Girls in Pants - Ann Brashares [55]
She opened her mouth to say something. And then she realized. “Oh, my God! I have to get Valia! I’m gonna be late for her.” Oh, God. She could practically hear the bone-splintering howl from the eighth floor.
“I’ll come,” Christina said, running after her to the bank of elevators.
“Bye, Win,” Carmen shouted over her shoulder.
He looked a little sad as she waved to him through the narrowing gap of the elevator door. As soon as it closed, Christina burst. “Nena, who is he?” She was obviously excited. “He is…he is just adorable! And the way he looked at you.”
Carmen’s face was hot. “He does seem…nice.” She didn’t want her mother to see her flustered smile. She wished she could get her mouth into a normal shape.
“Nice! He’s more than nice! How do you know him?”
Carmen shrugged. “I don’t really know him. Or I guess I do kind of know him.” She chewed the inside of her lip. “But he doesn’t know me.”
To the man who only has a hammer in the toolkit, every problem looks like a nail.
—Abraham Maslow
It took four evenings for Tibby to pounce on the garbage bags and take them out to the alley before Margaret could get there first. Margaret was so experienced at her job, having worked at this very Pavillion Theater for well over twenty years, and so dedicated to it, that it was nearly impossible for Tibby to manage to do her coworker even this one small favor.
“Tibby, thanks!” Margaret said brightly when she saw the empty cans. “You’re jis sweet.”
“I’m returning a favor,” Tibby said.
Tibby watched as Margaret put her sweater in her employee locker (no pictures pinned up inside, Tibby noticed) and collected her purse, in exactly the same manner she did every evening. Tibby knew Margaret would take the bus on Wisconsin Avenue to her home, which was somewhere north of here. She couldn’t exactly guess what Margaret did with her free time, but she felt almost sure Margaret did it alone.
Suddenly Tibby felt inspired. “Hey, Margaret?”
Margaret turned, her purse dangling neatly from the crook of her elbow.
“Do you want to get some dinner with me?”
Margaret looked utterly bewildered.
“We could just get something quick, if you want. We could go right around the corner to that Italian place.”
Why not spend some time with a gravely lonely person? Tibby thought, silently applauding herself. Wasn’t that a worthy thing to do? Tibby felt sure it was something a good person would do.
Margaret looked around, as though to see if perhaps Tibby was talking to someone else. The muscles around her mouth twitched a little. She cleared her throat. “Excuse me?”
“Do you want to have dinner?”
Margaret looked a bit frightened. “You and me?”
“Yes.” Tibby was beginning to wonder if she had overstepped.
“Will, uh, okay. I giss I could.”
“Great.”
Tibby led the way around the corner. She had never seen Margaret outside the movie theater. It was kind of strange. She wondered how many times Margaret had been out of the movie theater—other than when she was home. In her pale pink cardigan, with her white vinyl purse with gold buckles and her bewildered expression, Margaret looked like an innocent victim of some time-travel mishap.
“Is this place okay?” Tibby asked, holding open the door to the restaurant.
“Yes,” Margaret agreed in a slightly quavering voice.
Tibby had been to this restaurant before and it had seemed perfectly normal. But now, with Margaret at her side, the place struck her as raucous, dark, nightmarishly noisy, and totally wrong.
The hostess showed them to a table. Margaret perched on the very front of her chair, her backbone stiff, as though ready to flee at a second’s notice.
“They have good pizza,” Tibby said feebly.
Did Margaret eat pizza? Did she eat anything? Margaret was terribly thin, nearly as small as a child. There were certain clues to her age: the loose skin of her neck, the texture of her blond ponytail. Tibby knew she had to be in her mid-forties. But