“Let’s ditch this place.”
When her eyes begin to water with happiness, my throat starts to clog. Before I can stop her, Rosa launches her arms around me, her cheek pressed against my chest.
“Thank you, Colin. Thank you.”
I let her hold on to me longer than I should, but when she seems to have composed herself enough, my hands go behind my back and unlatch her grip on me.
“Let’s go.”
Her smile is a mile wide as she grabs her bag and walks side by side with me out of her hotel room for the first time in days. I take her to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and we spend the whole day there. For a girl who said she didn’t mind the silence, she sure talked her head off, describing how every painting and artifact made her feel. After we have lunch at a nearby restaurant, we decide to go back and see another exhibit, one where the artist preferred to paint portraits. After all we’ve seen today, these are my least favorite.
“You don’t like it,” Rosa says after we’ve stared at one particular painting.
It’s of a girl wearing only one pearl earring. She either lost the other earring sometime during her sitting, or the painter was just too lazy to add its counterpart.
“Why don’t you like it?” Rosa insists when I don’t give her an answer.
“It’s a painting.” I shrug, not understanding what more there is to it.
“Yes, I’m aware it’s a painting.” She laughs. “But I can tell you don’t like it. I’m just curious as to why that is.”
I offer her another noncommittal shrug.
“Okay. Then at least tell me how it makes you feel?”
My forehead scrunches at the question, but this time I answer her.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?” She questions back. “You have no reaction to it whatsoever?” She places her hands on her hips, looking none too convinced. “I know that can’t be since you’ve been looking at it like it’s personally offended you. So, tell me, what is the first word that pops into your head when you look at it? One word.”
“It’s a lie.”
“How so?”
I fumble with my words, trying to come up with the best way to explain myself so she’ll understand.
“You see that one?” I point to an artsy painting of a lone river with a bunch of trees and bushes around it.
“The Monet?”
“Yeah. Whatever. That one right there reminds me of cold Irish mornings. Or when Da and I would go fishing at the crack of dawn to a nearby lake we had close to our home. It’s serene. Simple. Honest,” I admit, giving the painting another glance and calculating how easy it would be to steal it and gift it to my Uncle Niall, who is always homesick for Ireland.
“But this one…” I begin to explain looking at the eyesore in front of us, “doesn’t say shit to me. My guess is the girl either lost the damn earing after fucking the artist, or the he was in too much of a hurry to get her clothes off to even bother painting the other one on her ear. Every time I look at it, all I see is some asshole painter wanting to get into a young girl’s panties by making her look ten times more beautiful than she really is. It’s shallow and uninspiring.”
Rosa lets out a giggle, causing a couple standing close by to give her a side eye. She covers her mouth with her hand to muffle her laughter while I throw the pricks my best menacing glower. They take the hint and quickly leave.
“Colin Kelly,” she whispers, my name sounding like delicate porcelain coming out of her mouth. “I think there is an art aficionado in you after all.”
I scrunch my nose at that.
She snakes her arm through mine and pulls me into the next room where more nature paintings—Monet’s I think she called them—hang on the walls.
“I was starting to doubt Tiernan would give me a wedding present, but now I see he chose his timing perfectly. You, Colin Kelly, are the best gift I could have ever hoped for. This might just be the beginning of a wonderful friendship. And I could use a friend more than you know.”
I don’t say anything to the contrary or risk bursting her happy bubble.
No one has ever been excited about calling me their friend.
And if I’m honest, the only ones I have are my cousins.
For the rest of the day, we tour the museum and make plans to visit the Institute of Contemporary Art next week. When I leave her back at the hotel, Rosa doesn’t look half as desolate as when I found her.
She looks happy.
Or as happy as she can be under her current living conditions.