The Secrets of the Little Greek Taverna

by Erin Palmisano

Genres: Friendship; Magical Realism; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

The ultimate beach read, with a Chocolat-esque touch of magical realism, this debut novel will delight and charm readers from start to finish, whisking them off to a Greek Island where food and wine are the stuff of life, where friendships lift you up, and love has a way of catching you when you’re least expecting it.

In a village on Naxos lies a gorgeous guest house and taverna that never opened. Cressida’s husband died suddenly three years ago – the taverna was their dream – but she’s been too lost in grief to keep that dream alive.

Marjory "Jory" St. James, a young traveler who always feels more at home on the move, arrives on Naxos in the middle of the night as if summoned by the island. She quite unexpectedly becomes Cressida’s very first guest.

Jory quickly discovers that this island vacation is more than just a sightseeing adventure as all of the women in town are more than what they seem. But when a hotel group offers to buy Cressida's taverna, it's going to take all of Jory and Cressida's drive and expertise to keep that from happening. With a generous dash of romance, deliciously tempting Greek food, and a growing friendship, can these two women find a way to finally open the little Greek taverna?

Release date: May 7, 2024

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 304

Sample

I bought a ticket to Athens this morning.” Marjory St. James waited for her two best friends to say something.

It was another beautiful Sunday in Los Angeles and they were sitting at their favorite cafe where they’d spent Sundays brunching for the past many years. Kate and Liz looked at one another, their glasses of prosecco mid-sip.

“You’ve only been back eight months, Jory. What on earth happened between dinner last night and now to inspire this?” Liz asked.

Most of Jory’s friends thought there was something Jory was running away from, or some inescapable need to find something. But years before, Jory’s mother had nodded pragmatically whenever Jory told her she felt called to go somewhere. “You’re a St. James,” her mother would say. “And a St. James knows when it is time to leave. An instinct, a pull to a place without knowing why. Perhaps you will simply explore. Or perhaps you will find yourself in a place that needs to borrow a little bit of your gift. The gift of home that exists within you. So you never feel lost, but always just where you are meant to be.”

“It has been eight months, Liz, thank you very much. And you know I don’t know why it’s time to go, but it is. As for the inspiration…” Jory grinned, pulling out the brochure the travel agent had given her with the yacht and whitewashed Greek Island on the cover.

Kate smiled at Jory. She was more understanding of Jory’s lifestyle than Liz, who was utterly practical.

Jory and Kate had gone to college together, and they met Liz a year after they had moved to Los Angeles. Liz told them once she’d had trouble making friends when she first arrived in the city. It wasn’t that she was shy, because she wasn’t. And it wasn’t that she wasn’t sociable, because she was. It was simply that she was very protective of her time and energy with people. She wasn’t a person who wanted to spend (or waste, as she thought of it) herself on people who weren’t going to be a core part of her life. Liz was pragmatic, concise, and she wanted solid, sturdy things. Her work as a fashion stylist was a solid, sturdy thing, and her family was a solid, sturdy thing. So when it came to friends, she simply thought it better to wait for something solid and sturdy as well.

Jory, and Kate, too, at that time, worked in a little French bistro called The French Café. Jory knew there was something about Liz and she proceeded to, as Kate teased her, “friend stalk” Liz until she had no choice but to become their friend.

“Hi, I’m Jory,” she’d finally said one evening, reaching out to shake her hand, which Liz took, her eyebrows furrowed. “This is Kate. We have decided we want you to be our third amigo. So what are we all doing tomorrow?”

The three had been solid, steady, and inseparable ever since, other than Jory’s constant wanderlust.

The girls sipped their prosecco as they reminisced, but Liz looked over the brochure again and dug into her eggs Florentine that had just arrived. “Well, I love you and you know I support you. And god knows I’d kill to be on that boat.” She pointed with her fork. “But girl, ain’t no way in hell you have the money to be sailing around on a superyacht, and even if you do have some sort of Vanderbilt blood, you gave that up ages ago.”

“And kept my soul intact,” Jory teased. Money was never something Jory had had in large quantities, even though she could have. That was an adamant choice she’d made years ago. “You know how I feel about my father’s money. And while I know you don’t think my waitressing job at The French Café is a real job, Liz, I have managed to save heaps in the past eight months by picking up extra shifts. As long as I can eat all the food I want and drink all the wine I want, I’m fine to budget on other things. Like this. Look on page five at the big ferries that take people around to the islands. It’s actually quite inexpensive.”

