After school on Wednesday, we went to Pappou’s house. He didn’t know we weren’t going to the wedding now. Mom wasn’t planning to tell him, either—she said it was better if we just kept it quiet and didn’t turn up. Which made me feel sick. Are secrets the same as lies? I think they are, but I have no one to ask.
“Feeling better?” Mom asked Pappou as we went in. I walked down the hall with my eyes on the floor to avoid looking at the photos.
“Better, better,” he said, waving his hand. “Of course better. You make me drink so much kanela, I turn into a stick of it.”
I grinned. Kanela is cinnamon. Greeks love it. They use it as a kind of medicine. Feeling sick? Drink tea with kanela. Got a cold? Tea with kanela. Accidently chopped your leg off with an ax? Tea with kanela.
“Told you,” Mom said, squeezing his tea bag and adding kanela. It wasn’t only cinnamon, either—they are even more fond of lemon. If you were eating lamb, they ask if you wanted lemon on it. Chicken? Squeeze lemon on it. Going out? Take a wedge of lemon in case you need to squeeze it on something. I swear we’d have cereal with lemon on it if it didn’t curdle the milk.
Just then, the phone rang. Pappou has a cordless phone beside him the whole time. He spends half his life on the phone. I could hear Aunt Soph’s voice from halfway across the room, and Mom must have heard it too, because she was nearer to Pappou than I was, and Aunt Soph’s voice is almost as loud as my mom’s.
“Sophiiiiiia,” Pappou said.
“I’m going to the shop to get more kanela,” Mom said to me in a low voice. Proof again that she can speak in a low voice if she really tries.
“Can I call you back a little later?” Pappou asked Aunt Soph in Greek. I’m translating in case you don’t speak it. “Evangelina is here with Lexie.”
When he said goodbye and put the phone down I said, “How can we get them talking, Pappou?”
“I try everything,” he replied in English. I speak Greek quite well but I always answer in English, so most of the time he speaks to me in English, or in a mixture of both that Mom calls Gringlish.
He sat down in his armchair with a huffing noise and held the armrests so tightly, his knobbly knuckles went white. “I invite them here at the same time to talk…to talk…but your mother, she see Sophia car outside and she drive home. Last week, I think of a new plan. I tell your mother I want her loukomades recipe for a neighbor.”
Loukomades are little crispy balls like doughnuts, light and airy and covered in sweet syrup. They’re my mom’s specialty and they’re YUM.
“But really,” he went on, “I want to give the recipe to Sophia but to change it, make it wrong, you know? So Sophia she will make very bad loukomades and then she have to call your mother to ask why.”
“That’s genius, Pappou!” I cried. I pulled up a chair beside his armchair, grinning even though it meant Pappou had also been lying.
“I know.” He winked at me. “I’m very clever sometimes. I told your mother that everyone knows she make the best loukomades. You know, make her happy.”
I grinned. Yep. Mom has to make the best loukomades or the world will melt (or something).
“But your mother, she ‘spicious. She answer me, ‘Oh yeah? What’s this neighbor called?’”
I laughed. Pappou did a funny impersonation of my mom, and he never managed to say words like suspicious right.
“So I tell your mother, ‘You don’t know her. Her name is Loukia Yiolides. She’s Thia Niki’s friend.’ You know what your mother told me?”
I shook my head.
“She said, ‘So tell this Loukia Yiolides to get a recipe from Thia Niki.’”
“Your plan didn’t work.”
“No. And now, I don’t know what to do. Dimitri, he don’t know what to do. Everybody in Greek community don’t know what to do. I hope that the wedding day come, and they will remember we are a family and they will stop this. They will. I’m sure. This is Dimitri wedding.” He looked at me sadly and repeated, “Dimitri wedding! And he marry on our wedding day—of me and Yiayia. These moment is what is important in the life. They will stop then. I know it.”
I stretched my lips out tight.
We aren’t going, Pappou, I said in whale song.
But Pappou didn’t speak it.
The only one I could ever wah-wah with was Eleni.