“Ah, Mr. Dennis. It is good to see you señor.”
“Reuben, it is good to see you, too,” I said. “Thanks for letting me stay in your little house.”
“The little house is for my son,” Reuben said. “He’s working in Mexico right now but I know he wouldn’t mind you staying for a week.”
I was taking a five-day vacation in Reuben’s little village of about three hundred people. I had no pressure, no deadlines and nothing to do but sit on the porch all day.
“Who is that?” I asked Reuben, as we sat on the porch late that evening.
A beautiful woman dressed in black was carrying a bouquet of flowers to the little cemetery on the hill. She placed them on a grave and stood there for a moment.
“That is the widow Maradona,” he said. “She is the richest lady in our village. She might be the richest woman in Belize. Her husband was on a jetliner that crashed on the way back from the U.S. She got almost a million U.S. dollars from the insurance company.”
“Wow!”
I watched as the widow left the grave site. She began to walk backwards down the path and all the way out of the cemetery gate. It seemed strange to me but she did it the same way for four days in a row. On the fifth day my curiosity got the best of me.
“Excuse me, señora,” I said, as she passed by the fence. “I find it admirable that you put flowers on your husband’s grave every day but why do you always back out of the cemetery?”
“When he was alive my husband always talked about my butt,” she said. “One thing he always said was, ‘Maria, you got one fine butt. It’s the kind that bring a dead man to life,’ and I’m not taking any chances.”
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