The waiter came and cleared their plates and came back, and they ordered espresso and Sambuca.
Kate said, “Do you like tiramisu? We could split one.”
“Sounds good,” Owen said. “But I want to hear about you.”
Kate told him how she’d grown up in Birmingham, an only child in a neighborhood full of big Irish families. The Youngs had seven, the Ivorys, eight, the O’Clairs, ten and the Callaghans, eighteen.
“Eighteen,” Owen said. “Must’ve been something in the water.”
“Rhythm method gone wild,” Kate said. “I went to Marian, an all-girls Catholic high school and played tennis, number one singles. I was ranked second in the state, eighteen and under, and I got a scholarship to Michigan, a full ride.”
“You look like a tennis player,” Owen said. “How tall are you?”
“Five seven.”
“Yeah, that’s perfect.”
Dessert was served. Owen picked up his Sambuca and Kate picked up hers and they clinked glasses. He said, “Salut.”
Kate sipped the warm licorice liqueur, put her glass down and took a bite of tiramisu. “You have to try this.”
Owen reached his spoon over, scooped some up, and put it in his mouth. He nodded and said, “That is something, isn’t it?”
Kate said, “I played two years and only lost four matches. I was All-Big Ten and honorable mention, All-American, and then I blew out my right knee, my ACL. It was the beginning of my junior year and that was it for collegiate tennis.”
Owen opened a bag of sugar and poured some into his espresso and stirred it with a spoon.
Kate said, “I partied after that-drinking and smoking-something I’d never done much of before, and at the end of my junior year, decided I’d had enough of college, and sixteen credits shy of graduating, I joined the Peace Corps.”
Owen stirred his coffee and took a sip and placed it back on the saucer. “You were so close. Why didn’t you finish?”
“My knee healed, but I knew I’d never be able to play the way I had. I was bored, tired of going to parties and sitting around smoking weed. I wanted to travel, do something interesting. I knew a girl who’d joined the Peace Corps, lived in India for two years. She said it was the most incredible experience of her life, trekking through Nepal and going to base camp on Mount Everest, eighteen thousand feet above sea level. I looked around and thought, what did I have to lose?”
Owen said, “When I hear Peace Corps, I think of a bunch of happy, clean-cut kids sitting around in a circle, singing folk songs. Is that what it was like?”
Kate took a sip of Sambuca and said, “Imagine leaving here and flying to Miami and then to Guatemala City, the largest town in Central America-a million and a half people-and taking a two-hour ride on a chicken bus to San Pedro.”
Owen said, “Where in the hell’s that?”
“Eastern Guatemala,” Kate said.
“What do they speak?”
“ Cakchiquel,” Kate said, “a local Mayan dialect, and also Spanish. The point I’m trying to make, I arrived in this little town and didn’t know a soul and I had to find a place to live.”
“Peace Corps didn’t help you?”
“No,” Kate said. “And people stared at me everywhere I went. Women would come up to me and run their fingers through my hair because they’d never seen a blond before.”
“Or blue eyes, I’ll bet,” Owen said. “Why’d you pick eastern Guatemala?
“That’s where they needed help. I signed on to teach English-second grade. Had fifty little Mayan girls who called me Seno Kate, short for Senorita. I’d walk in the classroom and they’d surround me, hang on my arms and waist and not let go, giggling. I’d have to pry them off.”
“You liked it though, I can tell.”
“I loved it,” Kate said. “The kids wanted to learn. I’d tell them stories and we’d sing songs and play games. It was fun.”
“Wish I’d had a teacher like you,” Owen said. He reached over the table and touched her hand. “You’re better-looking than Sister Mary Andrews who I had in second grade. Nicer, too.” Owen sipped his Sambuca.
Kate said, “Do you eat the coffee beans?”
“I don’t,” Owen said, “but you can.”
“When I got to San Pedro, I went around to the shops, asking if they knew anyone who was renting. There weren’t a lot of options in this town at the end of the bus route. It wasn’t a tourist destination. People didn’t go there for its deluxe accommodations or four-star dining.” She could see he was interested, sipping the liqueur, giving her his full attention. “I spent the first night in the school where I’d be teaching, slept on a bench in the principal’s office, and the next day, I found a little house with a patio in back.”
“How much was the rent?”
“A hundred eighty quetzales a month,” Kate said. “Twenty-eight bucks for a four-room house with running water. Not bad, eh?”
“What did they pay you?” Owen said.
“Nothing,” Kate said. “It’s volunteer. I got $150 a month for expenses. And they give you six thousand when you leave, when your tour is over.”
“Were you afraid, living alone in a strange country?”
“My windows had bars on them and the doors were steel and the patio was surrounded by a cinder-block wall that was seven feet high, topped with chicken wire.”
“Sounds like you were a prisoner.”
“Most of the houses in the village were like that,” Kate said. She took a bite of tiramisu, savoring it. “It was my first house and I loved it. I painted the walls bright colors and bought furniture and plants at the market. I’d never lived alone before. It was exciting, but also weird because it’s a male-dominated, third-world culture where women have to ask permission to leave the house. You think they thought I was a little odd?”
She told him about having water only two or three hours every other day and getting up at five-thirty in the morning to fill plastic buckets. And about the water, during the rainy season, coming out like mud. She’d have to boil and strain it to get anything.
She told him about learning how to kill a chicken, snapping its neck and plucking the feathers and cooking it Mayan style.
She told him about her neighbor, a little old lady who sold moonshine from her kitchen, and about the drunks who would fall asleep on the grass in front of her house, Kate finally getting the nerve to tell them to find somewhere else to sleep, and they never bothered her again.
And she told him about her Guatemalan girlfriends, Marina and Luzia, bathing in the temescale, a sauna made of adobe and mud, behind her house and talking like girls everywhere, about boys, who they liked and their plans for the future.
“One time, Luzia asked me if I thought Guatemalan boys were handsome and would I ever have a Guatemalan boyfriend? I said no, but it had nothing to do with their looks, it was because our cultures were so different. I said I could never go out with someone I had to ask permission to leave the house.
“Marina said, but if you really loved him, and he wanted you to ask, wouldn’t you do it? I said, in our culture, if my boyfriend or husband loved me, he would trust me. I said I didn’t need a man to take care of me. I told them I had a boyfriend named Jack back in Michigan and I couldn’t imagine asking him for permission to do anything. He’d think I was crazy.
“Luzia said she liked asking permission. Marina did too. They both said they’d feel strange not asking. While we talked, we were eating roasted cow udder.”
Owen said, “Hang on a minute-roasted cow udder? What’d it taste like?”
“Chicken.” She liked the way he grinned and liked it when he reached over and touched her hand.
And then she told him about Marina, who, in a town full of thick-bodied Mayan women, had the trim shapely figure of a Ladino. “She was the most beautiful girl in town.”
Owen grinned at her and said, “She’d have to go a long way to beat you.”
Kate said, “You want to hear this?”
Owen said, “I’m sorry, I’ll stop giving you compliments.”
“Marina was married,” Kate said, “but her husband Benigno had been in New Jersey for a year cutting grass and shoveling snow, trying to save enough money to build their own house and start a family. Marina lived with her mother, a muchacha, a maid, in a small house with a tin roof that leaked.