Page 90 of Spiced!

“He had a notebook.”

“Alan documented dock jumps in a notebook? That might be the most organized pranking in the history of pranking.”

“Alan documents everything. It runs in the family.” A pause. “The documentation, not the jumping.”

“Oh, right.”

“Right.”

I watched the neighborhoods pass, the grid of streets that had produced this particular man, and thought about me at eight years old in West Tampa and Brendan at eight years old here, two completely different childhoods in completely different kitchens, somehow ending up in a car with their hands linked on a Tuesday evening in late September.

The universe clearly had some explaining to do.

We parked near the sponge docks as the sun finished its work for the day, the sky doing something with oranges and purples that Tampa proper could never have managed. I got out of the car and stood on the sidewalk. The air smelled of salt and something frying and that strange warm-cool that came off the Gulf at dusk.

“Greek sponge divers started settling here in the 1880s,” Brendan said, coming around the car to stand beside me. “They came from the Dodecanese islands of Kalymnos, Halki, and Symi. The sponge industry built this whole waterfront. The Greek community never left.” He looked at the docks with an affection of a man describing something he’d absorbed so early in his life it had become part of how he saw the world. “My mother’s family came in the 1920s. She grew up speaking Greek at home and English at school and considers both equally hers.”

“And you?”

“My Greek is functional,” he said. “My mother’s Greek is considerable. There’s a difference.”

Two blocks from the water, he stopped in front of a small Greek Orthodox church, worn at the edges the way things got when they’d been standing long enough to stop caring whether anyone noticed them. I might have walked past it on any other day, except for the mosaic above the door. It caught the last of the evening light in the way of something placed exactly there to catch exactly that light. Blue and gold and white tiles were arranged into a scene that made me stop walking without deciding to.

Brendan stood beside me and let me look.

“My mother’s family has been coming here since the 1940s,” he said. “Her grandfather helped build it.”

“It’s extraordinary.”

“I never really looked at it until I was in my twenties. I’d walked past it my whole life.”

“What made you look?”

He was quiet for a moment. “I’d had a complicated case at veterinary school that I couldn’t resolve. I was walking and not paying attention. I looked up and there it was.” Another pause. “I think sometimes you have to get far enough away from something before you can actually see it.”

I thought about the panadería in West Tampa I’d been walking into since I was nineteen and had never fully seen until recently, when it started to feel like mine.

“Sí,” I said. “I understand.”

His hand found the small of my back and stayed there until we started walking again.

Stavros’s was three blocks from the water. It was small and charming, lit from inside with the warmth of a place that had been feeding the same people for a very long time and had no intention of changing anything about how it did it. A hand-painted sign creaked as it swung above the door in the evening breeze. White paper covered the tables. A glass case near the entrance filled with pastries made my professional eyes narrow, because whoever made the pastries had either trained somewhere serious or had an abuela with very strong opinions about process. Probably both.

A snow-topped man in his sixties appeared from the kitchen. The moment he saw Brendan, he bolted across the room and pulled him into a tight embrace, kissing both cheeks with the warmth of someone who had known this man since he was someone else’s height.

“Brendan, come here, boy.”

Brendan kissed him back without hesitation. “Stavros, it’s good to see you. Thank you for this.”

“Your mother called three times.” He grinned conspiratorially. “She frightens me.”

Brendan’s smile was immediate and wide. “She frightens me, too.”

Stavros’s laugh was deep and resonant, filling the space around us. When his eyes found me, he stilled, studying me the way only certain people could. It was the evaluating depth of someone who had spent their whole life reading the humans that came through their door and knew within thirty seconds whether a person was worth knowing.

He said something in Greek to Brendan. Brendan smiled, then nodded toward the table Stavros was already leading us toward. “He says welcome.”

“Mmhmm.”