Liz opened to page five. “Quite reasonable. I suppose I always thought Greece would be super expensive.”

Jory finally bit into her omelet. “I know. I can’t wait to eat all my favorite foods—feta, olives, delicious sun-ripened tomatoes. I’m not taking my phone or laptop or even a guidebook. I’m totally winging it.”

“Jory—don’t you think that’s a bit tricky in this day and age?” Liz asked.

“When I first started traveling, I didn’t even have a phone, and not only did I find my way just fine but they were some of my best trips,” she replied. “Don’t you remember that one time I was on the train?”

“Oh wait!” Kate interrupted. “I love that story. Is it the one where you hopped on the local train in Egypt to avoid paying the exorbitant tourist prices and hid in the bathroom just long enough that by the time the police found you, they couldn’t throw you off but had to escort you all the way back to Cairo for fourteen hours—”

“Surrounding you only with women and children you had to babysit?” Liz finished. “That was a good one.”

“Or was it the one when you had all your cash stolen from your bag on the way from Nice to Barcelona, and when you went to buy your next ticket, you realized it was gone? I wouldn’t imagine that to be one of your best stories, come to think.”

Jory grimaced. “No, it was the one—”

“Oh! The one in India where the tout took you back to that hotel that was really nice but ended up stealing the wine you’d smuggled in duty-free? That one was truly cruel,” Kate said. Liz nodded emphatically.

They were all laughing then, as the waiter came and opened another bottle of prosecco. He stared for an exceptionally long time at Jory. Kate and Liz raised their eyebrows and gave Jory a kick under the table.

“Ow, what was that for?” she grumbled, making the waiter blush before he walked away. The girls rolled their eyes.

“Honestly, Jory, the waiter was totally into you. He was really cute,” Liz said.

“I have absolutely no desire to be in a relationship, thank you. You know this!”

“I still don’t understand why you’re so adamant about that,” said Kate. “I mean, I know you love your life, and it is an awesome lifestyle, but couldn’t you have both?” she asked for the hundredth time.

“Could I still leave at the drop of a hat any time, whenever my instinct kicks in? Could I travel by myself for months at a time, nothing but freedom and letting myself explore and experience the world in just my way? Without thinking of anyone else or holding back at all?” Jory replied with too much passion.

“Well… no, not really,” Kate said honestly. She brightened. “But what if you met like, the big one? What if you met—what does your mom call him, Jory?”

Liz answered with a grin. “The sizzler!”

Kate laughed. “That’s right! The one who, as soon as you meet, and his skin touches yours—sizzle. So what if you meet that guy?”

“Then I will absolutely run the other way and get a ticket out of there. That one is danger incarnate!” Jory said dramatically.

Kate pretended to pout. “But your mom always says it with such lusty zeal, like it’s a good thing.”

Jory rolled her eyes. “You’re talking about Cindy St. James here, ladies. It does not take much to make her sizzle when she meets a man, but it doesn’t take long for that sizzle to fizzle either. St. James women have terrible luck in love. Now, Kate, just because you found your sizzler in Mark…”

Kate blushed but Liz squeezed her shoulder. “We tease because we are so happy for you, honey.”

“Totally true,” Jory said, squeezing Kate’s other shoulder. “But back to the subject at hand, please? I happened to be talking about the train trip in England when I hopped on and stayed until the tracks ended and found myself in one of my favorite places in the world—a fairyland with a castle, where I had the most amazing summer. I’m telling you, I have a feeling about this.”

Kate sighed. “You always have a feeling. But it isn’t as if you’re going somewhere unsafe. I mean, the Greek Islands.”

Even Liz had the wherewithal to agree, albeit with more reservation. “I still think you should take a guidebook at least if you won’t take a phone. When do you leave?”

“Next Wednesday. May twenty-eighth.”

“But that’s your birthday!” Kate cried.

“Yes, I know, so whatever surprise party you had planned for me, change it to the twenty-seventh, please. I’m sorry, but the ticket was on special for one day only, and it happens to be the twenty-eighth of my twenty-eighth year, so I figured it was kind of—”

“Fate,” Kate and Liz answered simultaneously.

“You know I don’t believe in fate,” Jory said.

“Jory!” Liz sighed, rolling her eyes. “You believe in your St. James gifts, that home thing, that ‘leave instinct’ thing. That is all fate.”

“No, there’s a difference. Fate is like, something inevitable, that you have no control over. Like you have no choice in the matter. The other things like the gifts are innate, but you still choose what you’re going to do with them. Does that make sense?” she asked, leaning forward.

