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your Moby-Dick.”
    Up close, she noticed that his nose was a touch off center, his smile slightly crooked, and understood that her attraction to him came less from his actual features and more from the way he carried them off. He had an easy charm, a gift for paying attention while stopping short of unctuousness.
    As they all dug in, indígenos hustled and plated and cleared in the background. Eve took a pull of cerveza clara, which tasted divine against the night heat and the lavishness of a dozen new spices. Will plucked another small fried husk from a bowl. “What am I eating?”
    “ Chapulines ,” Neto said.
    “What’s that mean?” he asked, chewing.
    Eve stifled a laugh. “Grasshoppers.”
    Will’s jaw stilled. “You’re joking.” Then, to Neto, “She’s joking.”
    At the other end of the table, Sue distributed eyedrops of iodine into her and Harry’s iceless water, drawing a tight smile from Lulu, who said, “The water is all filtered here.”
    “Just making sure,” Sue said. “The diet change can be upsetting. At home I make us a power shake every morning with acidophilus. I add lots of berries, kale—”
    “Kale?” Claire asked, packing into the syllable more derision than seemed possible.
    “You’d be amazed at the nutritional benefits of kale,” Sue said. “Detoxifying, cholesterol-lowering, antioxidants—”
    “I’ve heard there’s a ceremony around here,” Gay Jay said, slicing in mercifully with a topic change, “where the men of a village marry a crocodile. I shit you not. There’s a whole ceremony, something about reaffirming their relationship with nature.”
    “ Yes, it is true, ” Neto said. “It is to signal a fresh start. And the crocodile, she is the mother of the land. She is fearless. And so they embrace her.”
    “There’s another culture in Oaxaca,” Claire said, “that’s a true matriarchy. The women run everything. ”
    “The village of Juchitán,” Lulu said. “When a male is born, they say, ‘Better luck next time.’ Many boys become transvestites as the next-best thing”—she ran her fingers through Neto’s loose black curls—“to being a woman.”
    “I don’t know,” Jay said. “I like my men to be … men. ”
    A wickedly segmented wasp landed on the congealing gouda, and Harry reared back. Neto reached across, pinched it by the head, and tossed it aside. He grinned at Lulu. “Next time I let the matriarch get the wasp.”
    “Sorry,” Harry said. “I’m allergic.”
    “You’re allergic to bee stings and you came to the jungle ?” Claire asked.
    Sue said, a touch defensively, “We’re armed with Benadryl and EpiPens.”
    Harry exhaled. “And undaunted courage.”
    “We all have conditions we struggle with,” Sue said, still focused on Claire. “Do they know what caused yours?”
    Claire offered a dry smile. “Not enough kale,” she said.
    A breathless moment ensued in which no one seemed sure whether to laugh. Before anyone could decide, two of the workers burst out from behind the curtain, the younger one bearing a little cake with a candle in it, the other knocking on a pan with a wooden spoon. Eve assumed it was someone’s birthday until they veered toward her and she read, misspelled in icing, HAPY ANIVERSARI . Neto was waving off the workers, but they didn’t notice until the cake was displayed before the group. The makeshift kettledrum silenced, Lulu barked something in Spanish, and, confused, the workers whisked the cake out of sight. All focus turned to Eve.
    “I’m sorry,” Lulu said. “There was a note in the reservation. We didn’t update it, so the kitchen workers—”
    “No problem,” Eve said. “Totally understandable.” She found herself avoiding Will’s stare. “It was supposed to be an anniversary trip.…”
    “Oh,” Sue said, still a beat behind. “Where’s your husband?”
    In Holland screwing his new girlfriend.
    “He had other plans,” Eve said.
    “Yeah?” Claire said. “What’s