Free Let Me Explain You by Annie Liontas Page A

a complimentary compote to guests, they still had a thousand blackberries left, it seemed.
    The look July was giving her now didn’t match the delicacy that was July’s July. Rather, it was like the last day of the berries, when she and July surveyed the damage, the hundreds of blackberries overripened into saccharine mud, the dull and damaged skin, the loose, erupting drupelets. The soft, fine-haired mold that spread like a diseased cloth. That day, it was not exactly disgust that July expressed when she said, “Is it too late for sorbet?” but an exhausted humor that implicated them both. Instead of throwing the berries at each other or pushing one another into the sliding, skating fluids of the fruit, as Stavroula fantasized, they used a mop. They took turns wiping and rinsing, even though they could have had one of the boys take care of it. They talked about their fathers.
    â€œTry it,” Stavroula said. She held out a fork. “You don’t like it, I’ll take it off.”
    With her fingers, July took a berry with some onion.
    â€œIt’s good, right? Take another.”
    July slid the menu across the counter. “Change it, Stevie, the whole thing.” She walked off in the white wedges.
    Because the entire kitchen was already part of this, and because Stavroula knew it would expose her as much as she had exposed July, Stavroula called after her, “Next week we add Sorbet in Hot July.” It gave the staff permission to laugh.

    Marina had taught Stavroula, this is how you learn who a person is. First, you ask, What was the happiest moment of their life? Then you ask, and you keep asking until you get the real answer, Was it worth it? Stavroula had yet to have her happiest moment: that would come with July, when July was ready.
    Wouldn’t it?
    Stavroula had slept with a few women. No one she had been serious about. No one worth risking anything for. Everything.
    Age five, that’s when she fell in love with the first woman: Mother. Ba-ba’s new wife, who, along with Ba-ba, got them out of Greece, brought them back to America, raised them. As a child, Stavroula knew intrinsically that if you were hungry, you ate what was on your plate—so she had always been grateful to Mother. She adored Mother even now, with everything that had come between them and all the ways Stavroula had been left to fend for herself. If it weren’t for Mother, she’d be married off to some Greek who expected her to clean his fish of the faintest bones. Mother was the first to say—even before Marina— In this country, you can be whatever you want. She had been the one to teach little Stavroula, coming off the couch after an episode of Love Connection , about prenuptial agreements—and little Stavroula responding, “Maybe that is for me.” By which she meant, what women wouldn’t want that?
    Another thing: if you were hungry, you paid attention. This is what Mother likes—butter not margarine, television shows where women drift from one room to another, not realizing that some other woman has convinced their men to go away on a trip. This is the way Mother catches the little horse that lives at the end of your hand (your fingers are the legs, the middle one is the head, sniffing around her nightshirt). This is Mother eating burned toast and lukewarm tea, since you haven’t figured out cooking yet. Mother eats as much of it as she can, because Mother loves you. This is what love looks like.
    But not at first. At first Stavroula had to earn Mother’s love, just like she would have to earn July’s. Which felt right.
    At first Mother said, “If you want to go back, we’ll bring you back.” Because Stavroula, anytime she got into trouble, would cry to go back to Greece. Ba-ba fell for it, but Mother knew that no little girl actually wanted to return to the orange dust, or to the farm roosters that called ruku, ruku at all times of