“No!” Liz and Kate answered simultaneously.

“To fate!” Liz said, and they all laughed again, because after two bottles of prosecco on a Sunday morning before noon, everything was funny.

Okay, Liz, you were right. Not that I’ll ever tell you that.

Jory sat in a very uncomfortable booth on the top floor of the largest ferry she had ever been on, realizing that she should have purchased a guidebook, or at the very least should have booked accommodation. The ferry had left Athens at three in the afternoon on what was meant to be a four-hour journey to Naxos, an island in the Cyclades. It was the middle of the night when the ferry finally pulled into port.

Okay, Marjory, what’s the worst that can happen? You sleep on a bench somewhere. You’re in Greece, it will be nice and warm.

But it was not nice and warm. In fact, at one o’clock in the morning, even though it was early June, it was exceptionally windy and cold. As they departed the ferry, however, Jory was pleased to see that the port was not all empty as there were a few locals loading and unloading goods.

She couldn’t make out the town as the moon was not bright enough. It was all very dark and quiet. Starting to worry just a little bit, she watched as, one by one, they left with their boxes or packages that had been sent over from Athens. A young woman was one of the last, sifting through the pile, and though Jory spoke not a word of Greek, she was pretty certain she was cursing.

“Aha!” the woman said, picking up an overly large box.

Jory approached her. “Excuse me, I’m sorry to interrupt.”

The woman turned, her dark eyes heavy-lidded, her mouth full, her long black hair in a braid down her back.

“Yes?”

“Oh good,” Jory breathed, “you speak English. Did you need help? That box is very large.”

“Thank you, but it is not heavy. Seeds and bulbs for my garden. You are a tourist?” the woman asked.

“Yes. I’m sorry, but I wondered if you knew anywhere in town that might be open for accommodation. A guesthouse or something?”

“You have not booked?”

“No,” Jory said, resigned. “I didn’t realize we’d be arriving so late. There was a storm.” She was incredibly embarrassed, and yet despite that, increasingly cold and desperate.

“Storm, no storm, the ferry is always late.” The woman looked at Jory for a long time, biting her lower lip as though she was debating with herself. Finally, she took a deep, woeful breath that sounded somehow familiar, as if Jory had heard it before. “I have a guesthouse, you may come with me,” she said with a single nod.

“Really, you have a guesthouse? How lucky I came to talk to you.”

“Lucky,” the woman murmured, more to herself.

“Where is your guesthouse? Is it quite far?”

“Potamia. Up there.” She pointed into the black distance. “My village.”

“Oh.” Jory had not expected to leave the main town. “And, um… how much?”

“Does it matter? It is me or a park bench, yes?” Her voice sounded amused, though she didn’t smile.

“How did you…?”

“A park bench? Not a person on the island would see a woman sleep on a park bench, silly girl. I make fun of you.”

This was one of the stranger encounters she’d had since she left, yet not unpleasant. Jory smiled. “In that case, thank you. I’m Marjory St. James. But everyone calls me Jory.” She reached out her hand.

“Cressida Thermopolis. Pleased to meet you,” she said, shaking Jory’s hand. “Okay, shall we go?”

“Oh, right, okay.” Jory pulled her pack up onto her shoulders, following Cressida to the parking lot where a dusty little pickup truck waited. She threw her bag in the back and hopped in beside Cressida.

They began to drive up the main road, past the village, then up and up what seemed to be the start of a mountain. Cressida didn’t speak and Jory was beginning to wonder if this was a mistake. They climbed further still. Jory looked behind her in the rearview mirror, watching the great ferry pulling out into the blackness of the sea. It looked calm from this perspective, but she remembered the waves crashing over the top of what was, in essence, a four-story building. She shivered.

“It is colder up here than below,” Cressida said, “but once we are in Potamia there is not much wind. You’ll be the only tourist in town at the moment,” she added.

At least she was speaking to her now. “Is it very far from the main town of Naxos?”

“Only nine kilometers.”

Nine kilometers from the town? Jory didn’t know if Cressida necessarily understood “guesthouse.” She could mean her couch. Which at this stage would be fine for just one night, tired as Jory was beginning to feel. Cressida didn’t seem like someone who was used to having guests—she’d barely spoken a word since they met and seemed uncomfortable. Jory glanced over to her again. She looked tired too. Perhaps that was it. It was, after all, the middle of the night.

“Have you always lived in Potamia?” Jory asked.

“I am from here and have lived here most of my life, yes,” she replied. “Ah, here we are.”

