Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [107]
She hadn’t seen Roberto with a phone. He must have one. Had his wife called him? Had he called her? Maybe when he was walking around the train. Or maybe they weren’t the kind of couple who talked all the time. Not like her and Jones.
Carmen wondered how many times Jones had tried to call and text her in the last two days. What must he be thinking? She should find a way to call him, she thought. And yet, when she pictured Jones, he seemed a thousand miles away. As in fact he was. Planes just seemed to skip you around without really taking you anywhere different. The distances felt real when you were on a train.
She watched the sun go down with Clara on her lap. She kissed Clara’s head a few dozen times, and hoped Clara’s mother wouldn’t mind. She chanted and sang every rhyme and song she could remember her mother singing to her. Most were in Spanish, and when Carmen forgot stretches of words she’d fill in nonsense words. She got busted by Mr. Law-and-Order Pablo a couple of times, who couldn’t tell her the right words though he knew she’d gone far off the script.
Eventually the train turned dark and peaceful. Carmen wasn’t sure how she would live without the sound of the clonking and rushing under her feet. It was as though she’d developed an external circulatory system with a protective heartbeat of its own.
Roberto put the baby to sleep in her car seat on the floor in front of their row. He lay Pablo out over the two seats and tucked him in with a blanket.
Carmen watched him in admiration. Roberto was really adept at this stuff. Most fathers she observed did these things a little awkwardly and almost for show, as though waiting for the mom to take over before they messed it up too badly. Her stepfather, David, was a bit like that. But Roberto looked as though he’d done every one of these maneuvers hundreds of times. Maybe he was just naturally graceful that way.
He stood in the aisle for a moment, once they were settled, then turned to Carmen. “Could I sit with you for a while?” he asked.
“Of course,” she said. She shoved her purse out of the way. She thought of her horror in the first hour of the trip that someone might sit next to her. Now she couldn’t imagine wanting anything more.
“Wait,” he said, before he sat down. “I’ll be right back.”
When he returned he was carrying two bottles of Heineken and a brownie. He settled in and she put down her tray to hold the bottles. He split the brownie and she sipped her beer and enjoyed the coziness of it all.
“So tell me about you,” he started in Spanish. “Where are you from and why do you speak Spanish like a native?”
She felt happy to talk. She told him about her mom moving from Puerto Rico when she was a teenager and her mom’s family. She told him about growing up outside D.C., in Bethesda.
She told him about the Septembers, but she told him with partial amnesia. She couldn’t make any sort of picture without them, so she stuck to the happy parts for now. Not entirely happy parts. She told him about her parents’ divorce, her dad moving away. Usually when she told that story, she told it like it had happened to somebody else, but this time she knew it had happened to her. Maybe because it had moved down a notch in the hierarchy of her tragedies. She’d take that one if it meant she could hold off the bigger ones.
She told him about her later childhood, her awkward phases, the first summer of the Traveling Pants, and finally the last. She surprised herself by how open she was. The rock through the window, her dad’s wedding, the first summer of David, her mom’s wedding. High school graduation, the birth of Ryan, the first year at Williams, the first fateful trip to Greece. She decided to stop there.
Roberto listened intently. If he thought any of it was less than consequential he made no sign of it. He had a natural sympathy about him. His face seemed to react to each turn in the plot.
When she stopped talking she saw that her bottle was empty and so was his. The brownie was long gone. She squeezed by him to go to the dinette and buy the next round.