The Reluctant Baker (The Greek Village Collection Book 10) (6 page)

Loukas makes no move to leave the eatery. Instead, his gaze follows the foreign girl as she turns the corner by the bakery and disappears out of sight, and then he leans against the counter to watch Mitsos turning the split chickens, the fat dripping and igniting the hot coals, hissing and sizzling. With only a coffee since he got up this morning and no breakfast, his stomach responds with a gurgle. His dough-clean fingers rub across his belly and catch on the strings of his long white wrap-around apron.

‘You want anything?’ Mitsos asks, clanging the tongs against the grill to indicate the sausages. Loukas looks longingly, but the old lady will have cooked and will be expecting him back, and he shakes his head. It is beetroot again today.

‘Better not.’ He tries to hide the disappointment in his voice.

Mitsos casts him an understanding glance, slides the top napkin from a pile on the counter, and with deftly wielded tongs and economy of movement, he takes a sausage from the grill and delivers it to the napkin. He nods at it and looks at Loukas without a word before continuing at the grill.

‘So, late again, Loukas? Are you not getting enough sleep?’ Stella remarks. Loukas takes a second napkin to mop the juices running down his chin. Stella shifts her hip away from the counter. She heaps a spoonful of coffee and two of sugar into a metal beaker and adds a small amount of water. The stationary electric drinks mixer’s metal blade knocks against the beaker’s side as she turns it, making talk impossible.

Having finished his sausage, and with no haste, Loukas takes a step through the doorway and calls a hello to the farmers, who greet him back. A quip or two passes as he turns a wooden chair and pulls it to the adjoining doorway to face Stella.

Stella pours the froth of coffee and sugar she has made over a glass of ice and then tops it up with cold water and hands it to Loukas. This event is the daily mark for the end of his working day.

‘So what’s new?’ Stella asks the time-worn Greek phrase as she adds evaporated milk to her own cold coffee, the white curling round the ice as it sinks. Loukas shrugs.

‘Nothing. You? I’m surprised you are here. You have the hotel’s official opening tonight, eh? I heard the Mayor of Saros is coming and a few more besides?’

Stella throws her head backward, her face glowing in delight. Mitsos stands taller and his chest puffs out. Loukas considers him a lucky man in many ways. ‘Yes, the mayor, for all he is worth, but also the whole village, I am thinking.’ Stella’s face shines at the thought before a small frown creases her brow. ‘Everything is pretty much in control but there are still one or two things I need to do,’ she adds as her eyes scan left and right, unfocused, and she gnaws the inside of her cheek.

Loukas is glad for her. She went through hell with her first husband. Some of the memories of that time are dim, but others are sharp. He has never mentioned it, but witnessing her pain helped him when Natasha died. It showed him that colder, uglier things can happen. At least his wife left this world unblemished. He can hold his head up in pride at the mention of her name. Poor Stella has suffered so much more in that direction. At the time, it was hard to imagine how her life could reassemble.

Then, through his own tear-filled eyes, he watched Stella transform. All it took was meeting Mitsos, and their love did the rest. They ignited each other, brought out the best in each other. That is what he hoped for when he married Natasha.

How wrong he had been. There was no electricity, no igniting, not even smouldering. Not for him anyway. If only he had recognised what it was that he felt back then, right at the beginning. But he mixed up one feeling for another. There was so much pressure. His degree was going well but there was talk of no jobs by the time he graduated. What he read in the papers about an economic collapse scared him. Then Natasha appeared, offering him whispers from the past. Her attraction, in part, was that she was from his village, only in Athens to study. She represented a link to a time when things felt more sure, to a time when everyone in the village was a relation. When the mamas and
yiayias
of the village ruffled his hair and made him sit and eat their sweet puddings. When the streets were his playground, goats and dogs his friends, and there was less pressure. A lot less pressure.

Even their first kiss was for comfort. It is so easy to see it now. But back then? Nothing was easy to see back then.

That first kiss, the whole evening, it was odd from the moment he returned from his studies that day.

