My Brother Left Me With the Man He Told Me to Stay Away From, and Then Didn't Come Back novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Eleven Minutes
Laz Stavrakis turns up on Thalia's porch with her brother's spare key and tells her to pack for the summer; she takes her brother's laptop and sets her own terms, and a text from Nikos tells her not to let Laz read it.
The man on my porch was holding my brother's spare house key.
I saw him through the windshield from the end of the street.
A black Suburban sat in my driveway, blocking my parking spot.
I pulled up behind it anyway, got out in my scrubs with my lunch bag still on my arm, and walked up the path as if he were a package someone had left.
His name was Lazaros Stavrakis, and nobody in Tarpon Springs had ever once called him that to his face.
He was Laz.
He had not stood on this porch since my high-school graduation party.
I had been seventeen then, and he had been twenty-eight.
He had lifted a glass across the backyard, nodded once, and gone back to talking to my brother.
That was the whole of it.
He was thirty-four now and looked the same, only harder.
His white shirt was pressed, and the sleeves were turned back twice over his forearms.
A scar cut through his left eyebrow.
Half this town stepped around him when he crossed the docks, and he had never raised his voice to make them.
"Thalia," he said.
"That's my key," I said.
"It's Nikos's key," he said.
"It's still my door."
"Yes," he said, and he did not apologize for it.
He turned the key over in his fingers and looked at me with no expression at all.
"Nikos asked me for one thing before he left," he said.
"He asked that you not be alone in this house for ninety days.
"You'll pack for the summer.
"You'll sleep at my grandmother's house on Tarpon Avenue."
I laughed.
It came out of me before I could stop it.
He did not.
"I'm twenty-three years old," I said.
"I pay the water bill.
"I clean strangers' teeth for a living.
"Why would a grown woman need a babysitter?"
"Because your brother asked," he said, "and because I said I would."
"Nikos is on a ship," I said.
"I know where Nikos is," he said.
"Then he can call me and tell me himself."
"He'll call you," Laz said.
"I'm not asking you to like it."
He glanced at his watch, which was plain steel with no nonsense on it.
"Ten minutes, Thalia."
I stood there with my lunch bag and looked past his shoulder at the street.
It was Sunday, a little past five, and the light was going gold over the Gulf the way it did every April evening.
Mrs. Pappas's sprinklers ran two doors down.
Two men sat in the Suburban with its windows rolled halfway.
They were not looking at Laz.
They were looking at my house.
Then they looked at the house next door.
The Dimitriou place had stood empty since March, when old Mr. Dimitriou went to live with his daughter in Tampa.
I had watched the For Sale sign lean over in the rain for six weeks.
There was a new brass lock on its front door, bright as a coin.
It had not been there on Thursday.
I knew because I had walked the garbage cans past that door on Thursday night, and thought how sad an empty house looks.
"You changed the lock on the Dimitriou place," I said.
Laz said nothing.
His face did not change.
But his eyes went to the brass lock and back to me, and I watched him understand that I had seen too much.
That was the first thing I knew that he had not meant to tell me.
I held out my hand for the key.
He looked at it, and then he put the key in my palm.
"Nine minutes," he said.
I went inside and shut the door in his face.
The house smelled the way it always did, of coffee and old wood and the orange oil my mother used on the banister before she died.
Nikos's coat was still on the hook.
His mug sat upside down in the dish rack, rinsed.
My brother had left two days ago with one duffel bag.
He had kissed the top of my head in the kitchen and told me to eat something.
Then he had texted me from the road: Taking a contract, back in three months. Eat something.
He had never told me the name of the ship.
I had not thought about that until now.
I went into his room and opened the second drawer of his desk.
His laptop lay under a stack of receipts, where it had always lain.
He had never changed the password, which was the name of the boat he and Laz had learned to dive on at twelve.
I did not know why I wanted it.
I only knew that two men in a car were watching my house, and my brother had told me nothing, and when someone tells you nothing you take what is in the drawer.
I slid the laptop into my canvas tote.
Then I went down the hall to the little shelf by the stairs and lifted my mother's icon of the Virgin off its nail.
It was the size of a hymnal, in a tin frame gone dull from forty years of hands.
I put that in the tote too.
I locked the back door.
I locked the front door from the inside, went out through the kitchen, and locked that.
When I came around the side of the house, Laz was exactly where I had left him.
He looked at the tote, and then at my face.
"I'll come," I said.
"I'll drive myself.
"And at your grandmother's house I sleep with the door locked from my side."
His mouth moved.
It was a small thing, one corner of it, and gone before I was sure.
He had not meant to let it happen.
"Those are reasonable terms," he said.
"They aren't terms," I said.
"They're how it's going to be."
He stepped aside to let me pass.
I walked to my own car with my bag on my shoulder and my spine very straight.
The Suburban started up behind me.
I sat for a moment with both hands on the wheel.
Then I followed its taillights down Tarpon Avenue as the sun went into the water.
At the first light I looked down at the passenger seat, where the tote lay with my mother's icon and my brother's laptop in it.
My phone was lit up in the dark of the console.
It was a text from Nikos, sent a minute earlier from a number I did not know.
Thalia, do NOT let Laz read the laptop.
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