“You like?” da Vinci said, pointing to the exquisite landscaping in front of the office complex.
I said yes without so much as looking at his handiwork. “I like very much,” I told him.
As we passed by the Hallmark Stables on the way back to my house, da Vinci's eyes lit up upon seeing the horses grazing in the field. “Da Vinci rides horses,” he said longingly.
I glanced at the dozen or so animals in the pasture. I'd passed them nearly every day going home, but I'd never really noticed them before. Like Joel, I'd been raised a city girl in Dallas before moving to Austin to go to college, met Joel and, well, stayed and had babies and did the New York Times crossword puzzle every day. Was there more to a happy life than that?
I'd never ridden a horse in my life, save for pony rides at birthday parties. The expansion of Austin from a small city to sprawling suburbia meant occasionally the city and the country collided. “You ride horses? Well, we could arrange that.” As a stranger in a strange land, da Vinci was coping well, but I could sense he missed more than just his mama back home. If riding a horse would make him happy, then it was the least I could do.
Da Vinci ran his dirty fingers through his longish hair and instead of cringing at the thought of all that dirt, the idea of washing his hair flitted through my brain. Here, let me help you with that, I could say. My favorite part of getting my hair done was the scalp massage, and it was the first time I felt compelled to wash anyone's hair other than my children's. Something could be seriously wrong with me.
We passed by the string of fast food chains I'd sworn off, but da Vinci practically panted like a dog. “What you say, donut holes on way home?”
I hadn't eaten junk food in forty-eight hours. I practically jumped the curb as I screeched into Dunkin Donuts. How I'd missed thee!
Da Vinci and I made a great team. We finished off 36 Munchkins in under ten minutes, dunking them in coffee and rolling our eyes in sugared ecstasy.
“I love American food,” da Vinci said, patting his tight abs.
“It's terrible for you,” I said, popping the last chocolate-cake donut hole in my mouth, savoring the crunchy outside and doughy center. “It will make you fat.”
Da Vinci reached over and gently wiped away a large sugar crumb from my lip. “Then we jog extra mile tomorrow morning to work fat off bodies.”
Fireworks went off in my head, proof that da Vinci had an effect on me. I'd sworn the only way anyone was getting me to run was to be chasing me with a machete. But to spend more time with da Vinci and possibly lose a few pounds in the process? I'd be an idiot to turn that down.
I dropped da Vinci off at the house, reminding him about his early classes at UT the next day. I offered to drive him because I needed to visit the library for more research for my dissertation. Honest.
Da Vinci thanked me with his smile, something like a physical tip that was far better than money ever would be. “We ride together,” da Vinci said. “Da Vinci teach Mona Lisa to ride.” It dawned on me he didn't mean the car, but horses, but I was too caught up by my nickname.
Mona Lisa: the famed art of the pseudo-smiling brunette painted in the 1500s and the nickname given to one blonde widow by her sexy tenant. I had figured out the Mona Lisa within Ramona Elise in college in my first linguistics class. My parents hadn't been that clever on purpose. They had just lumped two family names together as so many expecting parents do: Ramona for my paternal grandmother and Elise for my maternal great-grandmother. It was an accident, yet Anh believed my secret moniker and da Vinci's appearance were no accident at all.
I didn't mind da Vinci giving me a nickname, forming some bond that only we shared. I never considered bonding with da Vinci on purpose. But it was an unwritten rule that no teacher could date students, so my idea of bonding did not go beyond that of one caring teacher helping out a student.
As I stepped into the beautiful marble foyer at the archdiocese where I was to meet with Deacon Friar (a man who had lived up to his moniker, another example of name revealing one's destiny), I stared at the largest reproduction of the da Vinci's Last Supper that I'd ever seen. The picture was at least twenty feet wide, so large that I could study the expressions of the disciples and the hands of Jesus, and I shuddered. The work was pure genius.
I thought of Joel and our last supper together, the night before his collapse on the basketball court, an hour after our nonverbal argument; we ate pizza, but not just any pizza: Joel's favorite, the expensive kind we could only afford once a month. It was hand-tossed by an Italian, the short, mustached man who had come to America with only a dream in his back pocket and a recipe for the crispiest yet gooiest pizza I'd ever tasted. I smiled at the memory. I hadn't thought about Joel's last supper before that moment. I'd thought about his last breakfast: Wheaties. And his last snack: peanut butter on crackers before he headed out to the park to play a pickup game with the neighbors. But his last real meal had been his favorite, something that suddenly comforted me greatly.
When Deacon Friar caught me studying the painting, I hadn't realized I had tears in my eyes, but not from the artwork. “It's quite beautiful, isn't it?”
I wiped my eyes and nodded, taking in Deacon Friar's appearance. I expected him to look more like a friar from the seventeenth century, wearing a brown robe beneath a bald head. Yet he appeared very modern, tall and attractive with salt-and-pepper hair and a face full of compassion that fit his profession. Gabriella had told me he was a widower with two grown boys, and that losing his wife had pushed him into the Church in a way that only a loss of such magnitude could. I had said half-jokingly that I should join a convent after losing Joel. Escaping from the world for nothing but 24/7 silence and solitude had seemed like a good fix at the time, but knowing how crazy the quiet around my home made me, I knew it would be even worse if I went somewhere where it was expected. Besides, I was no nun.
I felt a kinship with Deacon Friar before our eyes ever met. When they did, I found his to be kind, chocolate-brown eyes beneath dark brows. He wore glasses with tiny silver frames accentuating what already seemed a very intellectual face. He carried himself with ease, and as his warm handshake met my cold hands, I instantly felt him to be my spiritual superior. If spirituality grew along the lines of biology, mine would be considered a toddler, able only to articulate that I believed, but unable to verbalize a deeper understanding of what it was exactly that I believed.
To my surprise, I found it easy to open up to Deacon Friar, how my parents had been lapsed Episcopalians before being moved by the sunshine spirituality offered by the megachurch lifestyle: non-denominational, 100 percent rah-rah Christianity.
We entered a small courtyard with luxurious gardens and a stone path that led to a fountain with two angels. The courtyard itself might resemble Gabriella's idea of Heaven. In the last two years, I had lost all sense of beauty, but sitting amidst the majesty of nature, I could feel the appreciation for it stir within me.
“So Gabriella told me about your loss. Joel, right? My son's name is Joel,” he said.
Tears welled in my eyes, but I blinked them back. I didn't get to hear his name said aloud enough. “Yes, Joel. He was thirty-eight. His fortieth birthday would've been in a few weeks, on September 30th, a week before the anniversary of his death.”
“What did you do for his last birthday? When he was alive.”
His question surprised me. I thought back. “Well, Joel made a big deal of birthdays. He was an only child, so to say his parents didn't spoil him would be an understatement. So we didn't have birth days, we had birthday weeks. Every day the birthday boy, or girl in my case, would get to pick one fun thing to do each day, ending with a big party on your actual birthdate.”