In Between Frames Read Online Free

putting up both his hands, saying, “Wait, wait.”   By this time, Mabel had wandered into the street, and Sam was desperate to get her daughter before she wandered into traffic, but when she made a move, the man became insistent.  
     
    “No, I understand, it’s my daughter—“ Mabel floundered, trying to point to Mabel’s little head of brunette curls bouncing dangerously close to the curb.  
     
    “Stephan!” the man screamed, making Sam and Mabel both jump.   After a moment Stephan, a man, thirty- ish , wearing a stained canvas apron, came out from the back of the store.   Sam somehow intuited that the man was telling his son to get the car and drive her to their cottage.   She tried to protest, but the man dismissed her with a good-natured grumble.   After a moment, a slightly-dinged Prius appeared at the curb, and Stephan humoured Mabel by pretending to be a coachman.   “Your carriage, milady,” he said with an exaggerated Cockney bravado, as she got in.  
     
    “Thank you very much,” Mabel said, getting in.   She buckled her seat belt without having to be told, much to Sam’s relief.  
     
    “What are you doing in Loutraki ?   Dead man’s village, see?” Stephan asked, as he started the car.   They glided down the hill towards the ocean, and Mabel shrieked happily, as if they were on a roller coaster ride.   Sam’s stomach also lurched as they sped up, but just when she was certain they were going to careen into the sea, Stephan began feathering the brakes.  
     
    “I’m moving here,” Sam said.   “My late husband bought a house here, and we’ll be living in it for a while.”
     
    “If I may,” Stephan said, “you are one crazy lady.”
     
    Sam shrugged.   “That’s what they all say,” she said.   “I do make a bitching lemonade, though.”
     
    Stephan laughed, but after a moment he realized she was being serious.   “You will need Greek lessons, then?” he asked.
     
    “That would be useful,” Sam admitted.   “I’m not too keen on Greek.   And Mabel, too—“
     
    “Kids are easy,” Stephan said.   “I teach kids all the time.”
     
    “Oh?   You’re a teacher?”
     
    The conversation flowed easily the whole way to the cottage, and for the next hour, while she and Sam put their suitcases away.   It felt, to Sam, like a splash in the ocean on a hot day, or a rare day of sunlight during an English winter:   someone who didn’t know how much David had meant to her, how much it hurt to lose him, how tired she was on England, how much she missed the sun.   He was himself, not someone who wanted to be her confidant, her good sense.   He helped them wipe the dust off of the ceiling fan and turn the mattresses, and told her to run the water for at least five minutes, full blast, in order to clear the pipes.   She took stock of the pantry—a few tins of fruit, bottles of water, and an inexplicable package of raisins.   She frowned, wondering why David had bought them—she and Mabel both hated raisins.  
     
    “You must let me give you something,” she said, “when things were in order again.”   “I do not like raisins, except when they are covered in chocolate,” Stephan laughed, when she presented him with the raisins.   “But I will take some water, and the peaches, if you don’t mind.   It is a long way back to my father’s.”
     
    She let him take the tinned peaches and three bottles of water.   She walked him out, and then stood in the doorway with Mabel, waving good-bye to him as he pulled away.  
     
    “Mummy?”
     
    “Yes, Mabel, what is it?”
     
    “I like him.”  
     
    “Me, too, sweetie.”
     
    “Can you make him come back?”
     
    And for a moment, Sam imagined him standing in the kitchen, frying eggs for their breakfast the way David used to, wearing David’s white pants to the beach, holding Mabel’s hand as she squeals with joyful terror as the waves wash over their feet.   It was strange,