Chapter 4 Table Six
By Thursday, I knew the names of the regulars.
This was not an accident. This was a system.
I'd decided on Wednesday evening, lying on my bed at The Blue Door eating crackers and conducting a forensic review of the day's errors, that the fundamental problem was that I was tracking tables by physical location and people were moving.
They sat at different tables. They pushed chairs together.
Sometimes they sat at a completely different table from Monday because someone else had taken Monday's table, which meant my internal map of who-sits-where was unreliable data.
What was reliable: people were consistent. The dakos man always wanted the dakos. The couple who arrived at half ten always wanted the Greek breakfast and tea, not coffee. The German family at table two ordered in order of age, eldest first. This was information I could use.
So I named them.
The dakos man was Petros. He was seventy-four, a retired fisherman who had opinions about olive oil the way some people have opinions about wine — specific, hierarchical, delivered with gravitas.
He'd been coming to Taverna Stavros since 1995, he told me on Thursday morning while I was getting his water, and he had strong feelings about the shift from hand-pressed to cold-pressed that I didn't entirely follow but found genuinely interesting.
He had the rough-shelled warmth of a person who's been outside in weather for fifty years and come to find it mostly fine.
"Petros," I told Lex at the pass-through. "Table six. He wants the dakos."
Lex looked up from whatever he was doing. "I know," he said. "He's been ordering the dakos since 1995."
"Right," I said. "I was just—"
"Telling me what I already know," he said, not unkindly. Just accurately.
"Yes," I said. "That's what I was doing."
He went back to work. I went back to the tables. I thought: I am going to stop telling Lex Stavros things he already knows.
(This proved difficult. He knew a lot of things already.
He knew that Petros's dakos needed to be served with the flat side of the rusk facing up, which apparently prevented a structural issue I'd only just avoided on day three.
He knew that the German family preferred to be greeted in English regardless, because their teenage daughter was practising and it mattered to her.
He knew, I was beginning to realise, most of the things that would take me another three weeks to learn from observation.
He had simply already observed them. He had been observing this taverna, and these tables, and these regulars, for years, and the knowledge lived in him the way my supply chain frameworks lived in me — background, automatic, not something you had to think about because you'd already thought it.)
* * *
The bag business concluded on Thursday afternoon.
Konstantinos Stavros — not the taverna Stavros, the other Stavros, with the icons and the preserved lemons — turned out to live in a pale yellow house two streets back from the harbour with a bougainvillea that had staged what could only be described as a hostile takeover of the front wall.
He was sitting outside with his wife when Derek delivered me, which suggested this was either a coincidence or, more likely on Kaliroi, a scheduled event.
Kyria Panagiota, it transpired, was the kind of woman who required warmth to be expressed in edible form.
She sent me home with two jars of preserved lemons, a small container of something that turned out to be pasteli (sesame honey bars, extraordinary), and the warm certainty that I was now, in some capacity, known to the island.
Konstantinos pressed my hand at the gate and said, in measured English, "The island is good for people who come without a plan."
"I have a plan," I said. "I'm working at the taverna."
He smiled. The smile said: yes, but that's not what I meant.
I carried the lemons back to The Blue Door and thought about what he had meant.
* * *
The other thing that happened on Thursday was Elena.
I'd been watching her all week — trying to, anyway, because she moved quickly and was often behind me before I'd registered her in front of me — and on Thursday morning she was in the kitchen when I arrived, doing something at the back counter, and she looked at me and then made coffee.
Not normal coffee. Better coffee. The kind that had arrived at my table that first noon and done the unknotting thing in my chest.
She put it on the counter and said, in the tone of a woman confirming a fact: "You came back."
"It's my third day," I said.
"Yes," she said.
I took the coffee. I didn't question it.
Something told me questioning the coffee would be wrong — not because Elena would be offended, but because the coffee was clearly intentional and questioning it would suggest I didn't understand what was being communicated, which I didn't fully, but I sensed it was better to accept it and think about it later than to ask and break whatever tacit thing was happening.
"Thank you," I said.
She looked at me for a moment. Then she nodded, once, with the satisfaction of a woman who has confirmed something she already suspected, and she went back to work.
From the pass-through, without turning around: "Table two wants the breakfast and tea."
He'd heard us. Or he just knew. Both seemed equally likely.
* * *
The incident with the awning happened Friday afternoon.
The taverna had a retractable canvas awning over the outdoor section that operated on a spring mechanism and a wish.
At some point in the last year, the spring had become sticky: it would extend but not latch, which meant the clip at the end had to be pushed into a bracket to hold it in place.
This bracket was, I discovered, at approximately seven feet, which was approximately eleven inches above my comfortable reach.
I got the awning down. I was holding the edge with one hand and straining for the bracket with the other and making no meaningful progress, and I had committed too much to this operation to ask for help, because it would feel like admitting that I should have asked five minutes ago when I first noticed the height issue.
Then, from behind me, a hand appeared and held the awning steady without comment.
I didn't look back. I pushed the clip into the bracket. It caught. I let go.
"Thank you," I said, turning around.
Lex stepped back. "The clip sticks," he said.
"Yes," I said. "I noticed."
He went back inside.
I stood there for a moment, slightly breathless from the reaching, looking at the successfully-latched awning. Petros at table six was watching me over his dakos with the mild approval of a man who has seen people attempt and succeed at the awning before.
"Good," Petros said.
"Thank you," I told him.
* * *
I told Derek about it at dinner. Not because it was significant — it wasn't, obviously, a man helped me with an awning, this is not noteworthy, people hold awnings for each other every day across the whole of the Mediterranean and I was not going to write a voice note to Priya about it — but because I'd been noting things down in my head all week in the way I used to note things in the sustainability reports, building a picture, and I was trying to understand what I was building a picture of.
I had, it was becoming clear, a particular professional habit that was resurfacing.
At Greenpath I'd always been the person who walked into a new client and spent the first week just watching before I said anything with any confidence — mapping the flows, identifying the decision nodes, learning who actually held the information and who just had the title.
The analysis ran before I was aware it was running.
I didn't decide to do it. It was simply what I did.
It was what I was doing now. On Kaliroi. At a taverna. About a man who held awnings and made laminated cards.
I put this observation to one side and brought it to the dinner table as a practical question instead.
"He held the awning," I said.
"Yes," Derek said.
"He didn't say anything. Just held it."
"That's Lex," Derek said. He was very good at saying people's names in a tone that implied the name explained everything, which it didn't, but gradually it was starting to. "He helps. He just doesn't narrate the help."
"Most people narrate the help," I said.
"Most people need to be thanked for the help," Derek said. "Lex doesn't particularly need to be thanked. He just does it and moves on."
I thought about this. I thought about the three corrections this week, all done quietly, without anyone else hearing.
The awning. The card for the glass recycling procedures, which I'd found on the apron rack that morning in a small pocket — laminated, precise, in English — that I hadn't asked for and that Lex had apparently made sometime before I'd realised I needed it.
"He made me a laminated card," I said.
Derek smiled. "Did he."
"For the recycling information. Because I'd got it wrong and he knew tourists would ask again." I paused. "I didn't ask for the card."
"No," Derek agreed.
I took a bite of my dinner and didn't say anything else about it. But I was thinking about the card.
Two weeks, I told myself. I was getting better at the numbers. Petros knew my name. Elena had given me the good coffee.
This was progress.