“If he is old, then what am I?” asked her mother, her blue eyes unusually teasing. She had finished the dishes and was now in an uncommon perch, sitting doing nothing on her bed, below her favorite framed painting of pink roses. Sarah, Benjamin, and their father would often pick her fresh bunches, sometimes competing to deliver the grandest assortment, because pink roses, both real and inanimate, proved the surest way to make her smile.

“You are young, agapi mou,” said Sarah’s father. “You are young and beautiful forever. Come, Benjamin. Dance with me.”

Sarah’s brother had lit the kerosene lamp and was now reading in the window nook with his beloved bunny rabbit, Penelope, in her cage at his feet. Her mother called the spot God’s window; in the daylight, you could see the buildings all nearly kissing with golden light spilling over the ceramic rooftops, but now just the crescent moon hung in view beyond the slats.

“Dance?” asked Benjamin, clearly not eager to leave his book.

“It is my birthday, and I wish to dance!”

Sarah smiled in spite of her sorrow over the metsovone and Milos as her father began to hum the “Kokoraki,” an upbeat song about animals at a fair. Ki ki ri ki ki, he sang, bopping around their room with his eyes shut, so handsome in his nice black suit that he usually reserved for the Sabbath.

Sarah loved seeing him happy because her father was the type of person whose pain sometimes got turned inside out for some time. His mother had died in childbirth when he was seven, and then his younger sister from tuberculosis when he was thirteen. He always said, I am happy. I have my wonderful family. But Sarah was too sensitive a person to accept it. Sometimes she gazed at her father and his ears that stuck out a bit, and she could see him as a child. And then she would feel unsure for a moment, about who between them was protecting whom.

“I gave you ten drachmas for metsovone!” her mother said quietly, leaning down from the couch to Sarah’s perch on the floor. “We don’t have money, Sarah. You know this. And it’s even more dire with the war. On the mainland people are dying, Sarah. And here I saved money for your father’s metsovone.”

“I’m so sorry, Mama. I…like I told you, it just fell out.” She hung her head.

“You were careless, Sarah. Things don’t just fall out. When they are important, you pay close attention to them.”