Chapter 16 Just
He pointed out the just thing on a Wednesday.
We were going over the revised supply schedule — the corrected model, the one with the feast cycle built in and the fish supplier rotation and the adjustments I'd made after talking to Nikos.
I'd printed it (Derek had a printer, an elderly device he referred to as 'Margaret' and which I had decided not to ask about).
It was spread between us on the corner table.
Lex was marking things with a pen, not heavily, just small notations, the pen moving in that slow deliberate way.
I was talking him through the August projections. I was doing the thing I always did, which was present something I was fairly confident about but hedge it sufficiently that any error was pre-distributed across appropriate uncertainty.
"The August wine figures are just an estimate," I said, "and obviously you'll have a better sense of the actual demand than the model can, and these projections are just the baseline — I've tried to account for the feast cycle but you might want to adjust the margin on the rosé because I'm just working from the—"
"Stop," he said.
I stopped.
He put the pen down. He looked at me across the table with the flat, direct assessment.
"You said just four times," he said.
I thought about it. "I — did I?"
"In two sentences." He looked at the schedule, then back.
"The estimates are not just estimates. They are estimates built on seven weeks of data analysis and a corrected model that accounts for the feast cycle and three different supplier conversations and the fish rotation.
" He tapped the paper. "This is accurate work. The word just is inaccurate."
I looked at the schedule. At the projections I'd been working on for three weeks, the corrected model, the columns of figures I'd run and re-run and cross-checked with Nikos and verified against the last three years of invoice records that Elena had, without comment, placed on the corner table one morning when I arrived.
"It's a habit," I said.
"I know," he said. "I've noticed it."
"It's just — " I stopped. Looked at him. "You've noticed it before now."
"Yes."
"How long have you been waiting to—" I looked at the pen in his hand. "Was this — were you waiting for the right moment?"
He looked at me steadily. "I was waiting for the work to be inarguable. So there'd be no question about whether the hedging was accurate."
I stared at him. He had waited until I was presenting something objectively, demonstrably good before pointing out the habit that undermined how I presented it.
"That's very — strategic," I said.
"It's practical," he said. "If I'd pointed it out earlier, you'd have assumed there was a reason for the hedging."
"I would have."
"Now you know there isn't one."
I looked at the schedule. The projections. The careful columns of numbers.
He was right. The estimates were good. I'd done careful work.
I had been presenting careful work as though it might be wrong, and it wasn't, and the word just was — was a small surrender, pre-emptive, the kind of thing you did when you'd been wrong once and were now, apparently, apologising for everything in advance in case you turned out to be wrong again.
"I do it in general," I said. "It's not—"
"I know," he said. "I've heard you do it with Petros. With the ferry schedule. With Elena." He paused. "With me."
I looked at the table. The schedule. His pen, set down at a careful angle.
"I worked on something for four years," I said, "and it turned out to be built on—" I stopped. Picked up the projected figures and put them down again. "I'm doing a thing."
"You're pre-apologising," he said. "For being wrong. In advance. In case."
"Yes," I said.
"You're not wrong," he said. "Not about this." He pulled the schedule back across the table and looked at the August figures. "The rosé margin — I would put it slightly higher, you're right about that. Here." He made a note. "Everything else is accurate. It's useful. I'll use it."
I took the schedule back. I looked at the figures. The columns. The work I'd done, which was, he'd said, accurate.
"I'll try," I said, "to stop saying it."
"Good," he said. "Don't apologise for the things you know."
He picked his pen back up and turned to the inventory list. I looked at the schedule for a moment longer, and felt something settle — not dramatically, not with any weight, but quietly, the way things settle when they've been slightly crooked for a long time and someone gently corrects them.
* * *
I texted Priya about it that evening.
He pointed out that I say "just" too much.
She replied in forty seconds: "He's been waiting to say that for weeks, hasn't he."
Apparently since he had something inarguable to point to.
A pause. Then: "Oh, he's worse than I thought."
Worse?
"More patient. More deliberate. He's been — Margot, he's been building evidence before correcting you. He's been being careful with how he corrects you."
I looked at the phone. He corrects everyone.
"He corrects errors. He hasn't been correcting you as an error. He's been— God. This is a type, isn't it. The kind of person who is very precise and patient and waits until they can be useful rather than just right."
I thought about this for a long time.
He's just a thorough person.
"Stop saying 'just'," Priya replied.
I stared at the phone. Then I put it face down on the bed and looked at the ceiling of my room at The Blue Door, which was white plaster with a crack in the left corner that I had catalogued over the past two months in the way you catalogue things that are overhead when you're lying awake.
He was a thorough person. He was a very thorough person who had, apparently, been doing something specific about me while also being thoroughly himself, which was a distinction I was finding it difficult to maintain.
This was not something I was going to examine right now.
I was still looking at data.
* * *
On Thursday, I had what I would describe as a normal service — three tables, no major errors, the order pads used correctly (white layer to the kitchen; the satisfaction of this had not diminished) — and at the end of service Barba-Nikos was walking past the taverna courtyard and stopped.
He looked at me. I was resetting the outside tables. He watched this for a moment.
Then he said something in Greek.
I looked at him. "I'm sorry — I don't—"
He said it again, in exactly the same register. As though volume or repetition would not have helped and he knew it and was saying it anyway, for his own reasons.
Then he walked on.
