“Ah, Dennis Wolfe and the Usual Suspects. I’m glad to see you guys are still playing here.”
I was seated at a table on the deck of Wet Willy’s Restaurant and Bar. Sherry and David were on stage, putting the finishing touches on setting up our musical equipment.
“Hey, Roger,” I said, to the tourist who had addressed me. “I didn’t see you last season. I thought maybe you had decided not to come to Belize on vacation anymore.”
“My wife and I have been here every April or May for the last twenty years,” he said. “Last year is the first time we didn’t make it to Ambergris Caye and I blame it all on my mother-in-law.”
“What happened?”
“My wife decided we were going to take her mother with us on vacation last year,” Roger said. “As soon as we agreed to bring her with us the old lady started talking about wanting to visit the Holy Land.”
“The Holy Land?”
“Yeah. They call it the Holy Land but they don’t even serve rum punch in most of those countries over there,” Roger said. “Anyway, she talked my old lady into it. That’s where we went on vacation last year.”
“How was it?” I asked. “Pretty bad?”
“Not all bad,” Roger said. “My mother-in-law got food poisoning and died.”
“Oh, my God! That must be a nightmare in a foreign country. Expensive, too.”
“It’s cheap for a funeral over there,” he said. “It only costs one hundred and fifty dollars to bury somebody. It costs sixteen thousand to ship the body back to the U.S.”
“So you had her buried in the Holy Land?”
“Hell no! Two thousand years ago they buried a guy over there and three days later he rose from the dead. For sixteen thousand bucks I just couldn’t take that chance.”
