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During recess, she’d wander around the playground with a notebook writing things down. I watched her for weeks before I started drawing her. She has big, deeply slanted eyes with irises so dark you can’t see her pupil unless she stands in direct light.
When I drew her, I gave h
er eyes with shutters for lashes and with gold moons at the center of them. And wondered what she might teach me.
I wouldn’t know the answer to that until fifth grade when we were both taking classes at the children’s museum in Austin for the summer and our mothers met for the first time.
I walked out after my very first lesson and saw her talking to a woman I didn’t know. But, I knew right away she was Dina’s mom. She was very tall too and with a darker brown skin than Dina, but with the same wide eyes.
They’d been speaking French when I walked up but switched back to English as soon as I got there.
Dina joined us, and the four of us walked to the car together. Our mother’s slightly ahead of us, heads together talking.
“My mom is obsessed with your mom,” she informed me.
“Really? Why?”
“Well, I think it’s ‘cause your mom’s so pretty and glam. She says it’s ‘cause she speaks French.”
I nodded. “Where’s your mom from?”
“Senegal. But she and my dad met in France, and she’s kind of obsessed with it.”
“Oh, I haven’t been. But I want to.”
She locked arms with me. “One day I’m going to be a famous crime solving journalist with my own television show. You draw, right?”
I nodded, so happy she’d noticed that I was tongue tied. “Well, then you'll be a famous artist with lots of money. And we’ll take vacations in France every summer and make our husbands do all the cooking.”
I fell in love with her that instant. Her imagination was as a vivid as mine. And she loved my art as much as I loved her stories.
And as our mothers became best friends - a bond forged by being wildflowers turned into hot house plants—ours did too.
I was the sheltered youngest of three who’d never been more than a couple hundred miles from home. She, with her all her travels and insatiable thirst for knowledge. She was my window to the world. But those afternoons gave me more than simple companionship.
I joined them at the table, unable to understand any of the conversation. My father hadn’t allowed her to teach us French because he didn’t speak it and didn’t want us to be able to have private conversations.
Seeing her this way was a revelation. I’d never seen her so animated or happy. Those afternoons we spent at the Dina’s house are the only good memories I have of my mother. It was the only time she was affectionate or encouraged me to share my thoughts and opinions.
One afternoon, I asked her why she wasn’t like this at home. And she’s simply said, “This is exactly who I am when I feel at home. I’ve just never felt that way in our house.”
Colleen Le is the only friend my mother ever made in Winsome who wasn’t part of her club or on a committee with her. She gave the eulogy at Mrs. Le’s funeral when she died after a very short battle with brain cancer. She and I continued our visits to Dina’s after school and on weekends.
When she left my father and Winsome altogether, Dina was just as devastated by her departure I was.
We’d clung to each other through everything. Except when she and my brother started sleeping together. I pretended not to know. Because they tried so hard to hide it. It was only when Phil left town with Sara that she told me. She had been heart broken, she said she’d fallen in love with him and he hadn't felt the same.
She started dating his best friend, Wes, right after and he proposed the night before we left for college.
When he came home for Bethany’s funeral, everything between the three of them seemed fine. When she graduated from Tulane four years later and got married Phil had been Wes’s best man.
His job in oil field services took them from all over the world, from Angola to Oman before they settled in Houston last year.
Through all her moves, we stayed in touch. We emailed compulsively, sharing every detail of our lives with each other. Even when I went to work for Wolfe after graduation, her dispatches were what kept me pushing at the mountain. I thought one day, I’d join her.
“Thank you so much for saying yes to my dad. He’s so excited, he’s put fliers up all over town,” she says when we pull out of my driveway.
“I’m amazed he built a library out here. In retirement, too.”
