Free Enter Three Witches by Kate Gilmore

your mouth shut,” Bren said.
    “The vow of silence was just too much. I felt like a cloistered nun.”
    “You don’t look like a nun, cloistered or otherwise,” Bren said with an admiring glance at her exotic wrappings. “Have you got enough on? I brought a blanket.”
    “Clever you. We’ll bundle,” Erika said. “Do you know what that is?”
    “I think so,” Bren said cautiously, and the uneasy, lurching sensations returned.
    Erika laughed. “Come on, then, let’s blow this genteel scene and head for the wilds of Central Park.”
    Walking with Erika was fun, if rather exhausting. She had a swift, long stride for someone so small, and plenty of breath left over for talk.
    “I love New York,” she said, gazing up and down Broadway as they waited for the light. “I’m sorry. I have to learn not to say that. I always think of a little red heart being dropped, plunk, right in the middle of my sentence, knocking out the love’ and sticking in a sort of ‘umph’ in its place. Stupid.”
    “Well, it’s good you umph New York, anyway,” Bren said. “Where are you from?”
    “Philadelphia. Such boredom you can’t imagine, and we lived in a quiet neighborhood—not even a deli for miles. I took to playing hard-core at volume ten, you know? So the neighbors went up in arms, and Dad threatened to send me away to school, and I said, please do, but nothing came of it except a little temporary excitement. This place is heaven, believe me.”
    “I do,” Bren said. “But when you’re here for a while, you start looking for quiet places—like the park. But maybe that’s not your thing—trees and grass and open spaces.”
    “Oh, it is!” Erika said. “It’s just respectability I hate. Where do you live?”
    “Over there,” Bren said, with a vague gesture to the north. “In a house, but it’s not very respectable. I mean it’s a nice house, but—oh, a little…bizarre,” he finished, wondering why, out of his large vocabulary, he had not been able to dredge up a less intriguing word.
    “Bizarre?” Erika said. “How nice. I’ll visit you. Do you have what’s known as an intact family? That always sounds so sort of frozen. Mom and Dad grinning by the car. Boy and girl romping with dog.”
    “Not exactly,” Bren said. “Except for the dog, who does romp quite a lot, but only with me. No sister, and my parents are separated. I live with my mother and grandmother and assorted tenants—all female.”
    “Nobody stays married anymore,” she said. “It’s such a drag.”
    “My parents might get back together,” Bren said. “They seem to want to, but they drive each other crazy. Dad comes to dinner at least once a week, and they make a lot of jokes and flirt with each other, and then he goes home.”
    “Don’t complain,” Erika said. They were waiting for the light at Central Park West. Beyond the stream of traffic loomed the dark trees of the park. Bren examined the small face at his shoulder and thought for a moment that it looked immensely sad. “Mom went galloping off to fulfill herself as a woman about ten years ago,” she went on, “and hasn’t been heard from since. But it’s not so bad,” she added, seeing the look on Bren’s face. “A person gets a lot of freedom living with a father—especially a busy, rich father. You get everything you want and the time to enjoy it.”
    “Including braces on your teeth?” Bren asked.
    “Well, he ran out of ideas temporarily. There have been other, compensating goodies.” (Like a closet full of clothes I never wear, she thought, but the smile she turned on Bren was full of impish glee.)
    They crossed into the park and followed the wide, lighted path toward the theater.
    “I used to come here every day when I was a little kid,” Bren said, pointing to the playground on their left. “Eli and I would come with one of our mothers or Louise LaReine. She’s a ferocious black woman who lives in our basement apartment and does a few things