They entered a small whitewashed town. No lights were on, but the moon had come from behind the clouds and highlighted the village enough for Jory to see that it was quite pretty. They turned down a cobbled street and Cressida pulled up in front of a sign that read “Guesthouse.” The large house was beautiful, white with purple bougainvillea climbing up the sides. They had obviously arrived from the back, but it sat precariously on a hill and Jory wondered what the view would be like from the best rooms in the morning.

“There are six rooms. I think room two will suit you as you are here on your own. It is on the ground floor but very nice. You will be comfortable. Thirty euro for the night.”

Jory followed her down a winding little path through to a garden. Thirty euro? That was a great price, even if it was miles away from the main town and even if it was terrible. Cressida opened the door to room two. It was not terrible, not at all. The ceilings were low and rounded and plastered white, with the trimmings painted a lovely shade of turquoise. The floor was made of intricate mosaic tiles and a comfortable-looking double bed graced the middle of the room. There was no TV or phone and the room was small, but it had a lovely bathroom with a great big shower, and there was a sliding door on one side to her own private garden area with a chaise lounge and a little table and chair. There was a small fridge inside. It was beautiful. And it was hers. Something familiar hit Jory walking into this room. It felt like home.

“Do you like the room?” Cressida asked, a note in her voice Jory could not quite place. Almost… hopeful.

“It’s beautiful and I love it. Thank you, Cressida. This is amazing.”

She nodded and exhaled. “Be careful with the bathroom door—do not close it too hard or it jams. I will bring you breakfast tomorrow morning. Goodnight.”

And she left.

Jory made to unpack her bag, but instead, she crawled between the crisp white sheets on the gloriously soft bed and did not wake until morning.

Cressida woke in the morning with an uncanny urge to bake. She knew the feeling was dangerous when it was this strong, when nothing but using her hands to mold a cake or knead a loaf of bread would ease the deep longing inside her, but it had been so long since she’d felt it kick in like this that she could not resist.

Donning an apron over her blue dress, she walked down to the garden with a few big trays and her pruning clippers in hand. The olives were a daily job, in the tiny grove that had been on this land for hundreds of years. She walked past her herb garden, which was thriving from the rains they’d had in May. Now the days were mostly long and sunny and her vegetables were suddenly ripe and vibrant. The tomatoes that had been growing for a month were round and red, and cherry tomatoes littered the ground. The cucumbers were twice the size they’d been a week before, and her eggplant would be ready in another week or two.

But today, her figs were finally ripe. Weeks ago, she had covered the growing clusters with netting to keep the birds from sucking the juice out of her favorite fruit. She turned her figs into jams, pastes, syrups; she dried them and roasted them, but most of all she loved them fresh. She filled her tray with the purple delights, humming, and brought them back up to her kitchen.

She had already dropped Jory’s breakfast on her porch without waiting for her to wake. Cressida needed to bake, and there was only one thing she could even think to make now that her figs were ready—her classic honey cake. It was a simple dessert, but it was still one of her favorites, perhaps because it had been Leo’s favorite. She pulled out a large bowl and added eggs and sugar, beating them until they were creamy and thick. She looked down at the premium electric hand mixer Leo had specially bought her from America and she could not help but smile. He had loved his gadgets. And he had loved her.

At the sound of a door opening, Cressida peeked out the window, where she saw Marjory come out into the garden to eat her breakfast. A little flutter beat in her chest. Her first guest. She had her very first guest. Leo would be so pleased. He would also be grateful that despite not knowing why, Cressida had kept the rooms in pristine condition all this time. What would he be doing now if he were alive?

Certainly not hiding and being slightly rude to her.

No, he most certainly would not be doing either of those things. Leo was a charmer. He would be driving Jory around, taking her to all the tourist sites, making tea in the afternoon, introducing her around town. He would certainly be flirting with her, Cressida thought with a small smile. Leonidas was a born flirt. When her auntie on the other side of the island had first met him, she had tsked her disapproval with a blush she could not suppress.

“No woman should be marrying a boy who flirts like you do, Leonidas. She will have her heart broken,” Auntie had warned him.

“Ah, but, Auntie, I was born to flirt! Why, even a baby likes to flirt with me.” He had grinned, lifting his thick black eyebrows.

Cressida chuckled at the memory. It was true. Not a soul who met Leo had been safe from his charm. He was so happy, so personable, that everyone who met him loved him. No, he would not be avoiding his first guest.

First, or only?

She added in the flour next, and once blended, began to add in. . .