I stood with a wine glass in each hand and watched him go.
Lex was at the kitchen doorway. He looked after Barba-Nikos, then at me.
"What did he say?" I asked.
He was quiet for a moment, with the expression that was the expression of something requiring small calibration.
He said something in Greek. One word, low, as he passed the kitchen doorway.
"What did he say?" I asked.
Lex was quiet for a moment. "Kali douleia." He returned to his station. "Good work."
I stood for a moment longer with my wine glasses.
Good work.
Barba-Nikos, who had not looked at me for eight weeks. Who put my coffee on the counter without eye contact. Who had, I now understood, been making it the way I liked it — adjusting it, quietly, without comment — before I'd thought to question whether he'd noticed me at all.
Two words, to no one in particular, in a courtyard on Kaliroi. And yet.
The island had not been waiting to acknowledge me. It had, apparently, already decided to, and this was simply the first time the decision had made a sound.
I put the wine glasses on the tray and went to get the next ones and thought about how many things were said on this island through the thing given rather than the thing spoken, and whether I'd been misunderstanding the language this whole time.
* * *
On Friday, I went to the waterfront at the time the music usually started.
I was not going because Lex would be there.
I was going because I liked the music, which was true, and because the harbour in the evening was pleasant, which was also true, and because I had developed a perfectly independent habit of spending Friday evenings at the waterfront that happened to coincide with a habit he had independently developed.
This was, if you looked at it correctly, a coincidence.
I was at the wall for perhaps ten minutes before he arrived. He had the same glass he always had. The same shirt (not the one from last week; a different one). He stood at the wall and the musicians started and we listened.
I was very aware of him next to me. I had been very aware of him next to me since approximately week three, and I had been managing this awareness with the disciplined professionalism of a sustainability consultant who has a very strong professional reason not to — except I was no longer, precisely, a sustainability consultant, and the professional reason was becoming difficult to construct, and he was standing there in the evening warmth of a Greek island with the music going and the harbour below and the stars doing their unreasonable thing.
"The fish figures," I said.
"Margot," he said.
"I know," I said. "I know. I'm—"
"You don't have to talk about the fish figures."
"I know that."
"You could just stand here."
I stood there. The music went on. I thought about just and whether I was allowed to use it when standing was what I was doing.
"I'm going to," I said. "Stand here."
"Good," he said.
We stood there. The boats moved. The music played.
I thought: I have been on this island for eight weeks and I am going to be here next week and the week after, and I know the fish supplier's name and the recycling codes and the correct layer of the carbon copy pad and what thymari is and where to find the Aegean Overlord at any given time of day, and I have been given the better coffee since before I said a word, and Barba-Nikos had said kali douleia without being asked, which Lex had told me meant good work, and which I had been thinking about ever since, and none of this is what I intended when I got on the ferry in June.
I thought about the postcard in my jacket pocket.
I thought about among other reasons.
The music played. Lex was standing next to me in the way that had become, without my quite deciding to allow it, what Friday evenings felt like.
And I thought, very quietly, that perhaps some things happen not because you decide them but because the ground shifts under you while you're looking at the harbour, and by the time you notice you're already somewhere else, and the somewhere else is exactly right.
I did not say any of this aloud.
I stood there, and so did he, and the music played until it ended, and the harbour went on being the harbour, and for the first time in a long time I did not feel like I was waiting for the other shoe to drop.
This was, I thought, going to be quite difficult to come back from.
Good, said a part of me I hadn't heard from in a while.
Good, I agreed.
* * *
I did not go straight home.
The waterfront wound down slowly — the musicians packed up, the last of the evening's tables at the harbour tavernas cleared, the cats redistributed themselves among the chairs.
I stayed until it was properly dark, which I had started doing without deciding to, and then I took the long way back through the village because the long way goes past the bakery and the smell alone is worth the detour.
I was cutting through the interior passage of the taverna — the narrow corridor between the dining room and the kitchen where the air always smelled of garlic and the stone stayed cool — because the gate at the back was the quickest exit to the upper lane, and I had done this route enough times now that I did it without thinking.
I heard Lex's voice.
Not unusual. He was often the last to leave. But this was different — lower, less operational, the register of a phone call rather than service instructions. Someone he knew. Something settled, unhurried.
I was walking past. I was in motion.
I caught: "I Margot" — my name, in Greek, the I before it a soft article, the way names got carried in a sentence — and then a word I'd been learning from the laminated cards and from context and from eight weeks of paying attention: "próvlima" — and I slowed down without deciding to, because your brain does things before you give it instructions sometimes, and then something else, less clear, something that sounded like "den méni" —
I kept walking.
I went through the gate. I came out on the upper lane with the night air and the stars doing their unreasonable thing above the roofline and the sound of the sea doing its low ongoing thing below.
I noted the facts, because noting facts was something I was good at: I had heard fragments of a phone call in a language I did not speak.
I had recognised two words and possibly one phrase.
I did not have a sentence. I did not have context.
I did not have — anything, really, except my name and a word for problem and something that sounded like not staying.
I was an intelligent adult woman who had spent six years in sustainability analysis building conclusions from evidence. The evidence I had was insufficient. I was not forming a conclusion.
I told myself this several times on the walk back to The Blue Door.
I put the island in my pocket and walked back through the village and did not think about what I'd heard.
I thought about it for the entire walk back.