Her name is Amelia and she wasn’t expected home by anyone in the states until the week before Christmas. It’s still October; she’s been in the air, enroute from Rome to Sacramento, for six hours and not in First Class. She’s sublet her rooms and the low-walled stone patio overlooking Santorini’s cauldera to a college dean. She’s too crispy-crittered by age to sigh, but there had been a stirring between them, her and the Dean — a something, but not quite what she, or anyone else, might call a fire.
Before Santorini and the Dean, she’d squandered seven weeks in Agios Nikolaos celebrating her 59th birthday, learned to love her body, the body of the head waiter at her favorite open air café, and purchased her first thong and a dozen more for no reason beyond comfort and one last patch of modesty she couldn’t quite forsake. She was three-quarters done with her memoir before she arrived on Crete, was no further along before she ferried over to Santorini.
The Dean was older than the waiter, older, even, than her. He was also disinterested in her story, which, oddly, brought her round again to getting her story down. Or, maybe the host of long-dead ghosts in the depths of the cauldera brought her around to those loose spirits she’d known, caused her to gather them in to the page, sign them off, assign them over, or done, or both.
A Pennsylvania man boarded in Paris and sat across the aisle with his hairy forearms and dimpled fingers; he has a gold tooth that winks when he smiles and this Amelia saw once in the three hours since the Paris lift-off. She could be his mother or his mother’s just younger sister. He has watched her work the crossword puzzle in the airline magazine, has been caught by her in a smile when she glanced up from erasing with such energy the page wore through and the square was no longer there, has closed his considerably large lips to conceal the gold’s glimmer and almost shrugged before looking away. Wide forehead, widely spaced eyes, very pale blue, very little hair on his head, not much neck, thick armed, thick bodied, or seemed to be. His jacket pulled tight as a leather drum across his shoulders when he leaned forward to fish through the magazine pocket on the back of the seat in front of him, then offered her a fresh puzzle to tear.
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