes for a problem to dry up on its own.

  * * *

  The next morning, she sits at the breakfast table in the kitchen, smearing Nutella on toast and drinking apricot juice. An hour earlier, Oskar emailed her a bundle of documents that Lugn Escape’s attorneys had prepared for the deal’s closing, which is scheduled to take place in Athens in a week. She understands the broad strokes of them—this is amortization; that is an encumbrance. When it comes to the details, though, she’s lost, and that’s unfortunate; she can’t afford a lawyer, and she highly doubts Stavros understands the finer points of real estate finance. Still, she does her best to play ball—she’s never been a pushover, and she doesn’t want Lugn’s lawyers to take her for a patsy. Opening a new email, she begins bullet-pointing the items she plans to push back on—namely, a provision that says she’ll cover the cost of any needed repairs. She thinks, If they’ve got the cash to turn her bedroom into a sauna, then they’ve got the cash to patch the hole she made in the shower.

  She fires off the points to Oskar, then angles her chair so she can look out the kitchen’s single window and onto the back patio. It’s ten thirty, but already the morning has lost its amber glow; everything, from the tile to the bark of the pines, is baked in hot white. She takes a bite of toast, and the Nutella instantly coats the roof of her mouth. It’s the first time she’s had it in years—when she got to school, she wrote it off as something kids eat—and she forgot how delicious, how perfect it is. When she gets back to Athens, she decides, she’ll have it every morning—that’s how she’ll celebrate. She’ll toss away the muesli, the bran flakes, and all the other healthy shit that tastes like soggy cardboard, and just eat spoonful after spoonful of Nutella instead.

  There’s a knock on the door and she says, “It’s open.” It will be Stavros, she suspects, apologizing for being thirty minutes late (again).

  Instead, she looks up to see Sue Ellen Wright, standing with her hands in her pockets.

  Eleni brushes crumbs from her lap and rises from her seat.

  “Oh,” she says. “Hello.”

  “Kaliméra,” Sue Ellen looks at the contracts strewn across the desk. “You’re busy?”

  “No, it’s no problem. You need some fresh towels again?”

  This is not the first instance of Sue Ellen coming to linger, and often this is the excuse that she uses: her husband has stolen both of their towels, and now she needs another. Each time, Eleni complies; she goes to the linen closet in the hallway that connects the kitchen to the dining room and gives her a fresh towel, along with a small washcloth. Now, she prepares to do the same thing, even though she suspects Sue Ellen’s request is a lie: five days ago, when the family was in Delphi, Eleni went to clean the couple’s room and found a stack of towels in the corner, dry and entirely unused. She doesn’t pretend to understand the wants and wills of her guests—she just tells herself this is the last time she’ll ever have to worry about them again.

  But now, Sue Ellen stops her.

  She says, “Oh, no, no. We’re actually fine on towels. I … my husband’s still sleeping, and my son’s off doing God knows what. I just thought that I’d…” She takes a step deeper into the room and looks around. “You switched out the doors,” she says.

  “Pardon?”

  “The doors—” She nods to the one behind Eleni, which leads out to the back patio. “They’re glass now. Same with the ones in the dining room.”

  She adds, “They look lovely, honestly.”

  Honestly—they say this often, Eleni’s noticed. All Americans do. Honestly, I don’t mind. Honestly, it doesn’t matter. Honestly, the food was delicious. She wonders if it’s just some weird lingual tick, like how her father called all of his friends maláka, or if there’s something more profound lurking behind it. She wonders if without the addition of honestly, the sentence being said would be rendered a lie; if English would suddenly become a language of half-truths.

  “Oh,” Eleni says. “Ha, yes, I guess I did. Thank you.”

  “And this—” Sue Ellen runs a hand along the table where Eleni’s been working. “This is new, too.”

  “I got it two years ago in Pandrossou.”

  This, Eleni notes, is another thing that Sue Ellen has been doing: tracing her steps through the inn, identifying what’s new and what isn’t. She’s hardly alone in this; the Alectrona’s few repeat guests all seem to make a game of pointing out what has changed. Once, she got so annoyed with a Swiss man fetishizing a new lampshade that she took it off and replaced it with the old one in the middle of the night. The next morning, when he asked her where it had gone, she told him nothing had changed and that he must have been imagining things.

  Now, Sue Ellen glances down at the contracts. “I hope I’m not interrupting your work,” she says.

  “You’re not. I was just wrapping up.” A spot of Nutella stains the end of Eleni’s finger, and she discreetly licks it away. “Actually, you don’t happen to know anything about real estate law, do you?” She laughs, though it’s only a half-joke. “The only help I’ve got is Stavros, and he can hardly tie his own shoes.”

