After a while I ran out of tears, so I pushed back the covers and looked around my bedroom. No Calista. I set my bare feet down on the floor and walked to the door and peered into the hallway. No Calista. I walked down the cold hall into the dining room.
Calista was sitting at the table, reading one of my dad’s magazines about money. She jumped up when she saw me. “Oh, good!” she said, and she seemed really happy to see me, not mad that I probably almost definitely was late for school. “You’re up!”
“I think I’m late,” I told her.
Calista looked at the clock. “Yup,” she said. “About forty minutes.”
I scratched at my hair, which was still messy from sleeping. “Then I guess we should probably get going so I’m not even later, huh?”
Calista tilted her head to the side, like she was the one who was confused. “I thought you said this was bigger than a donut day,” she said.
“Well, yeah, but—”
“Everyone deserves a sad day once in a while,” Calista told me. “Sometimes things are too big for cheering up. Sometimes the best way to make things better is just to let yourself be sad for a little bit.”
I sat down at the table, and Calista pushed a plate of toast at me. She’d already spread jam on it—strawberry, my favorite. I took a small bite.
“Thanks,” I told her.
She watched me chew for a while.
“What do people do on sad days?” I asked when I was pretty much done with my toast. “If they can’t be cheered up?”
Calista thought about that. “Did you know I’ve never been to the Bronx Zoo?” she asked me after a while.
• • •
I didn’t think going to the zoo on such a gray, gray day would be any fun, because for one thing there wouldn’t be anybody there. But Calista said that was exactly why it would be fun, because we’d have the zoo all to ourselves. So after I finished all my toast and two glasses of orange juice too, I changed into my warmest clothes plus my puffy jacket, and Calista grabbed two umbrellas, and we headed to the subway.
It was a long ride to the Bronx Zoo. Long and gray and quiet. There was hardly anyone on the train, because it was a drizzly Monday at ten o’clock in the morning, probably. When the subway popped up aboveground, it was even grayer in the Bronx than it had been in Manhattan.
When we finally got to the zoo, the man at the ticket booth looked surprised that anyone was there. The rain was starting to turn into snow, tiny slushy flakes, and I was cold, and I was starting to think that coming to the zoo was probably the worst idea Calista had ever had, and if I were in school right now maybe Darren Ackleman would be calling me names but at least I’d be warm. But Calista paid the ticket man for both our tickets, and when he gave me a funny look, she said, “School in-service day.” Whatever that meant.
I’d been to the Bronx Zoo before, about five times probably, so Calista said I could pick where to go first. I picked the Congo exhibit, because that one was my favorite. Calista read her map, and she found the way pretty quick.
There was no one else but us at Congo, so we could watch the gorillas for as long as we wanted, without anybody or their baby pushing in front of us. One mom gorilla smashed her face right up against the window so me and her were face-to-face, and she slobbered all over the glass. Calista said she must’ve been trying to give me kisses, and that made me laugh.
“This is pretty fun so far, huh, Albie?” Calista said.
I stopped laughing. “I thought you weren’t going to try to cheer me up,” I told her.