Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [103]
This time she wasn’t freaked out or crushed when the fiancée/girlfriend Harriet answered the door. Lena had Bapi’s lion cuff links in the front pocket of her jeans and she was ready for anything. Kostos could have slammed the door in her face three times in a row, and she still would have rung again and said her piece. She’d come more than halfway; she would be damned if she didn’t do her part. At least I tried, she could say.
Harriet looked different this time. She was wearing jeans and flat shoes and she looked like a normal person. Not a totally normal person—she had twice as much makeup on as Lena had worn to her senior prom—but closer.
Harriet looked at Lena with vague recognition. Lena knew she looked different this time too. She was also dressed in jeans. Her hair was pulled back, her shirt was black, she felt like an adult. Last time she had worn fear. And this time she was crazy.
“Is Kostos home?” she asked politely.
There was nothing friendly about Harriet. “Did you come here before?”
No fear. “Yes. A couple months ago.”
The shape of Harriet’s eyes was changing and she seemed to be growing larger in stature. “What is your name?”
Lena cleared her throat. “Lena Kaligaris.”
“Why did you come here?”
“To find Kostos.”
“He’s not here.” Harriet took a step forward, but Lena didn’t step back.
“Do you know when he’ll be back?”
Harriet looked like she was debating between shutting the door in Lena’s face and replying to the question. There was something in Harriet’s expression Lena recognized as curiosity. The sick kind of curiosity you hated yourself for having. “I have no idea when he’ll be back here. Possibly never.”
“This isn’t his house?”
“It’s his house, but he doesn’t live in it any longer. He moved out. I thought you of all people would know that.”
Lena wouldn’t shrink. She would stay right here. “I didn’t know that.”
“Aren’t you the girl he wrote all the letters to, Lena Kaligaris? I’m fairly certain you are. You’re the one who made the drawings he had all over his fucking desk and stuck to his mirror. That would be you, wouldn’t it?”
“That would likely be me,” Lena said, unintimidated, without sarcasm. Who really knew? Maybe Kostos had other pen pals. She’d had worse disappointments.
Harriet gave a mirthless laugh. “He said they were ‘friendly’ letters. Funny. You don’t stay up until two or three every morning writing ‘friendly’ letters. I thought he’d run off to you a month ago.”
Lena looked down and shook her head. “He didn’t.”
“Well, good luck finding him. Give him my regards. He’s a strange man, you know. He’s never really with you. My grandmother warned me about shagging a man who doesn’t want to marry you at all, and I should have listened. But I landed quite a good house, didn’t I?”
“You have been my friend,”
replied Charlotte.
“That in itself
is a tremendous thing.”
—E. B. White
It wasn’t her farm in rural Pennsylvania.
Except for being an old acquaintance, bystander, and unofficial babysitter, Bridget had no claim on it. But after thirty-two hours of cross-planetary travel with a sweaty toddler sticking to her body, after nearly five months—arguably two-plus years—in complete limbo, she stepped across the willow-shaded front yard and felt as if she were walking home.
She hadn’t known she liked old farmhouses on twenty-seven acres of lawns and fields and forests, with converted barns, guest cottages, root cellars, and icehouses. She had never longed for any of those things. But as she swooped around the place with Bailey on her hip, she discovered that perhaps, in some way, she did.
Maybe because the whole thing was blooming before her eyes on the most perfect early spring day that had ever been. Maybe because it was the place that Tibby had found and planned to call home. Maybe because of the little soul making headway in her uterus, who was becoming an oddly joyful source of companionship to her.
“We could have animals here,” Bridget told Bailey, peering into the dark stalls on the lower story of the barn. “It’s like Charlotte’s Web.