Cole’s mother is still sick. But today he looked rested. After school he met me at the chemistry lab and asked if I wanted to come over to Rita’s with him. It made me a little sad to think that he was introducing me to her—like despite all the flirting he was definitely saying that he and I are just friends.
“Will she mind?”
“Why would she mind? I’ve been telling her all about you, she wants to meet you!”
It was only three o’clock. “Will she be home from school yet?”
He laughed.
We didn’t take the bus but walked all the way down to Lake Street. The trees all had little green buds on them, and small brown and black sparrows were hopping around crazily on the lawns and bushes and trees like they had been waiting all winter for today! Cole jumped up in the air when a tree branch hung low, tried to swing on it, or pluck a leaf, or pull it down.
My heart was beating so fast I was afraid he’d be able to see it pounding right through my T-shirt—the black one with the Above & Beyond lyric on it in big white letters: YOU WERE THE SUN AND MOON TO ME. And just when I was thinking that, a sparrow came flying straight at us only a foot or two above our heads! I jumped to the side with an embarrassing yelp at the same time that Cole jumped up and tried to grab it—narrowly missing!
“What were you going to do if you caught it?” I laughed at him.
“Let you hold it in your hands!” he said, his voice full of energy. “So you could feel its little heart beating four hundred sixty times a minute. Can you believe that—seven and a half times a second! And that’s at rest!” He was smiling and shaking his head incredulously.
I thought I would melt into the sidewalk right in that spot.
Eventually we got to Rita’s house on Harriet Avenue South and went around to the side door. In the yard was a weird old sculpture of an owl made with beer cans and driftwood and wire. Cole reached behind the sculpture and pulled out a key, then unlocked the door. We walked into a hallway that was hung with purple tapestries that had little round mirrors sewed into them. The house smelled like burnt sugar. We walked farther into a cozy, cluttered living room where an enormous almost white painting hung over the couch. But after a minute, I could see shapes of brushy pale blues and strange grays and light pinks. It was hard to say exactly what it was a picture of—when I looked at it, I could feel the wind roaring off of the lakes in the winter. I shivered and couldn’t stop staring.
“Ah . . . ,” Cole said as he watched me looking at it. “She paints these.” He gestured around the room, and I noticed there were three more.
“Anybody home?” Cole called.
“Cole!” A woman, who I assumed was Rita’s mom, came out holding a little torch, the kind we sometimes use in chemistry class. She was thin and had an angular, weathered face, was wearing bright-red lipstick and a short black dress. She wore many bangle bracelets. Had salt-and-pepper hair held up in a silver clip that looked like a bird skull. She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek.
“Come in, I’m having a hell of a time making the top of the crème brûlée. Maybe you can do it.” She lowered her voice a bit as if the next sentence was meant only for him. “I wanted to have something fancy for the special occasion.”
She turned to me. “You must be Atty.” She gave me a big hug, then pulled back and looked at my face, smiling. “I’m Rita.”
I probably looked as shocked as I felt.
She said, “You okay?”
“I thought you were a kid, I mean—before I met you,” I said. “Like our age.” All the stories Cole had told me were about him and Rita listening to music or studying or building weird sculptures in her yard, and it never occurred to me that she was not our age.
She started laughing. “Well, inside maybe, but . . . Come in, come in.”
The windowsills in her kitchen were filled with knickknacks. The kitchen itself was a mess, dishes and pans in the sink, cabinet doors flung open. There were several pastry tins of custard lined up on the counter and a bag of sugar next to them.
Rita handed me the crème brûlée torch. “Your girlfriend’s good at science, right?” she asked Cole. I felt a sudden cringing excitement when she said the word girlfriend, like I almost couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t look at Cole. I was waiting for him to say I wasn’t his girlfriend.
“And you’re French too, right?” Rita asked me. Her eyes were bright and blue.
Cole was grinning at both of us.
“Ah . . . my father’s Haitian,” I said.
“Well close enough.”
She poured a layer of sugar over the custard, and I held the torch above it trying to get the right angle to melt it. It was surprisingly satisfying watching the sugar change form.
I handed the torch to Cole so he could do the next one, and his fingers brushed mine and I could feel a pull between us, like a quiet weight was pressing us together.
When we were done we went out and sat on Rita’s screened-in porch and ate crème brûlée and drank coffee.
Rita asked me a million questions about trance music, and then she brought out all her old cassette tapes and we listened to them. She had Patti Smith, Prince, and the Clash, and David Bowie, Parliament, and tons of jazz: John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman. She had good taste in music for an old person. She asked me how Cole and I met, and then I asked her how Cole and she met.
“In the delivery room the day he was born!” she said, laughing.
“Rita is my mom’s best friend,” Cole said quietly.
The two exchanged a look that was sad and strange and that I didn’t understand.
“How’s she doing?” Rita asked.
“Better today,” Cole said. And I wondered if his mother had some terrible disease.
“Has she been to the doctors?” I asked.
Rita gave Cole a loving look.
“Many times,” she said.