Early each morning the first to rise was Lucky and, careful to move about quietly, he first lit the wood stove, nudging the Cafe Achillion from its stone sleep. Next he peeled and chipped potatoes. The air in this part of the cafe was soon steamy from the warming stovetop, and the smell of coffee boiled in a briki. For breakfast he mashed a soft-boiled egg into a small bowl with crumbled bread, rigani and ground pepper. If the household were ever woken abruptly in the mornings, it had nothing to do with Lucky’s kitchen routine: Penelope’s nightmares, which caused her to shout, were the likely cause.

Penelope Asproyerakas was seventeen, the favourite daughter, and quietly aflame with ambition, curiosity and dissatisfaction. Achilles proposed that the following year, when Penny had finished high school, she would start working in the Cafe Achillion, serving customers on the floor like her sister. Whenever he referred to such plans, Penny kept her eyes downcast and heard him out, out of either well-concealed amusement or acceptance—as if she had no choice but to do as her father wished. Her father had his plans, which he made clear, and Penelope had hers, which she kept utterly secret. This delayed their inevitable conflict. Everyone knew it was coming.

By seven o’clock the others joined Lucky in the kitchen. Achilles wandered in carrying the olive-wood club he kept under his bed at night for protection. During the war he cut a branch from the olive tree in the Achillion’s backyard, identifying a weapon in the thick shaft of wood. Nobody found the fruit edible; the olives were incurable, at least by Asproyerakas hands. But the tree might serve other purposes. Achilles leaned the heavy club against the wall in the corner of the kitchen. If someone came to rob the place, if there was any kind of trouble, a fight, an abusive customer, he could knock the crooks to the ground without much work, without injuring his hands. Before he carved the olive club, his options were narrow with regard to the drunken and offensive customers of the cafe. Achilles tended to punch them; he went around for weeks afterwards with bandages on his hands and needed help in the kitchen cutting and turning meat. With a busted wrist he couldn’t properly use a wooden spoon. Then he made himself a wooden weapon.