  Sue Ellen smiles. “No lawyers in this family, I’m afraid. Why do you ask?”

  Eleni pulls her hair back and ties it off. “I’ve got an offer from a company that wants to buy the Alectrona. Lugn Escapes, it’s called.”

  “I don’t think I can say Lugn.”

  “You’ve heard of them? They’re Swedish.”

  “I haven’t.” Something flickers across Sue Ellen’s face—a mix of clouded emotions that Eleni can’t read. “I didn’t realize you were selling the place.”

  “We’re actually set to close in a week and a half, two days before you leave. Don’t worry, though—they’ve promised they won’t kick you out.”

  Eleni laughs, but it comes out guttural and harsh. Sue Ellen doesn’t seem to hear her. Instead, she’s looking at the kitchen counter, drawing circles around a small, euro-size stain that’s been there since before Eleni was born. For a moment, Eleni says nothing. She watches as Sue Ellen moves on from the stain to the stovetop to the old door swinging open behind her. She remembers the Swiss man, and she feels a sudden surge of sadness. She thinks, Our ghosts don’t haunt us as phantoms, but as lampshades and doors. All the bits of life we refuse to forget.

  Stepping forward, she sets her fingers on Sue Ellen’s forearm.

  She says, “Look, I know I just ate breakfast, but would you be interested in grabbing some lunch?”

  * * *

  There’s a place she used to go with her mother, back when she was a little girl. A bakery in Perdika, on the southwest side of the island. They would drive there on Saturdays, when her father was busy paying the Alectrona’s bills, and when Agatha, with her witchy maternal intuition, sensed that Eleni needed to get out of the house. It didn’t have a proper name—it was called, simply, Perdika Bakery—and they probably never would have frequented it had Agatha’s cousin Maria not owned the dress shop next door. Typically, they arrived in the late morning, once Maria had finally gotten around to opening her store—a small, overcrowded operation that specialized in baptism gowns. For a few minutes the women would chat, the conversation darting between topics that, to Eleni, seemed foreign, and adult, and exciting: so-and-so’s sister leaving her husband for a man she met in Glyfada; the new Proton supermarket near the harbor, which charged too much for produce and bread. As they spoke, she would hang back listening near the front door, shifting her weight in her sandals and running her fingers along the gowns’ stiff lace. There was a picture of her wearing one of these in her father’s office, a glossy portrait of her dressed like an infant bride, her soft head covered with a white bonnet. It terrified Eleni whenever she saw it. Even though, at eight, she was hardly tall enough to see over the Alectrona’s bar, she didn’t like to imagine there was a ti
me when she was so breakable.

  Before long, her mother would come to her and rest her hand gently on top of her head.

  “Let’s go,” she’d say, “before you stain one of these things and Maria makes me pay a fortune to have it cleaned.”

  They would go next door, then, and on most occasions, Maria would join them; the shop rarely had visitors—there were only so many baptisms happening on the island at any one time, and besides, the year before a larger store had opened closer to the port, a two-level place that sold not only tiny dresses, but larger ones, too, along with other apparel, like T-shirts, tie-dyed wraps, and beach towels. At the bakery, Agatha would commandeer one of the two small tables outside, and as she and Maria got settled, she would hand Eleni a thousand drachmas—enough to buy a small bottle of orange juice and a bougatsa. They were, by Eleni’s estimation, the best pastries on the island: the phyllo dough crisp and flaky; the semolina custard warm and oozing from its edges. She always ate them slowly, trying to distinguish the individual flavors as they marched across her tongue.

  Now the bakery is gone. So is Maria’s store: a decade ago, she sold it to a company that rents motor scooters before moving to Tripoli with her girlfriend. There had been a going-away party for her, Eleni remembers, but she hadn’t been able to attend. Christos said she had too much homework. The end of the school term was approaching, and her grades had started to slip.

  “Huh,” Eleni says, “I guess it closed.”

  “What about Giovita?” Sue Ellen asks, in Greek. “Is it still open?”

  “You know Giovita?”

  “That’s the place next to Saint Sosti, right?”

  “Right, the one with the blue-and-white tablecloths. Great French fries. It’s been there forever.”

  “Well, good thing I was here forever ago.”

  They find a free table and, flagging down a waiter, Eleni orders for both of them. A bottle of moscofilero to drink. To eat, Cretan salad, fried calamari, and a grilled mullet, which arrives to the table whole, the two tips of its tail crispy and charred. Picking up a knife, Sue Ellen begins to remove the fish’s meat from its bones, peeling the flesh away to reveal an opaque and milky spine.