“Do you need anything?” Kamara asked.
Slowly, Tracy smiled. She moved forward now, closer to Kamara, too close, her face against Kamara’s. “You will take your clothes off for me,” she said.
“Yes.” Kamara kept her belly sucked in until Tracy said, “Good. But not today. Today isn’t a good day,” and disappeared into the room.
Even before Kamara looked at Josh the next afternoon, she knew he hadn’t won. He was sitting in front of a plate of cookies, drinking a glass of milk, with Neil standing beside him. A pretty blond woman wearing ill-fitting jeans was looking at the photographs of Josh posted on the fridge.
“Hi, Kamara. We just got back,” Neil said. “Josh was fantastic. He really deserved to win. He was clearly the kid who had worked the hardest.”
Kamara ruffled Josh’s hair. “Hello, Joshy.”
“Hi, Kamara,” Josh said, and stuffed a cookie into his mouth.
“This is Maren,” Neil said. “She’s Josh’s French teacher.”
The woman said hi and shook Kamara’s hand and then went into the den. The jeans dug into her crotch and the sides of her face were stained with a too-cheery shade of blusher and she was nothing like Kamara imagined a French teacher would be.
“The Read-A-Thon ate into their lesson time, so I thought they might have the lesson here and Maren was sweet enough to say yes. It’s okay, Kamara?” Neil asked.
“Of course.” And all of a sudden, she liked Neil again and she liked the way the blinds sliced up the sunlight coming into the kitchen and she liked that the French teacher was here because when the lesson started, she would go down and ask Tracy if it was the right time to take off her clothes. She was wearing a new balconet bra.
“I’m worried,” Neil said. “I think I’m consoling him with a sugar overload. He’s had two lollipops. Plus we stopped at Baskin-Robbins.” Neil was whispering even though Josh could hear. It was the same unnecessarily hushed tone that Neil had used to tell her about the books he’d donated to Josh’s pre-K class at Temple Beth Hillel, books that were about Ethiopian Jews, illustrated with pictures of people where skin was the color of burnished earth, but Josh said the teacher had never read the books to the class. Kamara remembered the way Neil had grasped her hand gratefully after she’d said “Josh will be fine,” as if all Neil needed was to have somebody say that.
Now, Kamara said, “He’ll get over it.”
Neil nodded slowly. “I don’t know.”
She reached out and squeezed Neil’s hand. She felt filled with a generosity of spirit.
“Thanks, Kamara.” Neil paused. “I better go. I’ll be late today. Is it okay if you make dinner?”
“Of course.” Kamara smiled again. Perhaps there might be time to go back down to the basement while Josh ate his dinner, perhaps Tracy would ask her to stay and she would call Tobechi and tell him there had been an emergency and she needed to take care of Josh overnight. The door that led to the basement opened. Kamara’s excitement brought a dull throbbing to her temples, and the throbbing intensified when Tracy appeared in her leggings and her paint-stained shirt. She hugged and kissed Josh. “Hey, you are my winner, buddy, my special winner.”
Kamara was pleased that Tracy did not kiss Neil, that they said “Hi, you” to each other as though they were brother and sister.
“Hey, Kamara,” Tracy said, and Kamara told herself that the reason Tracy seemed normal, not absolutely delighted to see her, was that she did not want Neil to know.
Tracy opened the fridge, took an apple, and sighed. “I’m so stuck. So stuck,” she said.
“It’ll be fine,” Neil murmured. And then, raising his voice so that Maren, in the den, would hear, he added, “You haven’t met Maren, have you?”
Neil introduced them. Maren extended her hand and Tracy took it.
“Are you wearing contacts?” Tracy asked.
“Contacts? No.”
“You have the most unusual eyes. Violet.” Tracy was still holding Maren’s hand.
“Oh. Thank you!” Maren giggled nervously.
“They really are violet.”
“Oh … yes, I think so.”
“Have you ever been an artist’s model?”
“Oh … no …” More giggles.