Chapter 15 The Carbon Copy
Idiscovered the carbon copy issue on a Tuesday.
I would like to say I noticed it myself.
I would like to say that I caught it through the particular attentiveness I'd been developing over seven weeks of running front-of-house for a busy island taverna in peak summer season, and that I identified the error with the practiced eye of a sustainability consultant who had built careers on spotting discrepancies in complex systems.
I did not notice it myself.
I noticed it because Theria sat next to me at the end of morning prep and said, with the directness of someone who has been waiting for the right moment and has decided this is it: "The order pads. You've been using the wrong layer."
I looked at her. "The — what?"
She took one of the carbon copy order pads from the stack and opened it. Three layers: white on top, yellow in the middle, pink on the bottom.
"White to the kitchen," she said, pointing. "Yellow stays in the pad. Pink to the cashier." She looked at me. "You've been tearing out the bottom layer."
I stared at the pad. I picked up one of the filled pads from the completed stack — we went through quite a lot of them.
I opened it. The bottom layer was the pink carbon, and every sheet I'd used was gone, and the white and yellow layers were still there, untouched, with the faint ghost impression of my handwriting.
For three weeks, I had been giving the kitchen the bottom pink carbon rather than the top white original.
"How long have I been doing this?" I said.
"Since the beginning," she said.
I sat with this. "The kitchen has been working from — what? The pink copy?"
"The pink is the lightest," she said. "Harder to read."
"How has anyone known what to make?"
Theria looked at me with the patience of someone who has held this information for some time and developed a careful relationship with it.
"Lex reads the order pads. He reads all of them.
And Giorgi from the supplier recognised your handwriting after the second week and started filing by what he could read on the yellow layer. "
I stared at her. "Giorgi worked out my handwriting from the yellow carbon impression."
"He says it's distinctive."
I thought about what distinctive might mean in context of the handwriting of someone who had been writing orders in some haste, often while moving, in the semi-legible script of a person who did not take a lot of paper orders in her previous professional life.
"And Lex," I said. "He's been—"
"Running the kitchen from the pink carbons and memory," she said. "Mostly memory."
I put the order pad down. I looked at my hands.
I looked at the stack of completed pads.
I thought about seven weeks of service during which Alexios Stavros had been deciphering my handwriting from the lightest possible impression of a carbon copy and had not said a single word about it.
Not one correction. Not one laminated card.
The tacit accommodation, done entirely without announcement, of a systematic error he'd noticed from approximately day three.
"Why didn't anyone tell me?" I said.
Theria looked at me with perfect calm. "You were learning. There were other things to learn first."
* * *
I went to find Lex.
He was at the prep counter. He turned when I came in, in the way he did — head and eyes first, then the full attention. The cloth at his waist. The kitchen whites.
I put one of the order pads on the counter.
"The carbon copies," I said.
He looked at the pad. Then at me. "Yes."
"I've been using the wrong layer."
"Yes."
"For three weeks."
"Seven weeks," he said, without inflection. "You've been here seven weeks."
"Seven weeks," I said. "And you didn't—" I stopped. Looked at the pad. "You read them anyway."
"The order system," he said, "is a system. We work around systems when needed." He looked at the pad, then back at me. "You were learning other things."
"What other things could possibly have taken precedence over—"
"Table assignments," he said. "The specials. The local regulars' preferences. The wine pairings. The meltemi protocol." A pause. "The ferry schedule for supply days. The cheese supplier's preference for written orders versus phone. The recycling codes." He looked at me. "There were other things."
I stared at him. "You put the carbon copy error below all of those."
"You would have got there," he said.
"I might have got there considerably faster if someone had—"
"You would have got there," he said again, in the tone of someone who had thought about this and reached a conclusion he was comfortable with.
"You were not — you were learning to trust your read on things.
Correcting everything at once—" He moved his hand, slightly. "That's not how this kitchen works."
I looked at him. I thought about what he'd said the other night — about the model being sound. About working around systems.
"I'm embarrassed," I said.
"You shouldn't be," he said. "The kitchen ran. The orders were filled. Nothing was lost."
"You were reading the ghost impression off the yellow layer."
"Giorgi worked out your handwriting," he said. "He found it distinctive."
"So I've been told," I said.
One corner of his mouth. "It is distinctive. Very much your handwriting."
I didn't know what to do with very much your handwriting, so I filed it alongside several other things I was not currently examining and picked up the pad. "I'll use the correct layer from now on."
