Chapter 12 Thessaloniki #2
"You've modelled the right thing for a restaurant that doesn't have the feast. For us—" He turned the laptop back. "Here. And here. This is where the gap actually is."
He pointed to two things I hadn't modelled. He was right. He was almost infuriatingly right — not in a gloating way, just in the way of someone for whom accuracy is a natural state rather than a performance.
"Right," I said. "I'll redo it."
"Keep the underlying model. It's useful." He pushed the laptop back. "The feast cycle is institutional memory. It's not written down."
"So there's no documentation of it."
"There's Yiayia."
"Is Yiayia a reliable data source?"
One corner of his mouth. "She knows what the island has ordered for the feast since 1987. So: yes. More reliable than most documentation."
I made a note. He went back to his papers. Outside, the harbour made its sounds — the knock of boats, the cats, something distant that might have been music from the waterfront.
"What did you do before?" he said, without looking up.
"Before the taverna?"
"Before Kaliroi."
I hadn't told him. Elena knew — or had inferred — but I hadn't told him. "Sustainability consulting," I said. "Impact assessment. Supply chains, actually, which is presumably why I keep doing this with your spreadsheets." I paused. "The company dissolved in April."
He looked up then. Not urgently. Just — attention arriving.
"Greenpath Advisory," I said. "If you looked it up you'd find it.
Though I'd rather you didn't." I looked at the spreadsheet.
"The company was founded by someone I was — closely connected to.
As it turned out, some of the impact reports had been.
Adjusted. In ways that made the company's clients look better than they were.
I didn't know." I said this carefully, because I'd said it enough times to know exactly where the emphasis needed to be.
"There's no reason you'd believe that, necessarily. But it's accurate."
He was quiet for a moment. "You built something that worked."
"It worked on paper."
"Most things that work," he said, "work on paper first."
I looked up. He was still looking at his paperwork — or not quite looking at it; looking at something near it. His pen turned over between his fingers.
"The model you've built," he said, "for the August order cycle — that works. I can use it. Whatever the context it came from doesn't change whether the model is sound." He glanced up. "Yours is sound."
I didn't know what to do with that, so I looked at my laptop and said "thank you" in a register I was reasonably sure was steady.
* * *
"Why did you come back?" I said.
It was later. The papers had reached some kind of armistice with each other; he'd made coffee on the kitchen machine and brought two cups out without asking whether I wanted one (I did; this was, I realised, the same thing Elena did, the thing where they just knew).
The harbour was quiet. The service lights had gone off and we were just in the spill from the kitchen doorway.
"My father," he said.
I waited. I'd learned, over six weeks, that Lex left space for the sentence after the first sentence, and that filling it too quickly was a mistake.
He did continue, which I'd also learned wasn't always guaranteed. "I trained in Thessaloniki. Six years. A restaurant called Kipos — the head chef was Bulgarian."
"Bulgarian?"
"Zdravko Hristov. He's been in Thessaloniki for thirty years. He makes the best fish preparation I've ever encountered. No Greek chef will admit this." One corner of his mouth again, briefly. "He was a good teacher. The kind who corrects once and expects you to have understood."
I could imagine, in a very particular way, what this teaching style looked like. I was suddenly sympathetic to whoever else had been in that kitchen.
"I was there for six years," he said. "Then my father had a heart episode.
Not—" He moved a hand slightly. "Not immediately serious.
But it wasn't going to be possible for him to run the kitchen.
My yiayia had been running the front-of-house since my grandfather died, and she was, at that point, sixty-eight and should not have been. So I came back."
"And stayed."
"And stayed." He turned the cup in his hands. "It's been four years now. The kitchen is different from what I was doing in Thessaloniki. Simpler in some ways. More complicated in others. The supply issues are—" He gestured at the paperwork. "More complicated."
I thought about this. "Do you miss it? Thessaloniki?"
A long pause. "I miss the kind of cooking I was doing there.
The restaurant had fifteen seats. We could do — things you can't do here, on this scale, with this throughput.
" He looked at the courtyard, the tables.
"Here, the cooking has to be reliable. Consistent.
It has to be the same dakos at table six that Petros has had every Thursday since nineteen ninety-five. I didn't train for that."
"But you're good at it."
He looked at me. "Yes."
Said very simply. Not modesty, not ego. Just a fact being placed on a table.
"And the other reasons?" I said. "You said: my father, among other reasons."
He was quiet. The kitchen light did something to the side of his face — made him look both very present and also slightly somewhere else.
"The island," he said, eventually. "In Thessaloniki I cooked very good food and I went home and I thought about whether what I'd made that night would still exist in ten years.
" He looked at the harbour. "On Kaliroi, the fava has been on that menu since my grandmother opened the taverna in 1982.
Petros's dakos — that, specifically, at that table — is a thirty-year conversation.
What I make here is going to exist. It has a place.
It matters in a way that was" — he chose the word with care — "located. Specific."
He stopped. I had the impression he'd said more than he normally said about this.
"Among other reasons," he said again, quieter.
I didn't push. I'd asked; he'd answered; I understood, from a specific and recent education, that sometimes the thing you want is the thing you can only approach sideways, and that pushing it into the light too fast changes it into something else.
"I filed a sustainability report," I said. "In 2023. I thought it was accurate. It wasn't." I looked at my hands. "I didn't know what to do after. Because the report had my name on it. It had the company's framework, the framework I'd helped build. And the company was — anyway. I got on the ferry."
He said, without preamble: "You should have been able to file an accurate report."
"I know."
"You will do something about it."
Not a question. Not quite. I looked up. He was watching me with the same flat, direct assessment he always had, except there was a register underneath the professional assessment that I'd provisionally filed under information he hasn't decided what to do with yet.
"Eventually," I said.
"Yes," he said, in the tone of someone who has decided to find this a sufficient answer for now.
* * *
Elena came through at half past nine on her way to bed. She said something to Lex in Greek. He was very still for a moment — the particular stillness that meant the thing that had been said required a small internal adjustment.
"What did she say?" I asked.
He looked at me. "She said good night."
It was not, I was fairly certain, only that. He had been very still about it in a way that a simple good night did not warrant. But I had also learned that some things were offered when they were ready, and not before.
"Good night, Elena," I called toward the kitchen.
From inside, a sound that managed to convey satisfaction.
I closed my laptop. He walked me out through the courtyard, the way he'd started doing without it becoming a thing, just a thing that happened. The Aegean Overlord watched us go from the wall.
"Thank you," I said at the gate. "For the coffee. And the — corrections."
"You didn't need the corrections," he said. "You needed someone to look at the model."
I thought about this all the way back up the harbour steps.
* * *
I walked back at nearly midnight with the smell of the kitchen on my jacket and the strange lightness of having said something true to someone and had it received without fuss.
I'd forgotten what that felt like.
The harbour was still, mostly. A light on one of the fishing boats.
Barba-Nikos's kafeneion dark and shuttered, the plastic chairs stacked with the propriety of chairs that have earned their rest. Bougainvillea spilling over someone's wall in the particular way it had, which was aggressively and without apology, and which I had stopped noticing the way you stop noticing something that has become part of the view from home.
I stood outside The Blue Door and looked at the island for a moment before going in.
Among other reasons, he'd said.
I thought about the way he'd been still when Elena said something I wasn't meant to hear.
I thought about the model being sound.
I went inside and did not book a return ticket and lay in the dark listening to the meltemi run its hands along the shutters, and felt, very quietly, like I was beginning to know what I was doing here.
This was almost certainly a problem.
I was looking at more data.