“Camping?”
“Yes, this. So now her phone is not working anymore.”
Neil began chewing each bite carefully, fifteen times on one side of his mouth and fifteen times on the other before swallowing, like Nan used to say would save him from developing esophageal problems later in life. He noticed that Dijana was sort of watching him out of the corner of her eye as she said the thing about Magdalena having a boyfriend, and after a moment she jumped up to get the chicken.
“Your father, you know, he is always speaking about you. You are very famous to him,” Dijana said from the kitchen.
“That’s nice,” Neil said. He had no idea what he was chewing, but he kept going, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. A boyfriend. Of course.
“He is always speaking to me about the things you are doing when child, all the things you liked, and how you were so funny child and smart. He will say to me, ‘My son, he knows to read Latin.’ ”
“Oh, well, yeah,” Neil said. He wondered if his father had told Dijana that Neil chose to live with his mother after the divorce. He tried to swallow, but he’d chewed all the moisture out of whatever it was in his mouth and it wouldn’t go down.
“He is alonesome, your father I think.”
“Yeah, that’s true,” Neil said. “But he has his things he does, you know. He has his research.” He washed the mouthful down with some wine. Magdalena hadn’t been dressed like she was going camping when he saw her at the station.
“Well, but these are not real things,” Dijana said.
She scooped most of a chicken onto Neil’s plate and added potatoes and another kind of mushroom. As they ate Neil tried to find out more about what had happened to Magdalena. What exactly had she said in her message? Was it like her to keep her phone turned off? But Dijana kept giving him little sympathetic smiles and steering the conversation back to Neil’s father and the old house, and finally Neil got the hint and let it go. Magdalena had a boyfriend. Or something. He let Dijana serve him the rest of the mushrooms.
“I am really loving this place of your father, is really like something from Hollywood movie, with so much countryside and horses.”
“Oh, does he have horses out there now?” Neil asked. His father wasn’t much of a rancher. His aunt Pearl always said he was crap at running the place and the land was going to seed.
“Yah, not horses, but is this kind of thing, you know. Like John’s Vein.”
“What?” Neil said.
“Like Hollywood movie. John’s Vein. You know, this country-western man who is shooting?”
“John Wayne?” Neil said.
“Yah. I am really liking this, is like John’s Vein movie this house of your father. And so much interesting things inside.” She heaped another helping of potatoes onto Neil’s plate and poured them both more wine.
“I guess so,” Neil said. When he was a kid he used to have to pull goathead thorns the size of thumbtacks out of his feet when he walked around barefoot in Nan and Pop’s house.
“Has kitchen like for a restaurant,” Dijana said.
“Well, it was built to be something like a hotel. Only, you know, it’s so out in the middle of nowhere. I think whoever built it lost a lot of money.”
“Yah, me and your father, we are finding one machine to mix paste for cooking—so big like for factory and not even used. And such nice thing, when I leave, your father is sending to me for making pizzas,” Dijana said. “Is like real antique but working pretty okay.”
Neil managed to fit the final potato into his stomach and finished his wine. Dijana cleared the dishes and came back with cake. She got a bottle of cherry brandy down from a shelf filled with little glass animals and photographs in souvenir frames: There was a moon-faced baby Magdalena, a little girl Magdalena, a high school–age Magdalena and another girl posing with purple streaks in their hair. “Cool figurines,” Neil said when Dijana caught him looking at them.
Dijana poured some brandy into each of their wine glasses and lifted hers a little toward the photos on the shelf. “Actually, it is all because of Magdalena that I am meeting your father.”
“Oh yeah?” Neil said.
“Yah, it is because of her I go to Colorado. Your father, he tells you how this is?”
“I don’t think so,” Neil said.
“Well it is one funny thing. When Magdalena is child she will like to do this thing, she will, how do you say? Tickle with fingers like this to my feet, to make me laugh, and she will say this funny word. Puebolo, something like this. She says, ‘Yah, mamyte, your feet will take you there.’ This is like some big joke between us. And when I first come to U.S. I am living—you know New Jersey? Well, this is not so nice, and my friend, one Polish lady what I meet, she tells there is some place where is job like in casino. With Indian people. And she tells me name to this place and it is just like that: Puebolo.”
“Pueblo?” Neil asked.
“She tells me this is real country-western town.”
“Well, sort of,” Neil said.
Dijana was pouring them each another glass. “So I am like, wow, I will tell Magdute this funny story how I go to this town name of Puebolo! And actually this casino, this is not happening, but okay, I am there already, I must to find some job, so I clean houses—this I always know for doing. And so I meet your father, and when he’s driving me one time for work he asks to me to tell him how do I come there. Because, really, in this place there are not so many Europeans. So I tell him this long story, and he listens and he is so nice, he says like, ‘Someday I will meet this daughter and I will tell her big thanks you are here!’ And I tell him, ‘Okay, for this you must to come to Lithuania!’ ”
“Well, I’m sure he’d really love to visit,” Neil said. “It’s just, you know. He’s not much of a traveler.”
“Yah, this is true,” Dijana said.
She started telling Neil more about her time in America, and about the pizza restaurant, which wasn’t doing as well as it might because construction on the big shopping center across the street had been postponed. But, Dijana said, there were rumors that a group of German investors was taking over the project, and as soon as the shops opened her pizza place would be able to double its output with help from the old dough machine.
After another cherry brandy she started looking sad. She put her hand on Neil’s and her eyes got wet. “Your father is some great man,” she said.
“Yeah, that’s pretty cool of him to send the mixer,” Neil said. Actually, he thought it was a little weird that his father had given away part of Nan’s kitchen like that. And it must have cost a fortune to ship something so heavy halfway across the world.