Watching the Wind Blow (The Greek Village Collection Book 9) Read Online Free

the sea life.
    Reluctant to return below until the air has cleared a little, Irini judges what there is to do on deck and, kneeling, she takes hold of a mass of rope and, lying the end on the deck, starts turning it with the flat of her hand on top. The rope coils around itself, lying close to the deck where no one will trip over it. It is satisfying work and she continues with all the ropes until the deck is bejewelled with flat rope spiral snakes. She won’t swill out the cockpit until she has finished the other jobs, knowing her own footfall will create mucky marks as she brings rubbish and mop buckets and anything else that needs to go up or down the saloon steps and out to the bins on the quay side.
    She opens a locker under the cockpit seat to see what a mess the life jackets and beach toys are in, and takes a few minutes to tidy them. She will not wash it out today. In fact, with the bareboat needing so little doing to it and relatively little to do here, this could be a really short day. If she can finish and leave before the captain comes back, that will also save some time. Closing the locker lid, she sits on the cockpit seat and looks out to sea.
     
    Stathoula and Glykeria. In retrospect, it was obvious that they would be at Yiayia’s funeral, but somehow it was a shock to see them there. She found herself unable to meet their stares. Her life had been so rough since her parents died that just the sight of her cousins brought a memory of softness, comfort that somehow made her feel so far away from them. The tears in her eyes were from the joy of seeing them, the tiredness from her way of life. But then, when you are fifteen, how else do you live if you have no home, when you have no one? Putting it that way, it’s amazing she was at the funeral herself that day. How different her life might have been if she hadn’t bumped into the stall holder.
    The yacht rocks as a fishing boat putt-putts past. The mountains that enclose the bay have colour now, brown and greens fading to pale purples in the distance. Somewhere over those mountains, Stathoula will be driving from the airport on her way to see Glykeria and her new baby down in Kalamata, Irini’s village almost exactly the halfway point. But just a lunchtime stop seems such a short time.
    No doubt Stathoula will thrill over Angelos, but what will she make of Petta? If the wedding had not been such a spontaneous affair, she could have met him then. There is no concern, though. She is bound to like him; everyone does. But he is not exactly in the same league as Stathoula’s husband, from what she has heard. A German, like her father. The days of hand-me-down clothes may be long gone, but their positions have not changed.
    That was her chief memory of being with Stathoula and Glykeria when she was little. The girls turning up in a new car, Mama greeting Dierk, her brother-in-law, and his new Greek wife warmly, always a sad look on her face as she remembered her sister. Irini on strict instructions not to let slip that Glykeria’s birth was the cause of her aunt’s death. But Irini knew that they knew anyway, which made her wonder for whose benefit they were not allowed to talk about it. So the topic was avoided and they played in the field, Irini happy, Stathoula and Glykeria enjoying the freedom, getting dirty.
    Those visits came with clothes that Stathoula and Glykeria had grown out of, and this was exciting when she was tiny. After plates of briam and glasses of homemade wine, Yiayia had helped her dress and undress, trying on the pretty things that were so unsuitable for playing in their field. But as the years passed, the clothes mostly served to highlight the widening discrepancies in their worlds. The visits slowly became less frequent, and each more pocked with repeated explanations to Yiayia about where her second daughter was. In her confusion, Yiayia began to accuse her son-in-law of terrible things, and the visits stopped soon after that. That was