Girls in Pants - Ann Brashares [20]
Tibby stood up, jamming her foot back into her shoe. “Mom, please tell me what’s going on? You’re scaring me.”
Her mom took a few seconds to get her breath. Tibby had never heard her sound like this before. It set her mind swirling and leaping spasmodically with fearful possibilities. She paced around the table.
What? Carmen was mouthing urgently.
“We’re at the hospital. Katherine is hurt.” Alice paused to gain control of her breaking voice again. “She fell out the window.”
Tibby couldn’t move or think. Waves of cold rolled through her body. Hot hysteria began to brew under her ribs. “Is. She. Okay?”
“She’s conscious, she’s—” Her mother’s sobs took on a more hopeful tone. “That’s a good sign.”
“Should I come?” Tibby asked.
“No. Please go home and look after Nicky, okay?”
“Yes. I’ll go.” Tibby was crying now. Carmen’s eyes were tearing and she didn’t even know what had happened.
Tibby needed to ask a question that summed up her dread. But she was afraid, so she waited until the connection was dead.
“Which window?”
Lena sat on the back steps of the restaurant during her break. Inside was hot, outside was hot. She was sticky, and her apron was spattered with tomato sauce. It looked vaguely gory. Like maybe a customer had made one nasty comment too many.
She hated this job. She hated the careless food, all hurried and overcooked in vats. She hated the constant pressure to turn tables over. She hated the green vinyl booths and the way the coffee cups rattled in their saucers, filling the saucers with hot coffee, which she inevitably spilled on her apron. She felt embarrassed by the lame painting of the Parthenon frieze that stretched across an entire wall of the dining room. She hated the fake windows and the fake ivy. She was bothered by the fact that her manager, Antonis, the one with the fuzzy gray hair spilling out of his ears, still thought she spoke Greek in spite of several one-sided conversations.
She would happily sit out here in the back alley and smell the garbage if it meant not being in there. She needed time by herself. She was constantly being talked at, complained to, harassed. Even the polite customers were always waving her down, catching her eye, needing her to bring one more thing.
Some people liked being in communication with other people all day long, but Lena was not one of them. Looking back on the relative peace of Basia’s clothing store the summer before made it seem like a dream job.
Her father had pressed hard for the restaurant job. He had personally recommended her to the owner of the Elite. It was what his parents had done back in Greece. It was the life he had grown up in. Since his own father’s death less than a year before, these things had become more important to him.
For most of his life her dad had rebelled against Bapi and against his upbringing. He had eschewed the restaurant business in favor of law school. He had changed his name from Georgos to George. He made a point of being American, not even teaching his daughters to speak Greek. It seemed sad to Lena that he had waited until his father was dead to start caring about the stuff his father had always wanted him to care about.
“The restaurant business is very practical,” her dad had told her on several occasions, implying that being an artist was not very practical. “It’s a good business,” he’d say, and she was sure it was a good business. For somebody else. She sort of wondered whether he’d ever stopped and considered who she was. Did he really imagine she was going to start a restaurant in the proud Kaligaris tradition? Could he not see how wrong it was for her?
It had been four days since the disaster in her drawing class. She hadn’t been back and she was missing it terribly. She could stand this job if she had her drawing to look forward to. She could tolerate Valia’s loud misery and her parents’ tension at home if she could draw. But without it, she felt like she was sinking.
She could take some other class maybe. There were still openings