After that the evening winds down quickly. Rhonda gives a tearful rambling speech, reading from some notes she’s got cupped in her hand, and presents Madam Bessant with a pair of earrings shaped, if I remember, like treble clefs. We have each put fifty cents or maybe a dollar toward these earrings, which Madam Bessant immediately puts on, dropping her old silver snails into her coin purse, closing it with a snap, her life beginning a sharp new chapter.

Of course there is too much food. We eat what we can, though hardly anyone touches the shrimp, and then divide between us the quantities of leftovers, a spoiling surfeit that subtly discolors what’s left of the evening.

Robert and his wife take their leave. “Gotta get my beauty sleep,” he says loudly. He shakes our hands, that little muscular fist, and wishes us luck. What does he mean by luck? Luck with what? He says he’s worried about getting a parking ticket. He says his wife gets tired, that her back acts up. “So long, gang,” he says, backing out of the room and tripping slightly on a music stand, his whole dark face screwed up into what looks like an obscene wink of farewell.

Madam Bessant, however, doesn’t notice. She turns to us smiling, her odd abbreviated little teeth opening to deliver a surprise. She has arranged for a different baby sitter tonight. For once there’s no need for her to rush home. She’s free to join us for an hour at Le Piston. She smiles shyly; she knows, it seems, about our after-class excursions, though how we can’t imagine.

But tonight Le Piston is closed temporarily for renovations. We find the door locked. Brown wrapping paper has been taped across the windows. In fact, when it opens some weeks later it has been transformed into a produce market, and today it’s a second-hand bookshop specializing in mysteries.

Someone mentions another bar a few blocks away, but Madam Bessant sighs at the suggestion; the sigh comes spilling out of an inexpressible, segmented exhaustion which none of us understands. She sighs a second time, shifts her shopping bag loaded with leftover food. The treble clefs seem to drag on her ear lobes. Perhaps, she says, she should go straight home after all. Something may have gone wrong. You can never know with children. Emergencies present themselves. She says good night to each of us in turn. There is some confusion, as though she has just this minute realized how many of us there are and what we are called. Then she walks briskly away from us in the direction of the Métro station.

The moment comes when we should exchange addresses and phone numbers or make plans to form a little practice group to meet on a monthly basis perhaps, maybe in the undeclared territory of our own homes, perhaps for the rest of our lives.