Page 8 of The Summer Show

Fast forward: My oohs and aahs. My gawking like the naive tourist I was. Me drooling over the koulouri vendor, hawking koulouria with a variety of fillings on the street. Me begging the cab driver to turn on the A/C, and him proudly showing off his limited but colorful English vocabulary. He didn’t want to turn on the A/C because his “son-of-the-beetsh” feet hurt.

Thanos intervened. He reached over and cranked up the A/C and I almost swooned as the cold air slapped my burning face.

Nera’s roads weren’t made for high volume traffic. Or any traffic. Even Europe’s tiny cars could choke a road here. The best way to get around the main village was, as far as I could tell, on foot, donkey, or scooter.

Before I knew it, the cab was shuddering to a stop outside a charming white cottage with blue shutters and a flat roof. The gardens were overflowing with colorful geraniums and pale gardenias. A Barbie pink bougainvillea asserted its dominance over the landscape, sprawling up and over a trellis and spilling across the house’s stucco facade. Houses in the main village huddled together like co-conspirators, and sometimes it was difficult to see where one ended and the next one started, but a small way outside the village, houses like this one came with an abundance of breathing space.

Ana and Thanos filled their breathing space with animals, and every last furry, feathery critter was in the front yard, waiting for us. Preventing them from fleeing was a chest-high fence made of painted steel pickets. Were they still called pickets if the structure resembled a simple balustrade more than a fence?

I should know these things. Words were my job.

Whatever they were, they kept the donkeys contained alongside their goat and goose siblings.

To be honest, the geese were surprisingly mellow for murder chickens. They barely hissed at me at all, although I noticed one ran its webbed foot across a switchblade while staring me dead in the eye.

“Have your geese ever killed anyone?” I asked.

Thanos went still, serious. “Some of our guests have gone missing, now that I think about it.”

Ana shoved him. He busted up laughing.

“They’re my sweet goose army,” Ana said, stooping to pet the geese.

Mur-dur-ers, Thanos mouthed at me.

I suppressed a cackle.

The donkeys didn’t know about boundaries, and frankly I didn’t care. They both leaned against me, and I decided then and there to quit my job and become a full-time donkey petter. The goats didn’t approach me. They were busy gnawing on my luggage tags.

Thanos waved his hands like he was warding away evil. “Anything that doesn’t wear clothes, disperse!” The menagerie grudgingly tromped in the direction of the backyard. Except that one goose that wanted to shiv me.

That goose, specifically, wouldn’t rest until I was bird food.

Thanos carried my bags inside. Ana and I followed him into the dim hallway, where the temperature immediately dropped.

“Air conditioning?”

“Shutters and marble tile floors,” Ana said. “The shutters stay closed during the hot hours to keep the heat out. That reminds me, I need to close the shutters in your room. We’ve had it airing out. You’re our first guest.” She hugged me around the waist. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

A tour of the house happened next. The house wasn’t American huge but it felt roomy yet intimate. Ana and Thanos had decorated with more crocheted doilies than I figured, but she grimaced and said, “Wedding gifts. We have to keep them on display or our families will cry that we don’t love them at every opportunity.”

“Show her Jesus,” Thanos said. “You have to show her Jesus.”

Ana took me to the living room. “Behold, Jesus!”

Jesus was a needlepointed Ob-Wan Kenobi—the Ewan McGregor version. Another flashback to my childhood and Mom’s Star Wars obsession. I wrestled the burst of anxiety back into its container.

“I know,” she said before I could raise the question. “My grandmother made it. She swears up and down that it’s meant to be Jesus. I’d tell her the truth, but I don’t want to rattle her faith in the local craft shop. Come on, let me show you to your room for the next few weeks.”

At the thought of a bed, my knees buckled slightly. The hours of nonstop travel had finally tackled me. I desperately wanted to faceplant in the bed and live there until my body and brain recovered.

The spare bedroom was charming. A gentle breeze lifted white sheers in the air and gave them a little flutter-shake. The bed was queen, the covers white, with a pillowy headboard. The perfect place to indulge my reading habits. Everything in the room was cool, soothing whites, from the ceiling to the lamp, to the fluffy rug spread out across the marble floor.

And then there was the naked man.

four

Ana recoiled.

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