by K C Ames
A few people perused the bookstore part of the café, but they did so while waiting for their food and coffee orders. So she was mostly helping Mindy keep up with the orders.
It should be cafe slash bookstore. Dana sighed to herself. Oh, stop feeling sorry for yourself, she soon chastised herself.
Amalfi Soto, who was the niece of Dana’s property caretaker, had become a talented barista and a real pro. A whiz at making lattes, espressos, Americanos, mochas, and anything else that might be ordered. But lattes, teas, and straight up black coffee were the most popular items people ordered.
After fifteen minutes of nonstop customers, Dana looked up from behind the counter, and there were more people lining up. She blew a strand of brown hair away from her face.
“You guys weren’t kidding about how busy we would get,” Dana said between breaths.
There were always rumors that the reality show was coming back to town until they would read that they were going to another part of the world. The first confirmation that it was coming back to town was two months earlier, when a twenty-something-year-old assistant producer named Henry Robertson walked into the bookstore slash cafe to give them the spiel he had given to all the other business owners in Ark Row about how they were good for business and they wanted to be good neighbors and cause as little disruption as possible to their everyday life, yada, yada, yada. He seemed to be on autopilot by the time he made it to the bookstore slash cafe.
Dana knew that although assistant producer sounded like a fancy title, they were at the bottom rung of the production crew. They were the ones doing the grunt work that Henry was doing of going business to business then home to home giving the same spiel, over and over.
She had overheard Henry tell Amalfi, who had been flirting with the handsome young man, what he actually did when she asked if it was glamorous.
He scoffed. “Hardly. My official title is assistant line producer, and that just means I’m a glorified go-for at the beck and call of the line producer who manages the day-to-day activities of the set, which is why I get to do this and he doesn’t,” he said, sounding upset.
He spent the week before the production team arrived doing just that: going door to door like a political candidate, handing out a folder with the permanent information about the shooting schedule tucked in the folds inside which had all the information about their arrival and the strict rules of keeping away from the island during shooting.
Dana wondered how much that had cost them, to secure the island for themselves.
Dana had shrugged back then. “I don’t have a boat, so that won’t be a problem,” she told him.
An hour after the crewmembers had descended into the cafe like a swarm of locusts on a farmer’s crop, things quieted down again.
Dana, Mindy, Leo, and Amalfi could finally take a break.
“It takes a crew of about a hundred to film that show,” Mindy said. “I think they all showed up just now.”
“A hungry crew that downs coffee by the gallon and bagels by the metric ton. I wish they would film here every year,” Leo added with a wide grin.
“I don’t know about that, it was crazy busy,” Dana said, having experienced the busiest day she had encountered at the cafe.
“Do you watch the show?” Leo asked Dana.
“Not really. I watched the first couple seasons then lost interest.”
“I love it,” Amalfi said.
It had been an interesting premise to Dana when the show first aired. The cast members were referred to as castaways; they were whisked away from the comforts of their first-world lives and were supposedly marooned on a deserted island. Each castaway competed against each other in a series of over-the-top challenges until the last man or woman left standing was declared the winner and awarded the grand prize of a cool one million bucks.
The runner-up won $100,000 dollars, and the third prize was worth $75,000 dollars.
All dozen castaways were paid $20,000 plus all their expenses for appearing on the show. Not a bad gig if you were willing to put up with the backstabbing, the elements, and grandstanding for the cameras.
Dana had loved the first season, and gave serious consideration into sending in her own audition tape for the second season but chickened out.
By the third season, the show had lost its luster for her. It was the same old, and the show was taken a much more drama-for-the-sake-of-drama approach, so she tuned out by mid-season and had watched none of the subsequent seasons.
She didn’t even know that they had filmed in Costa Rica until the word spread through the small beach community that they were in the running for the upcoming season.
“I didn’t even know they had filmed out here before,” Dana said.
“Isla Santa Rita is right up their alley,” Mindy explained.
“It’s remote, with a choppy and rough boat ride to get there. And aside from a few marine biologists, the island is inhabited,” Leo added.
“It used to be a prison, right?” Dana asked.
“Yes, but that was a long time ago. Back in the nineteenth century. The worst of the worst from all over Central America were dumped there to serve out their sentences,” Mindy explained.
“Sounds like the book by Papillon,” Dana said.
Leo shrugged and said, “Haven’t read the book, but the movie with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman was pretty good.”
Mindy and Dana agreed.
“Wait, it was Charlie Hunnam and Rami Malek,” Amalfi added, sounding confused.
“I feel so old, again,” Dana said as everyone started to laugh.
“Anyway,” Mindy said. “After ten or twenty years, they closed down the prison, and in the early twentieth century, it became a leper colony, but that closed down in the nineteen forties and it’s been abandoned ever since. The old prison buildings are crumbling piles of concrete.”
“What about the scientists on the island?” Dana asked.
“They’re on the other side of the island, but they’re usually not there during the rainy season as much, so the producers have the whole island for themselves.”
“A penal colony then a leper colony, no wonder the producers love shooting there,” Dana said.
