The two girls look at each other. "Actually I don't," Shelley says. Katrina just looks at the ceiling and shakes her head.
"Okay, cerveza," Shelley finally agrees to the suggestion, feeling bold.
"In the daytime?" Katrina asks her friend as the waitress departs.
"I'm off for the weekend now. My last class was at 10 this morning. You can order the beer now and take all day to drink it. People come here and play chess, all kinds of stuff. It's a place to hang out. Buying a pitcher of beer is like buying a ticket to stay for the afternoon. You know, they need a pool table, though. I don't play pool myself, but it would be a good addition to the atmosphere."
"No doubt," Katrina agrees with her friend, just to be friendly.
The beer arrives, with two glasses, before the enchiladas. Shelley eats tortilla chips laden with hot salsa, and sips some beer. "I should have asked for water too," she realizes fairly soon.
"It didn't do me any good," Katrina points out. In fact no water has been brought to the table.
"This happened to me in Mexico too," Shelley remembers. "I don't think water in restaurants is a common item in Mexico." She thinks again and adds, "Spoons either. It's always hard to get a spoon."
To be friendly and social, Katrina decides to pour a little beer into the glass that was brought for her. She doesn't go so far as to sample the tortilla chips however.
"I'm going to the loo," Shelly tells her friend, who shrugs in response. "If she comes back, tell her to bring me some water too."
Katrina nods. Shelly stands up and looks around, then walks off. Katrina smiles. As many times as Shelley's been here, Katrina would have expected her to remember where the toilets are by now.
Alone in the silence, Katrina takes out a book from her backpack and opens it on the table. She turns to a familiar page and looks down, then looks back up at the wall. She scans the wall briefly, looking for a large undecorated space. Finding one, she lets her eyes rest there. Thoughts of her fights with Charlie rise back into consciousness. She doesn't indulge them, nor try to suppress them. She looks at them blankly, without answers. It reminds her of when her dog had died. That thought also she allows to play across her mind, neither encouraged nor opposed. The dog is gone, she finally forms the thought, which she tells to herself silently. Maybe soon Charlie will be gone too.
The emptiness inside her seems overwhelming. A suggestion of tears stings at her eyes, but no tears come. She blinks, takes a deep breath. The waitress has appeared with the enchilada plate. "Two glasses of water please," she says, looking up, trying to catch the woman's eyes, but unable to do so. "Agua, por favor. Dos," she tries it in Spanish, to no better effect. The woman writes nothing down and gives no indication of having heard. She picks up an unused place setting from the table and walks away.
Katrina looks in the direction the waitress has gone until she disappears, then turns to look at the book in front of her. Her eyes close. When they open again she is staring at an empty area on the table, feeling empty, thinking nothing, again feeling the tears trying to start but failing to do so. After a few minutes she is surprised to see the waitress return carrying a pitcher of ice water with sliced lemon, and two glasses. She sets them all on the table quietly and disappears again. Katrina pours herself a glass of the water and takes a sip, wishing it had occurred to her to ask for the water without ice. Sometimes you really just can't win, she thinks to herself.
Her friend returns, happy to see the water, but equally unhappy to see the ice.
"I think it's what you said before," Katrina analyzes the matter. "They just aren't used to using spoons or drinking water. They don't know much about it. They're in unfamiliar territory."
"Aren't we all."
"Some more than others. Sometimes more than other times."
"And is this one of those sometimes, for you?" Shelley asks, probing.
Katrina looks up, meets her friend's gaze.
"You haven't been your usual chipper self lately," Shelley observes. "Come on, what's going on with you? Spill it."
"Fighting with Charlie," Katrina confides, shakes her head and shrugs, then drinks another sip of water.
"Over what?" the other girl asks, incredulous.
"He doesn't study. He doesn't think straight. He wants to take a break from school and campaign for the LiberTEA Party."
Shelley laughs out loud. "You have GOT to be joking."
"I wish I were."
They talk about it for a while, and come to the same impasse the subject always hits.
Now Katrina has bared her soul to two people. It may as well have been two Polar Bears, she thinks. Aloud she says, "but enough of all that. I think the value of this confession thing is much overrated." She tries to smile, to indicate in some way that the words are a joke, but it probably comes off looking more like a grimace.
"Drink some of that beer," Shelley suggests.
"Why not?" Katrina answers, and tries a sip. It tastes bitter, but it's oddly appealing at the same time. She takes another drink. At least it doesn't have ice in it. "Not bad," she announces the result of the taste test. She takes a third taste, and half the glass is gone. An odd feeling of relaxation comes over her body. Strange, she had not realized she was tense. Hunh. She feels almost like yawning. It dawns on her then: What she does NOT almost feel like is crying. Wow. This must be why people drink alcohol, she realizes in that moment. The next thing to rush into her awareness unbidden is a sudden strong feeling of repulsion, a need to pull away, as if she had inadvertently picked up a burning hot object. Wow. That I do not need, she thinks to herself. She shakes her head.
"Strong stuff?" Shelley jokes. "You've never had alcohol before, have you?"
"Actually, I have," Katrina tells her, "a few times, at holidays. I've never had it when I was depressed or confronted with a big problem. That's the novel event here. Okay, to be fair, it isn't a situation that comes up for me a lot, having a depressing apparently insoluble problem. However, what I do know is that I'm going to work on fixing the problem, not on avoiding looking at the problem for a while so it can just continue getting worse while I'm busy avoiding."
"Well spoken," Shelley says applaudingly, raising her glass as if in a toast. She drinks a sip of the beer. "I myself am neither depressed nor confronted with any major problems. I just have the weekend off. So, it's a different situation for me."
Katrina nods in agreement and takes another sip of cold water.
"You, on the other hand," Shelley continues, "apparently have a big problem to solve. That's sort of like having a big term paper due, or a project deadline coming up."
Again Katrina nods. "I have to figure out how to get blood and tissue samples, for starters," she tells her friend. She goes on to describe the Caribbean epidemic of sudden onset insanity. She confides that she thinks Charlie might have gotten infected with it. She has no idea how that could have happened, of course. "He used to be totally logical about everything," she comes to the conclusion. "He was Mr. Logic personified. It had to be something big to change that. Something physical."
"That particular insanity you mention, it leads to death, from what I've read about it," Shelley observes.
"Yeah, so, that moves the deadline up a bit," Katrina agrees.
"Let's get to thinking of some ideas then," her friend suggests. "We already know he doesn't always flush the toilet. So stool samples are no problem. What else do we have?"
"We need blood samples," Katrina says.
"I know a nurse," Shelley responds. "Again, no problem. She can draw blood."
"So she just comes over and takes blood samples? How do you see that working?"
"You invite us for dinner. Charlie falls asleep early. Nina takes the blood samples while he's asleep. Like I said, no problem."
"Falls asleep?"
"Knock out drops."
"Oh, wow. And she's just going to do this?" Katrina asks.
"Why not? She owes me some favors, and besides she's a good friend."
Let Them Eat Tea Page 10
