Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [102]
She looked down at his up-reaching arm and she could remember, almost in her muscles, the holding-hands era of her life. Reaching up to hold her mother’s hand. Her teacher’s. She could picture herself with Bee holding hands, Bee always yanking her around the yard, but holding on to her nonetheless. She could feel the sensation of holding Tibby’s hand, which was small and squirmy. And Lena you were usually dragging. Lena was slow and distractible when it came time to get anywhere, including the ice cream truck. But they held hands anyway, sometimes three or four of them in a chain, even when it tied them down. Why was that? And when did it stop? First grade, maybe? At some point it had seemed babyish. She had probably been the last one to stop.
Pablo begged for a Snickers bar and Carmen was about to get him two, but then she stopped at the memory of how it had been with her around his age when she had a bellyful of candy. Halloweens, Christmases, and Easters were a catalog of frantic behavior followed by tears. She could picture herself crying over her pink Easter basket every single time.
She sat him on the counter and studied the menu. “Have you ever had apples and cheese?” she whispered to him in Spanish, as if it were an international secret.
He shook his head, interested.
“Separately they are good, but together, in one bite, they are so good they shouldn’t be allowed.”
This, he liked.
“Do you want me to show you?” She looked around, as though concerned somebody might catch them.
His eyebrows were raised. He nodded.
She bought two apples and a pack of cheese and crackers and grabbed a plastic knife. They settled at a table together, him standing on the seat across from her, bent over the table to watch her every move. She cut the apple into small, neat pieces. She saw him eyeing them hungrily.
“Okay, but you can’t eat any yet, because that would just be apple,” she instructed him in Spanish. She cut the orange cheddar cheese into squares. “Do what I do,” she told him. She stacked a piece of cheese on a piece of apple, and he did the same. She held it up to her mouth. “Are you ready?”
He was smiling excitedly. Kids were such suckers for a little bit of ceremony. She remembered that about herself too. She’d get taken in by anything.
“Okay.” She popped hers into her mouth and he did the same. He was so excited, she wasn’t sure he was tasting anything. He was riveted on her reaction. She closed her eyes and nodded, savoring it. He did the same.
“Good, huh?” she asked in English
“Gooooooood.”
They ate about ten more each, stacking them in different ways, into sandwiches, into towers. He wanted to bring the last bits back to his father. “Is it allowed?” he asked her in Spanish.
“Sí,” she said.
His father ate them gratefully, and with a lot of instruction from Pablo. He seemed to understand it was a bite worthy of an international secret.
Carmen sat back down and watched Pablo telling his father about the whole episode, getting it all out of order. And the father listened with admirable patience. He took it in without demanding that the facts add up. Carmen’s mother had been like that, when Carmen was little.
She wondered about Pablo’s father. He was probably not much older than she was—maybe in his early thirties—but he seemed like an adult. It seemed liked he had crossed a chasm that she hadn’t.
Jones was almost forty. Had he crossed that chasm? She thought not. Maybe it was fatherhood. Maybe it was becoming a parent, which Jones had vowed not to do.
Carmen sat back and looked out the window. Occasionally she stole glances at the little family across the aisle.
Clara napped and Pablo sat peacefully on the floor, playing for at least an hour with his father’s shoelaces. Carmen felt proud that she hadn’t just bought him the two Snickers bars.
There was something pretty different between the last time Lena had come to number twenty-eight Eaton Square and this time. The difference was that this time