“Well, I don’t know how rough they have it in real life, since they’re surrounded by a big crew including medics and nurses, but as you can see, it’s good for business,” Leo said, waving his arm at the empty coffee cups and plates.
“I even sold a few books,” Dana said, smiling.
“Well, not everyone in town was happy about them coming into town,” Mindy said.
Dana knew she meant the non-business-owning expats that had moved to town to live off the beaten path.
They eschewed the circus-like lives they left, only to have the circus move into their small, quiet town.
The older locals were not fans of the hoopla the production brought to town, either.
“A bunch of nonsense, if you ask me,” eighty-one-year-old Doña Amada had told Dana a few weeks ago.
“They take over everything. Can’t get a table at the Qué Vista restaurant or Oceanview or anywhere in town. And all those big, fancy trucks driving fast through town are annoying.”
“Well, it’s only for a month, and most of the time they’re on the island anyway, so it’s not a constant inconvenience. And I hate to say it, but they’re great for business, especially during the off-season,” Maria Rivera, the owner of the Qué Vista Restaurant, had told her.
As they were closing up for the day, Dana thought the production people didn’t seem as annoying as they had warned her.
“The people didn’t seem that bad,” Dana said.
“That was the crew. Wait till you run into the cast and the producers,” Mindy warned.
Dana shrugged. How bad could it be? she thought.
Three
After a busy day at the bookstore slash cafe, Dana was looking forward to relaxing in the evening.
They closed the shop at six p.m. and
Dana hopped into Big Red. That was the nickname she had given the 1948 red Jeep Willys that she inherited from her uncle along with the beach house.
Her uncle loved that Jeep and had refurbished it a couple years before he died. After tooling around town and off-roading with Big Red the last few months, Dana understood why her uncle loved that little Jeep so much. It was a blast.
The first time she had laid eyes on the vehicle, she thought about Radar O'Reilly tooling around in those Army jeeps on M*A*S*H, just that her Jeep was painted cherry red, not army green.
But from the moment she fired the vehicle up, shifted into gear, and put her foot on the accelerator, she was a fan of Big Red.
The little Jeep was made for the ruggedness of the Nicoya Peninsula and the coastal beach towns of the Guanacaste Province and the Nosara District, where a lot of the roads weren’t paved and those that were paved were littered with potholes the size of Texas.
That was why the most popular mode of transportation around town were Quad ATVs which Big Mike rented at his Surf Shop. He earned more from that than the business surfing brought in. Tourists loved riding around the beach in Quads.
Since it was the rainy season, Dana had the black vinyl soft top rolled up, but in the summer she loved buzzing around town without the soft top, feeling the mixture of the warm winds and the salty cool breezes off the Pacific Ocean in her hair and the hot sun kissing her face. Even though she had to take a mouthful of kicked-up dirt and dust from time to time, it was worth it.
She didn’t have to worry about that today. It had rained hard in the morning but the water had dissipated by mid-afternoon, although the gray skies still hung around menacingly above, threatening to unleash another downpour. Dana was hoping Mother Nature was all bark and no bite so she could enjoy a dry evening.
As usual, it was pitch-dark out by the time she got home. The sun rose early in the tropics, by five thirty a.m., and went to bed early. By six p.m., darkness took over year-round.
The drive from the cafe to Casa Verde was just a few minutes long, which reminded her how much she did not miss the San Francisco Bay Area commute.
She got home and got out of her clothes, which smelled of old paperbacks, coffee, onion bagels, and cream cheese. She showered and dressed for dinner.
She was excited that Benny Campos was coming to town. Benny was an attorney in the capital city of San José.
In fact, that’s how they met. He had been her uncle’s attorney who handled all the legal paperwork and the boatload of problems that came to Dana when she inherited the property.
He was handsome and had the same brown eyes and hair color as Dana.
He was born and raised around the capital city of San José, but his family owned property near Mariposa Beach for decades, which he had inherited years ago. His beach home was on the other side of town from where Dana lived, but in the tiny town of Mariposa Beach, that meant a ten-minute drive from door to door.
Since there wasn’t much business for an attorney in the tiny beach towns on the coast, Benny lived and worked in the capital.
He had a solo practice that specialized in real estate and immigration law catering to the expat community. Most of his clients were from abroad, the bulk from the United States and Canada.
At first, the relationship between Dana and Benny had been strictly professional even though a platonic friendship quickly developed.
That changed after a homicidal book collector tried to kill them both, an encounter that left Benny with a terrible concussion that took him months to recover from. He spent weeks in Mariposa Beach recovering, and the two of them became even closer until neither of them could keep their romantic feelings from each other.
The relationship evolved slowly and naturally, and she liked that. She had gone down the road of moving too fast in a relationship that eventually failed, so she figured it was time to try a different approach.
She didn’t want to be like that fly that kept hurling itself against the same spot of the window over and over rather than move a little towards the open window.
They were both in their mid-thirties and divorced, and she was finding dating was much less chaotic than in her early twenties.
