“Let me think about that,” Alejo said. “We’ll find something fun for them to do.”
“Bandit can draw,” Sam said.
Alejo turned to the raccoon. “That’s cool.”
“He can. Bandit, show him.” Sam made writing motions with his fingers.
Alejo watched as the raccoon looked around, then flitted to the chalk Alejo used for marking wood for cutting. The raccoon crouched on a plank, held the chalk in both tiny hands, and began to draw tiny, delicate leaves.
Alejo bent down. “Hey, this is really nifty.”
Then all four stilled to alertness, their heads turned toward the street. Alejo caught the sound of gravel crunching under tires. Four pops, and Sam’s friends vanished.
Alejo stepped out—and relaxed when he saw a pickup truck full of gardening equipment, and a couple of workers. They let themselves into a neighbor’s gate.
But Sam’s friends did not return. Alejo went back to sanding, making a mental note to do the sawing when Sam was at school. Sam chattered on about all the things his friends could do—“Ratty can climb anything!”—until it was a quarter to six.
“We’d better call it a day, and go wash our hands. Didn’t your mom say she had pizza baking?”
“Pizza,” Sam said happily, skipping beside Alejo. He kept talking all the way to the house. As they entered, he was saying, “…and this year, I learnedperspective. It’s the coolest trick, and everything looks 3-D, and Ms. Nelson—that’s my teacher—she said, that’s the first step to being a real artist!”
“If you make art,” Alejo said, “you’re already an artist.”
“Really? Pater said I can’t be an artist until I get paid, and anyway it’s only a hobby, not a man’s work.”
“Maybe he’s forgotten that the men and women who make anime and cartoons are artists, and they get paid a lot,” Alejo said as they passed into the kitchen.
“Really?”
Alejo glanced past him to Wendy, who stood by the table with a salad in her hands, her expression searching. But the moment she noticed Sam talking, her face brightened. “Sam, go wash your hands,” she said.
Sam trotted off, and Alejo said, “It seems you’ve got a budding artist here.”
Wendy said, “He’s always drawing, when he’s not outside playing.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “His father doesn’t like it, but Sam loves to make comic books. Tiny ones, for raccoons and squirrels.”
“He told me a little about that.”
“He did?” Wendy’s eyes widened, and her cheeks pinked with pleasure. She murmured, “He’s never told anyone that, ever since his father tried to get him to stop drawing.”
“What’s wrong with art?”
“It’s not art, it’s mere illustration. Not prestigious enough for the Champlains. Also, they don’t believe a man can make a living at it.”
“I guess that’s true for some, but Sam is only nine. I don’t know many people who knew what they wanted to do at nine. I wanted to be a detective and a superhero, as I recall. Emphasis on the superhero, and I used to memorize the locations of phonebooths in case I might have to duck into one to change into my superhero outfit.”
Wendy’s eyes crinkled as she uttered a tiny laugh. Sam reappeared then, followed by Eve and Lilly, and they sat down to several kinds of pizza, with meat and without.
Alejo enjoyed the crunch of the crust and the savor of the sauce. He could taste red wine in it. But when his eyes met Wendy’s over the dishes, he forgot what he was eating. There was question in the slight pucker of her forehead, but below that, a fleeting warmth. A little shy, but there, and it was all he could do not to leap over the table, scattering dishes left and right, to just hold her. His arms ached to hold her.
MATE!Insisted the serpent, then his lion nature once again climbed over the serpent.PRIDE!
Everyone helped to get the kitchen spick and span, and then Wendy and Sam went off so the boy could get his homework done. Alejo longed to go with them. They were both starved for hugs. He could feel that need as the invisible bond between them all strengthened. Soon, soon, he promised himself.
He decided to occupy his time until he could see Wendy again by tackling the phone messages, which had gotten even longer. Twelve spams were summarily shot into the ether, then appeared an actual message, from a number he’d never seen before. It was from Joey Hu, asking if he and his wife Doris could visit Godiva’s house tomorrow, directly after his last class, which ended at two. Alejo saw that Mikhail Long was included in the conversation.
They agreed to meet at the back of Godiva’s garden just after two. Alejo zapped two more spams, and there was one from his dad:
Hijo: you’ve been pretty quiet. Everything okay?