"Yes," he said, mildly.
"And retroactively you were very kind not to say anything and I'm not going to make a production of it."
"Good," he said.
"And I'm still embarrassed."
"That's fine," he said. "Embarrassment is useful. Use it."
He turned back to the prep counter. I stood there for a moment, holding the order pad, watching him work.
He had the same economy of movement he always had.
Nothing wasted. Everything deliberate. I had spent seven weeks in the same building as this person, delivering him increasingly accurate orders on the wrong layer of the carbon copy, and he had worked around it without comment and without complaint and without making me feel, even once, as though I was a problem rather than a person who was learning.
"Thank you," I said.
He didn't turn. "For what."
"For not saying anything. When it would have been easy and probably satisfying to say something."
He was quiet for a moment. Then: "You said learning, not failing. When I asked you about the order errors in week two."
I didn't remember saying this. "Did I?"
"You said: I'm still learning the tables. Not I keep getting the tables wrong. There's a difference." He glanced back. "I noticed it."
I thought about this on the way back out through the courtyard. The Aegean Overlord watched me pass with his standard assessment, which was to say no assessment at all, just the fixed gaze of something that had decided I was a fixture and was no longer curious about me.
"I got you as well," I told him. "Apparently."
He blinked very slowly.
* * *
The Friday evening waterfront music had been happening for six weeks before I registered it as a pattern.
It wasn't that I hadn't noticed — I'd heard it on previous Fridays, the sound drifting up from the waterfront, something stringed and unhurried, music that had been played in this place long enough to stop being a performance and start being a feature of the air.
I'd noticed it from The Blue Door, from the dock, from various points around the harbour.
But I hadn't connected it to a schedule.
I noticed the pattern on this Friday because I was walking back from the taverna and I heard it, and I thought: this is the same music as last Friday, and I turned at the top of the harbour steps and saw Lex already there.
He was standing near the waterfront wall, not at a table, just at the wall — the low wall that separated the harbour promenade from the drop to the water — with a glass in his hand. Not on duty. Not in kitchen whites. In a shirt I'd never seen before, which I noted and filed.
I could have walked past. I often walked home this way; this was not unusual.
I walked to the wall and stood next to him.
"What's the music?" I said.
He looked at the waterfront, where two men were playing — one with something that looked like a lute, one with something I didn't recognise. "Local song. The island's."
"Is it a famous song?" I said. "Is it — traditional?"
"It's ours. The island's. The words are about a particular kind of summer."
I listened. The melody was slow and specific, a tune slow and specific enough that the evening light seemed to have arranged itself around it — or perhaps had always been arranged around it, and I simply hadn't noticed until now.
"What kind of summer?" I said.
He was quiet for a moment, listening. Then: "The kind that you keep. That you carry after." He looked at the musicians. "The kind of summer that — changes the shape of the years after it. Not a dramatic change. A quiet one. The kind you only notice looking back."
I looked at him sideways. He was looking at the waterfront, not at me, with the expression he sometimes had when he was saying something he hadn't entirely planned to say.
"Is it a sad song?" I said.
"No," he said. "It's the opposite of sad." He took a small sip of his drink. "The keeping is the point. Summers end. The keeping doesn't."
I listened to the music. The harbour was the harbour — the boats, the water, the particular warmth of a July evening on a Greek island. Barba-Nikos's kafeneion lit at the far end. Stars beginning somewhere above the hotel on the hill.
"Every Friday?" I said.
"In summer. Yes."
I made a note, internally, about next Friday.
I did not examine this note.
We stood there until the song finished and then the musicians started something else, and then it was fully dark, and Derek appeared at some point on the harbour promenade with a small glass of something and gave me a wave with the discretion of a man who has learned to assess situations and remove himself from them.
He kept walking, which was very tactful of him.
At some point we walked back up to the taverna, because that was the direction of home for both of us (or in the same direction, which was the same thing in terms of the walk). At the junction where the path split — his way back to the family house, my way up to The Blue Door — he stopped.
"Good night," he said.
"Good night," I said.
He walked down his path. I walked up mine.
I walked back through the night air that smelled of thyme and salt and the particular Kaliroi evening and let myself into The Blue Door quietly and went up to my room and sat on the edge of the bed.
The kind of summer you keep, I thought.
I was, I had to acknowledge, actively planning to be here next Friday.