“I thought you were trying to get over being sorry.”
“Oh. Right. Yeah.”
He almost added the word “sorry,” but he caught himself just in time.
“I used to know how to cut a rug,” Mrs. G said between songs.
“How to what a what?”
“It’s an expression. It means I was a pretty good dancer. Or at least an enthusiastic one.”
She stood back from Raymond, alone in the middle of the street, and began to dance. She swung her legs back and forth, one leg at a time kicking out behind her, then out front. She held her arms out to the sides, palms out and fingers up. She spun all the way around and began again. People formed a circle around her to watch, some filming her on their cell phones. When she got to the part where her knees knocked together and apart, her hands crossing back and forth in front of them, the crowd applauded.
There were a good eighty people in the street by then.
Mrs. G stopped dancing and stood panting, and the crowd went wild with applause. Her face broke into a grin, the likes of which Raymond had never seen on her before. In time they accepted that they had seen all the dancing she had in her.
“Play the bunny hop song,” a stranger yelled in the direction of the band. “Everybody knows the bunny hop.”
They knew it. They played it. More than half the partygoers formed a human chain snaking down the street, punctuating their dance with three comical hops each time the music indicated them. Raymond was right behind Mrs. G, his hands on her shoulders, for about three sets of hops. Then he felt her slump and almost fall.
He caught her instinctively and kept her on her feet.
“I need to go sit down,” she said.
He led her out of the line and back to the table, which sat empty now. He helped her down into a chair.
“Are you okay?” he asked, feeling desperate. Panicky.
“I’m fine. I just need to breathe a minute.”
They sat in silence for several minutes, watching the snaking line of dancers doing their hop, hop, hop. Or Raymond was watching, anyway. He looked back at her to see her eyes wide open, but her body entirely motionless. Just slumping back in her chair, staring at nothing.
Raymond’s heart jumped up into his throat.
“Mrs. G!” he shouted, shaking her shoulder.
“What?” she asked. “Why are you shouting at me?”
“Oh.” Raymond’s breath flew out of him, all at once and involuntarily. “Oh, you’re okay. You scared me.”
“Did you think I had kicked the bucket?”
“Well, you were just . . . you weren’t moving, and your eyes were open, but you weren’t looking at anything . . .”
“Raymond,” she began. A bit derisively. “I’m blind.”
“Oh. Right. Well, now I feel really stupid. You looked different than usual. But I guess just because you were tired.”
She reached along the table and felt for his hand, then patted it.
“You’re not going to get rid of me that easily, my friend. I’m going to live to be a hundred if I can. Maybe older.”
“I’m glad to hear you say that.”
“I told you that already.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I guess you did.”
Luis Senior came by as dusk fell, and brought the collection jar, which he handed to Isabel with a formal sort of ceremony.
“Every time we count it, we get a slightly different number,” he said, looking ashamed. “But it’s over seven hundred dollars.”
“That’s wonderful,” Isabel said.
“Listen,” Luis said in return, his voice heavy. “I have four kids. I know seven hundred dollars doesn’t go very far these days.”
“It’s wonderful,” Isabel said again. “It’s a lot. It’ll help a lot. And even if you had only raised fifty bucks, I would’ve been grateful. Because it was just so nice that all these people cared.”
“Well, that’s the idea behind the block party,” Luis said. “That’s supposed to be the point of the thing.”
Raymond and Mrs. G walked slowly toward the subway station together as the sun went down. Isabel and her children stayed behind to party. But Mrs. G had experienced enough for one day, and then some.
The setting sun hovered in front of them, between buildings, causing Raymond to shield his eyes with one arm. He wondered if the light bothered Mrs. G at all. If she was even aware of it.
“I feel like we’re in one of those old cowboy movies,” she said.
“Not following.”
“In the end they would always walk off into the sunset. Or, actually . . . I guess they rode off into the sunset on their horse. But we don’t have a horse, so this will have to do.”
Raymond smiled.
They walked for a minute without speaking.
“You sure you’re okay walking?” he asked.
“Positive. I told you. I just needed to rest for a minute after dancing. Don’t treat me like I’m so terribly fragile. If I wasn’t a tough old bird, I wouldn’t be here. So, had you forgotten that I told you I was going to live to be at least a hundred if I had anything to say about it?”
“No. I remembered. But lately . . . I don’t know. You were so down about everything. I guess I thought you changed your mind.”
“Well, if I did, I changed it back.”
“What changed things for you?”
“Oh, no one thing.”
“More like all those little lights?”
“More like having a friend like you who spent so much time igniting all of them, just to try to please me and help me cope. The world is a tough place, my friend. I’m not ready to change my mind about that. And yet we’re called upon to be grateful that we’re in it. That seems to be our challenge.”
“Yeah,” Raymond said. “Hard sometimes.”
“Well, if we’re being honest with ourselves, it’s hard most of the time. But we have each other. What else do we have but each other? And what would we do without each other? It would be unbearable.”
“I guess it would,” Raymond said.
“But at least I have a good friend. And you have me until you’re in your twenties somewhere, whether you like it or not.”