“They were very emotional. The poem helped.”
“The poem was eight pages long, Vež.”
“It was a long wedding.”
He laughs. The room settles back into the laptop click and the air conditioning, and through the window the Atlanta light is doing what it does at four in the afternoon, gold pulling east.
“Vež.”
“Yeah?”
“You’re doing the hand thing again.”
I look at my hand. I am doing the hand thing again.
“Cramp,” I say.
“Sure.”
He says it the way Tomáš says “I’m thinking about it” to me. He doesn’t push.
Then he pushes a little. Not in the direction I expect.
“Whoever it is, just text them back. You don’t have to say much. You don’t have to say it well. You just have to send the sentence. Then you can go back to lying about cramps and I can go back to pretending I haven’t been watching you do this. We can both have what we want.”
He says all of it without looking up from his laptop. Šíma talks too much and notices everything, which is a combination I have never figured out how to manage.
“It’s not like that,” I say.
“Sure.”
He flips the laptop closed and swings his legs off the bed.
“Dinner in twenty?”
“Yes.”
“I’m getting steak. Kovár banned me from steak commentary at the table. I have things to say.”
“You always have things to say.”
“That’s why he banned me.”
He goes to the bathroom. I look at the spot on my palm. The palm is fine. The palm has been fine for thirty years.
The restaurant is two blocks from the hotel, one of those places with brick walls and Edison bulbs and a staff who have decided we are charming. Šíma is across from me, three drinks deep before the bread arrives. Kovár is next to him cutting into a steak with the focused expression of a man performing surgery. Novotný and Polášek are bickering about a Champions League match from March that neither of them watched. Tomáš is on my left and Tobík isn’t here.
On the Beltline he mentioned, casually, the way he says things that are not casual, that he had a foodie group event tonight. Some restaurant opening. He didn’t elaborate. I didn’t ask. He has his own evening planned. The small thing of it arrived and went past.
We eat. The wine is fine. Atlanta restaurants run cold in summer, the air conditioning set to a Bavarian winter for reasons I cannot understand. The food keeps coming and Šíma keeps drinking and Kovár keeps narrating his steak like an Italian uncle.
Tomáš leans toward me near the end of the meal. He takes a drink. He is quiet for a second, the way he is when he is about to say something he has been thinking about for longer than he wants to admit.
“I came here at Christmas. I came for four days. I knew he was doing well. I did not know he was building this. He has built a life at twenty-two that I probably won’t know how to build at thirty-two. I’m really proud of him. I am also slightly afraid of him.”
I make a small noise. Tomáš sets his glass down. He waits a beat.
“Take another day. He likes you.”
