He punches the air with his fist, then holds out his hand to shake. “Consider me your comrade in amends.”
We spend the next hour drinking coffee, making lists, and plotting a love letter delivery plan to make up for all my past lies. The addresses aren’t terribly hard to find. A few Google searches for property records and home ownerships reveal most of the homes. An unlisted number is meaningless in the Internet age. When we leave, I ride my bike home to my mom’s. Maybe, just maybe, as I send anonymous letters, I can start to restore some of the love that was stolen.
Matter can neither be created nor destroyed, but it can change forms; the bad becomes good, the wrongs start to right.
The way it should be.
I slam on my brakes, thrilling when I see a man in a purple shirt walking toward Central Park West.
Chapter Six
Kennedy
My parents loved to cook together. That was their thing. Their bond. They loved to cook and they loved to entertain. When I was younger, we had one of those homes where their friends would drop in on Saturday afternoons, have wine and cheese, olives and pastries.
One time my mom’s friend Patricia came by with her husband and their daughter, Catey, who was my age. I hit it off with Catey, and we became best friends at the tail end of third grade and then throughout most of middle school. We did everything together—discovered new music, got our periods at the same time, and shopped for clothes and makeup. We both became hooked on coffee drinks at the same time too. Back then, I was more into the froufrou drinks, while Catey was already on coffee.
“I’m so tough,” she said, after ordering a latte to my mocha chip Frappuccino on our first trip to the coffee shop around the corner.
“Let’s see who can finish her drink first,” I said as the nearby espresso machine whirred and hummed as a barista made drinks.
“No fair. Yours is cold. Mine is hot. It’s harder to drink hot drinks fast,” she pointed out, swiping her light-blond hair away from her face.
“Yeah, but you’re underestimating the potential for a brain freeze to knock me out of the battle.”
“Oh, good point!” she said, then added cream to her latte. “This’ll help me keep up.”
We chugged our drinks, laughing and wiping foam and mocha from our lips, and by the time we were both halfway through, we declared it a tie and high-fived.
“We should always make sure things end up in a tie. Then we both win.”
“Always,” I seconded.
We were friends for several years. Looking back, it’s amazing my mom took as long as she did to hit on Catey’s dad, Adam. But sure enough, she tapped him for a ride on the Jewel Express when Catey and I were twelve. He was a British historian, and she wanted to make sure the final treatment for Lords and Ladies hit the mark. All in the name of valiant research and historical accuracy, Catey’s dad started coming over in the afternoons, to help my mom. He’d pick up Catey from school, bring her along, and our friendship became their cover-up. They told us to stay upstairs, because we were loud by then, chatting and dancing to music, and that was better done behind the closed door of my bedroom, so they could focus on the fine-tuning of the scripts.
But one time, we were hungry and we left my bedroom, flying down the stairs to the kitchen to grab some pretzels.
When I hit the landing, I was greeted with one of the loudest moans I’d ever heard. A reckless “Oh God” blared from my mother’s room. My face burned as the awful soundtrack of her path to pleasure continued. A rhythmic groaning that matched the banging of the headboard, and made my gut twist in mangled knots from the shame.
I turned to Catey, red flooding my cheeks. “Um, I think our parents are … ,” but I couldn’t finish the sentence, so I said, “I’m not hungry anymore.”
“Me neither,” she said, and we went back upstairs, listless defeated soldiers, broken in battle from a surprise attack.
We were silent and worked on homework quietly on opposite corners of my bedroom until her dad tucked in his shirt, zipped his pants, and gathered up his daughter to head home. After all, what do you say after you hear your mom screwing your friend’s dad, and vice versa?
Nothing. You say nothing.
Before the next party, my mom pulled me aside and reminded me that the reason Adam spent so much time at the house was for research.
“Research, honey. If your dad asks, Adam is here for research.”
“Research,” I repeated.
“You’re a good girl,” she said with a smile and a kiss, and I smiled back. Because that’s what I had to do. Store up the names of men I was told to keep from my dad. Keep it quiet, don’t mention it, keep calm and carry on. I didn’t mention it. Not to anyone. I stuffed all the names inside of me. My plan was to do the same with Catey—pretend it never happened when I saw her. We could move on and stay friends. I was sure of it. All we had to do was make believe nothing had ever happened. That’s what my mom had taught me.
But Catey didn’t come to the next party. When her parents showed up, they said she was spending the night at another friend’s house.
I learned then that a friendship could die.
*
I see purple and my breath hitches. I slam my feet into the brakes and hop off my bike, walking it the final few feet to him, across the street from the park. I unsnap my helmet and sling it over the handlebars.
“Did you just leave my house?”
He nods. “Going to join some friends at Roseland to see a band.”