She nodded once and left. Her voice boomed instructions across the kitchen. People ducked to their work.

I sipped the soup. It was delicious. I did not know what kartoffel suppe was and I wondered if my mother, who was a renowned cook in our community, would like it. I thought she would. I was hungry and I finished it quickly.

“So, was it good?” Nora Dowling demanded.

“Yes, ma’am,” I answered politely. “What was it?”

She looked at me in amazement. “Kartoffel suppe? It’s potato soup. That’s what it means.”

“Oh,” I said. I did not know that people made soup from potatoes. In my family, we did not. We ate the potatoes. “It’s one of the best meals I’ve had in a long time.”

Nora Dowling’s sullen face flashed with amusement. A laugh bubbled from her abundant bosom. “Ach du lieber Gott,” she exclaimed. “Meal? That’s not a meal. That’s soup.”

In that moment I experienced the first memorable cultural bewilderment of my life: there could be more to a meal than soup. In my family, on the farm, soup was a meal. Soup and cornbread. My mother made the soup with meats and vegetables and a sweet beef broth that stayed in the mouth with a filling aftertaste. We loved her meals of soup and cornbread.

“Now, you have the meal,” Nora Dowling crowed. She pivoted to the people in the kitchen. “He thinks soup is a meal,” she announced in a roar. A hard, sharp laugh dropped from her mouth. She muttered again, “Ach du lieber Gott.”

The meal that Nora Dowling placed before me was astonishing, grander than any I had ever eaten anywhere, the kind of meal that I had imagined in reading stories of banquets in foreign countries. I thought of my mother as I ate. I wished she were with me.

The baked chicken that Lila served was, as she had warned, overcooked and tough, but it was better than the asparagus and carrots. I was glad for the wine.

Lila sat at the table with me and occasionally glanced toward the couple huddled at the other table. She seemed fascinated by them. The woman was young and radiantly pretty, the man obviously older. His hair was gray, but he was slender, with the athletic look of a man who plays racquetball three days a week.

“Lord, Bobo,” Lila said behind her hands. “You should see that bed after they’ve been at it. Looks like elephants have wallowed in it.”

“Don’t you think that’s personal?” I asked.

Lila flicked away my righteousness with her fingers. “I’m not complaining,” she whispered. “Tell you the truth, it turns me on. You can smell sex in there after they leave. The place reeks of it.”

“Maybe they’re honeymooners,” I suggested.