The tavern was my father's before it was mine, and it has stood on the shingle at Porto Germeno since I was a child, and in winter the sea comes almost to the door and in summer the people come, and the big freezer, the chest kind, with the white lid that lifts like a coffin, my father bought that the year I was born, and inside it I keep the season, all of it, the ice cream for the children and the octopus and the red mullet and the sardines and the bread I freeze because the baker doesn't come up this far, and that freezer isn't an appliance, it's winter, because it's what gets us through from November to March on what we make in August, and I knew that, and so did Stavros.

The fire came down off the hill in the afternoon of the second. First it was an orange line up there, behind the pines, and then it wasn't a line anymore, it was a wall, and the wind pushed it down toward the coast, and the air went yellow, and ash fell into the glasses on the tables outside, and I carried the glasses in like an idiot, the glasses, with the town burning.

The shingle filled up. First ten, then a hundred, then I stopped counting, people come down on foot with their bags, old men sitting on plastic chairs, children, and they waited for the boats, because the boats came to take them off the sea, the road was closed by the fire and only the sea was left, and the boats came, filled up, went out again, and meanwhile the people waited under the ash, and the firemen came down off the hill black in the face, tongues out, French, Romanian, boys, who didn't speak our language and had red eyes.

And there was that other thing too, which I never say but that day I thought it, which is that in summer the tavern is full of people who order and pay and leave and don't look at you, and you serve and clear and smile and by the end of the season you're tired and alone as a dog, and instead that afternoon on the shingle it was full of people who ordered nothing, who paid nothing, and looked at me, and needed something, and that's a different thing, that fills you up, and I didn't know it before that afternoon and now I do.

Stavros shut the kitchen door and looked at me. "Eleni," he said. "The insurance doesn't cover the food. You know how it works. If the town burns we don't reopen here, and if we don't reopen that freezer is the only thing we have left, and you don't open it now, because that's November, that's December, that's January." And he was right. That's the thing. He was right, not me.

I'm someone who keeps things in order. The tablecloths folded in half and then in half again, the glasses by height, the till exact, and my father used to say I was born a cashier and not a tavern-keeper, and maybe it's true, and my whole life I've kept things, put things away, locked things up, and I carry the key to the freezer in my apron pocket, always, for twenty years.

And then there was a little girl on the shingle crying from the heat and the fear, and she wasn't crying loud, she was crying quietly, the kind of crying that's worse, and her mother was fanning her with a newspaper, and the newspaper had ash on it.

So I took the key out of my apron. I lifted the white lid of the freezer, the one that rises like a coffin, and Stavros looked at me the way you look at someone who's lost her mind, standing in the doorway, his arms at his sides, and I took out the ice cream, all of it, the whole box, and I went out onto the shingle and started handing it out, to the children first, one by one, and then I threw the octopus on the still-hot grill and gave it to the firemen wrapped in paper, and the red mullet, and the bread, and the cold water, everything, the season, November December January, I passed them hand to hand along the shore under the ash.

And the ice ran. The boxes sweated in my hands and dripped, and the water ran down my wrists, and now it was just water, it wasn't winter anymore, it was water falling on the sand and the sand drank it.

Stavros stayed in the doorway a while. Then I didn't see him there anymore. I saw him on the shingle. He had the crate of sardines in his arms, the heavy crate, the one I can't lift alone, and he was carrying it toward the firemen, and he didn't say anything to me, and I didn't say anything to him, and we gave away the winter together, in silence, with our hands.

Now the freezer is empty. It's switched off. I pulled the plug because keeping it running empty is only noise. And I keep it open, the lid raised, so it doesn't take on the smell of shut-up things, and every morning I pass by and put a hand inside, on the bottom, where the metal is still cold on its own, and I hold it there a moment, my hand, on the cold bottom of the empty freezer, and then I take it out and go make coffee.