‘Sit down, Loukas. We need to talk,’ his baba greeted him. Loukas could tell by the look on his face that it was serious. He sat, sweeping his long hair out of his eyes. His mama’s hand stroked from one of his shoulders to the other as she passed to take her own chair, lines of worry corrugating her forehead. The three of them faced each other around the table. The highly polished mahogany table that his great-grandparents had bought his grandparents as their wedding present. The matching chairs his
yiayia’s
dowry. Softly drumming fingers on the waxy surface provided a release for his nerves.

‘You hear what they are saying?’ his baba asked. ‘But it is not only the change in the economy. The old are dying and the young do not come to us to buy their spices. They go to the supermarkets.’ His baba sounded strangely old as he spoke, and that alone felt scary. ‘The supermarkets buy pre-packaged rubbish in bulk. Cheap. They do not care about the quality.’ His baba did not meet his eye. Loukas had always thought his baba’s spice-grinding business old fashioned, the machines cranking and groaning, the air filling with dust, the smells filtering out onto the street. It was obviously not the modern way, and he had been saying so since he was ten, since the first mention of the idea when they moved from the village, but Baba could only see him as a boy. His ideas and opinions were not of the adult world and therefore were to be humoured but not heeded.

That evening of the kiss, he could hear the tension in his baba’s voice as he spoke Loukas’ own words back to him, and he could see the strain on his mama’s face. He stopped drumming and his knuckles turned white as he clenched his fists. His gaze fixed on the picture of the Virgin Mary over the candle in the corner of the room. The house they called home slowly took on an appearance that told him it was no longer a place for him to feel safe. He could feel it, sense it. The whitewashed walls suddenly foreign, the shutters alien. The tiled floor would be someone else’s home long after they were dead. Permanence dissolved before his eyes.

‘We picked the wrong trade when we moved from the village.’ His baba spoke slowly. Loukas bit his tongue in case he was tempted to speak out. ‘The raw goods are becoming more expensive each year and the demand less. I can grind the spices all day and all night, but that will not make us any more sales.’

‘Right.’ Loukas’ sharp, emphatic response came because he didn’t want to hear any more, nor did he want the temptation of saying anything. He sat there mute, wondering how this was going to affect the fun he was having with his friends. ‘Do I have to stop University?’ was all he could ask.

He was so much younger then, so self-absorbed.

‘No!’ his mama was quick to say, her hand reaching across to overlay his.

A chestnut seller on the street called out his wares as he passed the window.

‘
Kastana! Kastana zesta
!’ Growling on the first
a
and rising towards the end, a wail of a sound that almost lost definition. They waited for his calls to pass, his parents staring at him, Loukas staring at his mama’s hand over his until, with a pat, she slowly slid it back to her own lap.

‘So what? What are you saying?’ he asked.

His baba looked to his mama and then splayed his own fingers on the smooth, warm surface with a faint aroma of spice. He always smelt of spices; they were ground into his palms, etched into the creases, forever present under his fingernails no matter how much he scrubbed.

‘Son, I am sorry, but there may not be a business for you to come to after you finish with your studies.’

The news felt like a strange reprieve. It wasn’t so serious. He had never dreamed he would slave alongside his baba. Looking at the cracked and worn skin of his baba’s broad thumbs, he noticed the ridges of his nails lay in parallel to the grain of the wood, and around his capable and providing hands, there was a slight smudging of the table’s daily wax, a smear on its sheen. A bubble of panic formed just below his rib cage, a liquid knot that shook his foundations. It was then that he realised, despite his initial arrogance to the contrary, he had, at some level, been relying on the business as his security anchor, his fall-back. Now, his baba was saying it was going—or even gone!

They sat in silence for what seemed like a long time, listening as the chestnut seller reached the end of the street and turned out of earshot. As Loukas stared, the walls showed their dirt, the shutters clearly in need of repair, the grand table suddenly out of place.

