“I’d never acted before. I’d been traveling with an acrobatic troupe. So when I tell you it was all by accident, I’m not kidding.”
“But you did other plays?”
“Yeah, Much Ado was a disaster but we ran it for four nights before Tor realized it. Then Guerrilla Will switched back to English and I stayed on. It was decent money.”
“Oh, you’re one of those. Doing Shakespeare just for the money,” she jokes. “You whore.”
I laugh.
“So what other plays did you do?”
“Romeo and Juliet, of course. A Midsummer’s Night Dream. All’s Well That Ends Well. Twelfth Night. All the crowd-pleasers.”
“I love Twelfth Night; we’re talking about doing that next year when we have time. We just closed a two-year off-Broadway run of Cymbeline and we’ve been touring it. Do you know it?”
“I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never seen it.”
“It’s a lovely, funny, romantic play and there’s lots of music in it. At least the way we do it.”
“Us, too. We had a drum circle in our Twelfth Night.”
She glimpses at me sidelong as she keeps her eyes on the road. “Our Twelfth Night?”
“Theirs. Guerrilla Will’s.”
“Sounds like the whore fell in love with the john.”
“No. No falling in love,” I say.
“But you miss it?”
I shake my head. “I’ve moved on.”
“I see.” We’re quiet for a while. Then she says, “Do you do that a lot? Move on?”
“Maybe. But only because I travel a lot.”
She taps out a beat on the steering wheel, audible only to herself. “Or maybe you travel a lot because it lets you move on.”
“Perhaps.”
She’s quiet again. Then: “So are you moving on now? Is that what brought you to the grand metropolis of Valladolid?”
“No. The wind just blew me there.”
“What? Like a plastic bag?”
“I prefer to think of myself as a ship. Like a sailboat.”
“But sailboats aren’t steered by the wind; they’re powered by it. There’s a difference.”
I look out the window. The jungle is everywhere. I look back at her. “Can you move on from something when you’re not sure what it is you’re moving on from?”
“You can move on from absolutely anything,” she replies. “But that does sound a little complicated.”
“It is,” I say. “Complicated.”
Kate doesn’t answer, and the silence stretches out, shimmery, like the road ahead of us.