“It’s Yanni,” said Caleb, steering in their direction and waving. “I hope he brought lunch. I’m starving. His mum makes the most amazing baklava.”
A few meters from shore, a lanky youth with caramel skin waded out to meet the paddleboat and Caleb introduced us.
“Caleb has talk so much about you,” said Yanni, his absurdly white teeth fixed in an exuberant and slightly mocking grin.
“Pleased to meet you,” I said, feeling uneasy about what Caleb might have told him.
More waifs waded out to greet us, some of them children, others slightly older with chin fluff or budding poached-egg breasts. Two skinny girls with nut-brown skin put their arms around Caleb and tickled his ribs, and he batted them off in a relaxed, brotherly way. All in all, I was introduced to a dozen teens but barely noticed their names, and with every handshake, I felt more and more out of place among these lithe, tan saplings. Led by Yanni, the group drifted back to where they had set up a camp of raffia beach mats, and Caleb cleared a space for me to sit next to him. But I stayed standing. My skin was bright red, burned to a crisp because I hadn’t applied sunscreen. The skinny girls were staring at me, at my ratty swimsuit, at my sunburn, and whispering to each other in nimble Greek.
“I have to go,” I said to Caleb. “I promised to get back and help with Peggy.”
“No you didn’t,” he said. “They’ll be fine without you. Elena’s like supernurse. She can change sheets one-handed—and Mum loves it when there’s too much to do.”
For a moment, his eyes were just a bit pleading, but I ignored them and gathered up my towel and knapsack, anxious to leave. “I’ll see you back at the villa,” I said. “Thanks for showing me the cave.”
“You don’t mean that,” said Caleb. “You hated it.” He didn’t get up to follow me, and I marched up the goat track at a ferocious pace, relieved to get away. At the top of the hill I drank the last of my bottled water and steeled myself for the long trek back.
By the time I reached Elena’s I was dehydrated and starving, but couldn’t face returning to the hospice just yet. Instead, I walked toward the village, fixated on a mouth-watering souvlaki. In the piazza, I discovered where all the men spent their days: under the canopy of a knotty fig tree, a dozen of them sat sipping ouzo, hard at work over backgammon boards. Some even gave me the glad eye as I walked past, and I felt vaguely flattered but mostly insulted by the way Mediterranean men could have one foot in the grave and still think they had it.
I found Ari at his brother’s taverna, sitting out front with a glass of pale yellow liquid in his hand. His cheeks were flushed, but not, I thought, from exertion. “Sit down a while,” he said. “Would you like a bite to eat?”
“Yes, please. I’m ravenous.” I inhaled the first souvlaki, and when another was brought out I devoured that too. After two liters of water, my thirst was almost quenched, but I declined Ari’s offer of an ouzo for the road. “I better get back,” I said. “There’s so much to do.” It hadn’t been a dig at Ari, but he took it that way.
“I tried to help,” he said. “But I got sick of them telling me I was doing everything wrong, so I just left them to it.”
Back at the villa, sickbed chores were in full swing, and I was soon swept up in a flurry of sheet folding and bed moving. Ari was right—Pippa did have a particular way of doing things, but I didn’t mind conforming to her standards as I had none of my own. In my absence, Peggy had rallied briefly, and demanded to be moved outside again. They’d been waiting for an extra pair of hands with which to accomplish the task. So with Harold and I on one side, Pippa and Elena on the other, we shunted the trolley bed—with Peggy in it—across the pebbled courtyard, its wheels snagging constantly and its cargo threatening to tip over or jump out. Once she was in place, with Pippa’s help I fashioned an awning out of an old quilt and two broom handles, but the quilt was too heavy and the tent sank in the middle. A sheet worked better, but still left Peggy partly exposed to the sun, and Pippa and I spent a good half hour applying industrial-strength sunscreen to her desiccated skin. By then Peggy had lapsed into a state resembling a coma—or so it appeared.
“She’d kill us if she knew what we were putting on her skin,” said Pippa, not bothering to lower her voice. “In her day it was baby oil or nothing.”
“I can hear you,” said Peggy, her eyes still shut.
“Good,” said Pippa. “Do you want your sunglasses?”