‘Well, I just wanted to let you know,’ his baba said when at last he stood, his wife by his side, and the two of them retreated downstairs, to the airless, boarded-up, windowless cellar where they ground the spices using the time-worn machine. His mama grabbed her stiff, dust-impregnated apron from the kitchen chair and put it on as she walked. She bagged what his baba ground, using her kitchen scales and a spoon. The edges of her nostrils were always tinted brown.

Loukas sat at the table for a long time. Until that point, thoughts of what he would do when he left university had not really entered his mind. He just presumed there would be a natural progression somehow, but a progression to what, he had never really considered.

He had arranged to meet up with Natasha to go over some coursework later that same evening. But his heart was heavy and the kiss was designed to take him far from his worries, to help him escape. In fact, it left him cold. Her keen reciprocation, however, boosted his ego and it was from this inauspicious start that their relationship was born. The whole relationship was unfair on Natasha and ultimately, it isn’t fair on him. But perhaps he deserves that.

‘Shall we sit outside?’ Stella asks, bringing him back to the present. Loukas returns his chair to the eatery before following her.

‘So,’ Stella starts as if introducing a fresh topic as they sit. ‘What’s with the late deliveries? Are you not sleeping?’ She wears a small frown, her eyebrows arching to the middle, her concern always genuine. His sigh is heavy and his chest raises and then falls concave; his spine curves into the wooden chair. It is impossible to explain everything.

‘You know what you need? A really good night out with your friends, so you laugh and dance and drink and then you will fall exhausted into bed.’ Stella stretches out her legs and pulls her sleeveless floral dress smooth over her stomach, which is remarkably flat for a village woman of her age. But then, she never did have children. Mitsos comes out to join them.

‘Remind me to order more charcoal,’ he says as he puts down his coffee and pulls up a chair.

The sun through the leaves of the tree dapples his face. He moves his chair nearer to Stella and her hand slips over to his knee.

‘You know that is impossible,’ Loukas says.

‘What is?’ Mitsos asks.

‘I suggested to Loukas that he have a night on the town to cure his sleeplessness,’ Stella replies.

‘How can he when he has to be up before the dawn?’ Mitsos sucks at his iced coffee through a straw.

‘I know, but maybe once in a while. He needs to live a little,’ Stella smiles.

‘I need to live a lot.’ The words come from Loukas with such speed and force both Mitsos and Stella turn to him in unison, both their mouths a little open.

‘Is that it then, Loukas? You feeling trapped?’ Stella’s words are soft and quiet.

‘I didn’t say that,’ Loukas answers, but he knows his expression is giving too much away.

‘It hardly needs saying, Stella. A young man, in his prime, going to bed before it is dark, getting up before it is light to make an income for his in-laws of a wife that is…’ Mitsos bites the inside of his bottom lip. The remaining words hang in the air.

‘For a wife that is dead,’ Loukas says. It doesn’t hurt. Too much. It’s just the guilt.

Stella gives a harsh sideways glance to Mitsos, who shrugs as if to say, ‘What?’

‘It’s alright, Stella. She is dead. It’s the truth, and so is all the rest of what Mitsos just said. But what to do?’ Another sigh expresses his powerlessness.

‘If life were easy, we would not notice we were alive,’ Mitsos says.

‘Speak for yourself,’ Stella says. ‘I would gladly take "easy" if I had a choice.’

Mitsos puts his glass down quickly as he rocks with laughter, his chair creaking with the movement. ‘You? Take the easy way?’ He turns to Loukas. ‘This is the woman who takes on the eatery single-handed after kicking her first husband into touch. Marries a cripple.’ With a jerk of his shoulder, he makes his armless sleeve swing. His voice then becomes serious, the laughter lost. ‘And just as her life finds an even keel, she takes on the hotel that is only cheap because it does not have all its legal paperwork!’

Loukas looks from Mitsos to Stella. He has not seen them disagree before. The muscles in Mitsos’ cheeks twitch. He seems either angry or scared; Loukas is not sure which.