“You say it like it was a dose of fungus.” Godiva looked puzzled.
“It was fine. Even fun! Just took me by surprise, is all. I wasn’t ready for that, especially with a stranger.”
“Okay. If you’re not ready, you’re not ready.” Godiva gave a short nod. “Nuff said.”
“I’d better get inside.” Jen flicked her thumb toward the studio door. “I need to be in there before the students arrive.”
“Speaking of. I’m pretty sure those cute little foreign girls are going to turn up any second. They really seemed to be taken with you.”
“Well, this class has teens in it,” Jen said. “They get credit for P.E. at the high school.”
“Yeah. It’s just, there’s something . . . funky about the way they dropped out of nowhere. The hot dude, too. Not that I’m complaining. Damn, no. If I can wrap words around that scrap you and he got into—which was something between a Hong Kong film of the sort I used to watch decades ago, and a tango—which is basically art porn with clothes on—I guarantee it’ll be my most popular book yet.”
Jen laughed as she opened the door to the studio. “I’m glad it worked for you.”
To her surprise, Godiva followed her inside. Jen couldn’t remember Godiva ever having been in there before.
“Whee-yoo,” Godiva whispered in what for her was an undervoice. “Does it always have this distinctive aroma of eau de sweat?”
Jen almost asked “What aroma?”
She breathed in. The studio was scrupulously clean, but the evidence that people had been working out hard here for a couple of decades was bound to seep into the woodwork. Even the air conditioning never quite did away with the faint whiff of clean sweat, but it was so familiar that she never noticed it. She smothered a laugh.
Godiva said, “What’s so funny? You think I’m a snob.”
“No!” Jen’s chuckle came out in a surprised squawk. “It’s just, I’ve been used to it ever since I was a kid.”
Godiva raised her brows. “A kid? I thought this karate-kung fu stuff was something you did with Robert.”
“True.” Jen looked back cautiously, and again the awful stab of guilt—that she was still alive and he wasn’t—was a mere echo of what it had been. “Robert hated sports. His study group, which included me though I was only a freshman, were all nerds and bookworms. When they were told they couldn’t graduate until they got their P.E. requirement in, he suggested we all take a martial arts class, which would be more aerobic than boring stuff like baseball, and maybe useful if anyone got mugged. I was so intimidated by their brains and academic awards that I didn’t dare tell him my dad had been teaching me Krav Maga since I was a kid.”
“Krav Maga? Even I’ve heard of that.” Godiva’s black eyes rounded. “Hardcore!”
“I think my dad learned it in Eastern Europe during the war. We were living in a tough neighborhood in those days.”
“But I take it you did tell Robert?”
“I kind of had to when we all went to our first lesson, and I knew a lot of the basic forms, and the instructor asked what I was doing in a beginner class.” Jen felt another bubble of laughter, small, but there. “It wasn’t long after that Robert asked me to join the Peace Corps with him. He was sure I could handle anything the world threw at us.”
“I take it that was Robert’s version of courtship?”
“Probably!” Jen shook her head, smiling. “I was so clueless, I had no idea he thought of me that way until he said we should get married first, to save trouble with paperwork and insurance while overseas.”
Godiva snorted a laugh. “Married, but not a wedding, I take it?”
Jen shook her head. “It was the seventies! Marriage—weddings—were Establishment. We went to City Hall to do the paperwork.” Jen hesitated, then said in her lightest voice, though it still cost her a pang all these years later, “And the next day he told me my wedding present was the vasectomy he got, so I would never have to take birth control.”
Godiva’s eyes narrowed. “Was that his idea or yours?”
“Oh, I followed his lead. I was barely out of my teens, and he was so idealistic. So dedicated to the Cause of Planet Earth. I was so proud that of all the women in our group, he picked me, though I was the youngest and the most awkward.”
“I well remember seventies attitudes.” Godiva smiled, then said, “Well, I’ve got to get this masterpiece loaded onto my computer, and the phone recharged before it goes totally dead. The rest of you can transfer stuff with a tap here and a swipe there, but I need to follow the steps.” She saluted, two gnarled fingers flicking her forehead, and walked out.
Jen turned away, lifting a hand to greet Master Reynaldo, the studio owner. Five students were inside the training area, the two older women already getting out the practice pads. The three teens giggled and whispered back and forth as they examined themselves in the floor to ceiling mirrors all down one wall.
“Start warming up,” Jen said.
Though she had already warmed up before meeting the others at the bakery, she took her place at the front and established a rhythm, which the four fell into. Students streaming in took their places and joined in. The class had nearly filled when four people walked in—Bird, Doris, and the two teenage girls, one in shorts and the other jeans. Both wore T-shirts, one with a Gintama character on i