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“Thinking has two outcomes, Dami. Yes or no. Which one are you leaning toward?”
“Tomáš.” I turn and stare him down.
“Fine. But the question stands.”
He watches me. I look at the lobby.
“Okay,” he says. “But call them.”
At dinner I sit between Tomáš and Polášek. Šíma is across from me, already three drinks deep, hands moving as he talks.
“I’m going to say something controversial,” he says.
“Don’t,” Tomáš says.
“No, hear me out.”
“That is how every Šíma sentence starts.”
“The food here is better than the food in Brno.” He nods while he says this, as if trying to convince everyone at the table.
Kovár looks up from his plate. “That is treason.”
“It’s a steak, Kovár. The steak is a fact.”
“The steak is American. We’re Czech. There are loyalties.”
“I have loyalties to steak.”
“You’d sell your grandmother for steak, Šíma.”
“My grandmother understands. She is also pro-steak.”
Polášek raises his glass. “To Šíma’s grandmother. A woman of taste.”
“To Šíma’s grandmother,” three of us echo. Kovár refuses on principle and is overruled. He drinks anyway.
At some point Šíma leans across the table and points his fork at me. “Vež, you’re quiet.”
“I’m eating.”
“You’re brooding. There’s a difference.”
“I’m jet-lagged.”
“You flew six hours.”
“It was a long six hours.”
The dinner runs an hour over because Šíma starts the story about the hotel in Bucharest and nobody can breathe by the end. Kovár arm-wrestles Polášek over the last bread roll and loses and blames jet lag. I eat too much. I laugh in a way that sits close to genuine. Tomáš leans toward me near the end of the meal.
“How are you, really.”
“I’m fine.”
“Fine like fine, or fine like not so fine.”
“Fine like I’m eating and it’s good and shut up.”
