Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [106]
That was what it was. And the effect of it on her was incalculable.
Lena’s adrenaline wasn’t quite as helpful in mapping out step two of her plan. Here she’d overcome a lifetime of reticence and arrived in London with lion cuff links, armed with a bolt of thunder, and now she had nowhere to fling it.
Might Kostos be at work? Could she possibly find him there? She pictured herself arriving at his fortress of finance and the moment of their reunion taking place in the hallway in front of five secretaries. My, that would be awkward.
It was six in the evening on a Monday night. It was possible. She knew the name of his firm because he’d once sent her a letter in an envelope from his office. So she got the number through an automated operator and called it.
“May I speak with Kostos Dounas, please?” she asked after she’d been transferred from the main reception desk.
It must have been his secretary. “I’m sorry. He’s not here.”
Lena felt her thunderbolt weaken a little. “Will he be in tomorrow?”
The silence felt uncomfortable. “No, I don’t believe so. I believe he’s traveling outside of the country.”
“Do you know when he’ll be back?”
“No, I’m afraid I don’t.”
“Well, can I ask if—”
“I’m afraid I can’t give out any further information.”
Could he be in Greece? That was her next possibility. She still had the phone number of his house there, so she called it.
After a vast number of rings, one less hopeful than the last, the phone was answered by a woman’s gruff voice. She knew the voice.
“Is this … Aleta?” Lena asked in Greek.
“Yes, who is this?”
“It’s Lena Kaligaris. A friend of Kostos’s. Is he there?”
“No, he’s not here. I talked to him two days ago. He said he was traveling somewhere. He didn’t know when he was coming back.”
“Oh. He didn’t say where he was going?”
“No, he didn’t say.”
And you cannot go on
indefinitely being
just an ordinary,
decent egg.
We must be hatched or go bad.
—C. S. Lewis
Carmen gave Clara her afternoon bottle and, at Pablo’s extreme urging, let her try some bits of apple and cheese. Clara wanted to grab them more than eat them, and spit half of them out, but Pablo was undeterred.
“Good, huh?” he said to his sister in English. It was funny how he seemed to have faith in Clara’s ability to appreciate what he appreciated. It occurred to Carmen that Pablo had been where Clara was rather recently, so he took her more seriously and didn’t doubt, as the rest of them probably did, that she was an actual person.
She tried to teach Pablo go fish while Roberto carried Clara up and down the aisles of the train cars. Then they played war, which was somewhat more successful. Pablo got it wrong half the time, but he was viciously competitive. She had to keep herself from laughing at the snarly face he made every time he thought he’d won her card.
Roberto brought them back wraps and sandwiches and sodas for dinner, and Carmen gobbled hers down. She realized that it was the first time in years she hadn’t calculated the calories of something before she stuck it in her mouth. She hadn’t drunk a soda that wasn’t diet since she was about ten.
The idea that she had an audition seemed hundreds of miles away, and in fact it was. She didn’t want the train to go any faster than it was going.
She discovered that Roberto was originally from Chile, but had crept progressively northward throughout his life. He’d lived in Colombia and Costa Rica, briefly, gone to university in Mexico and stayed there until he’d met his wife four years ago, and moved to Texas to be with her.
Carmen chewed her Caesar salad wrap and wondered about his wife. What must she be like? It seemed to Carmen like an extremely exalted position, to be Roberto’s wife and the mother of these children. Carmen pictured a Supreme Court justice with the body