Promise Me A Rainbow by Cheryl Reavi Read Free Book Online Page A

wearing her favorite wrestling T-shirt today, one that saluted the wrestlers of the past with a big picture of Mr. Moto and Gorgeous George. Sasha liked Gorgeous George—because she’d read that he used to throw gold bobby pins to his fans.
    “Ms. Holben,” Sasha said again, because Catherine’s attention had already wandered. Catherine couldn’t stop thinking about another child today, about Fritz D’Amaro.
    I call him Joe so he won’t die . . .
    She kept thinking about the look that Fritz had given her at the bottom of the stairs, as if it were she, Catherine, who needed reassurance.
    Don’t worry. He’s not like Koong-Shee’s father . . .
    “Are we eating outside today, Ms. Holben? It ain’t raining.”
    She forced her attention back to Sasha. “Do you want to?”
    “Yeah! It’s like a picnic! Beatrice’s got her radio—she won’t play it too loud and get all them office women upset, will you, Beatrice?”
    “Who, me?” Beatrice said innocently.
    Catherine smiled. Beatrice Delcambre’s radio had only two alternatives: off and loud. She looked at her watch. “All right. We’ll go outside. Sasha, you go down to the refrigerator and get the lunches.”
    “By myself?” she asked, alarmed. The building’s only refrigerator was in the front office, and Sasha was afraid of the long, dark hallway she had to walk down to get there.
    “Take Abby with you.”
    “Aw, Ms. Holben, don’t send Abby,” Maria said. “If she meets somebody saying they hungry between here and that refrigerator, she’ll give away every bag she’s got.”
    “No, she won’t,” Beatrice said, “because Sasha won’t let her. Will you, Sasha?”
    “No, Beatrice,” Sasha said, more than pleased at having Beatrice’s trust.
    “And don’t you go eating anything out of those bags,” Beatrice added.
    “No, Beatrice,” she said again.
    Catherine waited until Sasha and Abby had come back with the lunches—all of them, she was happy to see—then walked with the group to the one picnic table out under the pine trees in the back schoolyard. She and her five students had been banished to a classroom in a recycled school building too old to be used for anything but administrative offices and projects like the one for pregnant students, and its dark and sagging interior hadn’t been improved by the week of rain. Catherine was glad for the chance to get outside, glad to be in the sunshine again.
    “Ms. Holben, this table’s all wet! We can’t eat out here!”
    “Maria, here,” Catherine said, bringing a large plastic drop cloth out of her tote bag. She’d found, too, that one couldn’t function in a sixty-year old building full of leaks and drafts and falling plaster without anticipating problems never considered by the better housed.
    The weather was still cool, deceptively cool, because of yesterday’s rain. But the mid-September heat would be back, and she and the group would soon swelter in their un-air-conditioned classroom on the west side of the building. She’d managed to get permission to have one of the closer school cafeterias send bag lunches every day, but she hadn’t been able to get the class moved to the cooler, shadier side. Beggars, it seemed, couldn’t be choosers.
    Catherine sat amid the rattling sandwich bags and Beatrice’s rock music, trying to keep her space on the drop cloth on top of the table, her mind again going to Fritz D’Amaro. She had a telephone number—a business number. She needed to talk to Joe D’Amaro, if he’d stand still long enough to listen. She thought that Fritz was a troubled little girl, and her father needed to know that.
    “Ms. Holben, Sasha’s eating candy,” Maria informed her. Maria was partial to bib overalls—bib overalls with tank tops in warm weather, bib overalls with flannel shirts when it was cold—and she wasn’t above keeping her own supply of junk food in the bib pocket.
    “I am not! I ate all my other stuff. Ms. Holben don’t care if