Three weeks with my brother - Nicholas Sparks [31]
Though I laughed, the guide glowered. He was Maya, as were most Guatemalans who lived in the area, and I’m sure he thought we were insulting him or his culture. When he didn’t crack a smile, Micah reluctantly got up from the stone. As we began trailing after the group, I shook my head.
“Where do you come up with these ideas?” I asked in disbelief.
Micah laughed. “He didn’t like that much, did he?”
I shook my head. “He looked pretty mad, and so did the people running the tour. You’re insulting their culture. You’re going to get us in trouble.”
“Ah, they’ll get over it. They won’t even remember it.”
They did, of course. An hour later, one of the people who worked for TCS sidled up to us as we were walking. She was maybe a dozen years older than we were and had worked on numerous tours. She was well versed in the art of sizing people up quickly.
“You two are going to cause trouble on this trip, aren’t you?” she observed.
We walked along what was once the main boulevard entering Tikal, touring the ruins of a palace while howler monkeys screeched their warnings overhead. From there, we moved on to the main plaza.
Two pyramids lie at either end of Tikal’s main plaza. They are among the most photographed of all Mayan pyramids, and while one of the pyramids is off-limits to climbers, we were allowed to scale the second one.
At the top, the view was breathtaking. Micah finally reached Christine, and when he was finished with the call, we sat on the edge of the pyramid, our feet dangling beneath us. The ground was hundreds of feet below, and we could see other members of the tour, clustered in small groups throughout the ancient plaza. Since only a few wanted to make the climb, we had the place to ourselves.
“So how’s Christine?” I asked.
“She’s all right. Says she misses me.”
“How’s life on the home front so far?”
He smiled. “She’s going a little crazy. Unlike Cat, she isn’t used to me being gone. She kept talking about how busy she was—she hasn’t stopped since I went to the airport. She said it’s been four days of hell, and that she’s going to call Cathy for moral support.”
I smiled. “Tell her to call while the older kids are in school. Otherwise, Cat won’t have a chance to talk to her. Once all five are home, the house goes crazy. Especially between five and nine. We call those the witching hours. That’s when the little ones get tired, the older ones groan about having to do their homework, she starts cooking dinner—and still somehow manages to run the kids from one practice to the next. After that comes bath time, and if you’ve ever tried to get five kids tubbing and showering at once, you know it’s not exactly relaxing. She’s got such a good attitude about it. She’s a great wife, but she’s a genius as a mother.”
Micah put his arm around me. “We married well, didn’t we?”
“Yeah, we did,” I admitted. “I think that’s what we learned from mom. What to look for when we got married, I mean. We both married smart women with big hearts, who adore their children unequivocally. That’s what mom taught us.”
“Are you saying I essentially married my mother?”
“We both did.”
He cocked an eyebrow. “What did we learn from dad?”
“Anger management?” I cracked. “You know, the tongue thing?”
He laughed. “Yeah, that was something, wasn’t it? Man, he looked pretty scary when he did that. It still gives me nightmares.” He glanced at me. “Did I tell you I did that to Alli once? Just to see how she’d react?”
“And?”
“She ran away screaming and wouldn’t come out of her room.”
I laughed. “No, what I think we got from dad was our love of learning,” I said after a moment.
“I think so, too. Growing up, I thought mom was smart. Very smart. But dad . . . he was in his own league.”
“They were quite a pair, weren’t they?”
“Yeah,” he said. “And they balanced each other out. Who knows how we would have turned out had they not gotten back together after our stint in Grand Island?”
On December 1, 1974, our family was reunited in Fair Oaks, California, a suburb just northeast of Sacramento.