There were other challenges. He had a nine-year-old daughter, which terrified Dana. She liked kids, but the idea of being the girlfriend of a tween’s dad kept her up at night. But when Beatrice Campos had proven to be a darling young girl, she had put aside all the fears of the problem child.
The bigger challenge for her turned out to be the distance. It was difficult starting a new relationship with someone who lived over one hundred fifty miles away. The mostly two-lane highway system that was jam-packed with cars, buses, and semitrucks meant being stuck behind an exhaust-spewing vehicle for four to five hours on a good day.
So their relationship was mostly via video chats on WhatsApp and on the weekends when he would come down. But Dana didn’t want to think about any of that in that moment. He was on the way so they could enjoy a lovely dinner in town.
She checked her makeup, which she kept light. It was either too hot or too rainy for getting all gussied up in makeup, and besides she was living in the tropics now, where it wasn’t practical and made her stand out from the locals.
She double-checked her choice of attire and she still approved of the knee-length navy blue free-flowing dress she was wearing. It was light, and she loved the deep front pockets so she could leave the purse at home. It was perfect for a nice dinner on the beach.
She was looking forward to a nice, quiet, and romantic dinner. Little did she know then what the night had in store for them, which would be anything but peaceful, quiet, or romantic.
Four
Dana and Benny were waiting for a table for almost ten minutes at the Qué Vista Restaurant—a rarity for Mariposa Beach, especially for regular and good-tipping diners like them who usually would get the Henry Hill from Goodfellas priority seating treatment.
Maria Rivera, the owner of the beach restaurant, saw them waiting and hurried over.
“Hi, guys, I’m sorry for the wait. It’s these Hollywood people. It won’t be long, I promise.”
“It’s okay, I’m loving the extra business myself,” Dana said, smiling.
“It’s nice, but some of these people, I tell you—” Maria was saying before a loud commotion coming from behind interrupted her.
Dana looked over Maria’s shoulder towards the direction of a lot of yelling going on.
Maria turned around to witness the commotion, then she turned back towards Dana and Benny with an annoyed look on her face.
“See what I mean? Those two are on the show and they’re so drunk, especially the woman, so we refused to serve her anymore, so she yelled at us for a while and then they began yelling at each other. I thought they finally tired of yelling, but here we go, round three.” Maria sounded exasperated.
“Who are they—” Dana began to ask, but was cut off by the sound of glass shattering on the floor, causing everyone in the restaurant to turn their heads towards the source of the chaos: the arguing couple.
Dana and Benny did the same thing as they craned their heads towards the back of the restaurant, where all the commotion was coming from.
“Oh jeez,” Maria said with an exasperated expression as she took off towards the scene of the chaos.
Benny had caught the malfeasance in action when Dana and Maria were talking.
“She just threw a glass to the floor,” he explained, amused.
“Oh, my,” Dana said, craning her neck to get a better look.
Dana got the attention of Julio, the head waiter, and asked him who that was as she nodded in the chaos’s direction.
“Cast members from that reality show,” he replied with utter disdain.
The ruckus was happening at the back in one of the most popular tables in the restaurant, located on a wooden deck that was right on the berm of the beach, built on the white sand and within the swash zone of the Pacific Ocean me
re feet away.
Besides the delicious food and the serene beauty of the ocean, dining right on the beach was the main calling card for the restaurant, where you could enjoy a great meal to the gentle sounds of the waves crashing on the shore nearby.
The rains had held up, so it was a beautiful night out with a comforting sea breeze, but Mother Nature’s beauty and her generosity at holding back the rains couldn’t compete for attention with the two loud drunks hurling glassware and insults at each other.
Even though Dana was far away from the action, she couldn’t help but stare. It was like rubbernecking during a car accident. You don’t want to do it. You know you shouldn’t do it. But you do it anyway.
“Careful, you’re going to strain your neck,” Benny said teasingly.
Dana blushed. “Oh shush, I’m only human. I can’t look away,” she said as she continued to stare at the scene being caused by the good-looking couple.
It was becoming harder to ignore anyway, as they seemed to get louder and louder with every word spoken until they were just shouting at each other.
“No... no... no, I won’t shut up! You shut up! You liar!” the female shouted, slurring her words.
“Bravo, as usual, you’re making a scene!” the man shouted back.
“It’s getting a bit ridiculous,” Benny said. His voice had changed from amused to annoyed.
Dana watched as Maria and Julio walked up to the table of the battling cast mates.
She couldn’t hear what Maria said, since she was speaking in her normal, calm, respectful voice, but Dana heard the female cast member’s muttered response loudly.
“No, I won’t keep it down! Do you know who I am? And where is my stupid drink? I’m dying of thirst over here.”
To Dana, the woman’s voice sounded like nails on a chalkboard.
Maria said something else, then an even louder outburst.
“I’m not going anywhere! I’ll leave when I want to leave. You’re not the boss of me.”
Then she began to cuss Maria out with the vilest insults in the book as her male companion sneered at her but did nothing to stop it.