Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [13]
“For how long?”
“Just about a week. I guess it’s a reunion.”
Eric saw her tears and her uncensored joy. “That’s great, Bee. I’m happy for you. I’ll miss you, but I’m happy.”
She nodded. God, how unexpected this was. The answer to a wish she hadn’t let herself articulate in a long time. “I think this is what we really, really need.”
Suddenly her legs took root,
and her arms grew into
long and slender branches.
Apollo reached the laurel tree,
and,
still enamored with Daphne,
held the tree in
a special place in his heart.
—Encyclopedia Mythica
On Friday night, after she finished work, Carmen went directly to the SoHo Grand to meet her father. It was a forbidding lobby, all right angles, muted surfaces, and minimal cheer. She was a successful actress in New York with a big loft in Nolita, a closetful of enviable clothes, a boyfriend—make that fiancé—who was a network executive. This was her world, and even she felt constrained by the coolness.
“Albert Lowell,” she said to the brittle, long-nailed woman at the front desk. “Can you tell him Carmen is here?”
The woman conducted her brief conversation with Carmen’s father in hushed, proprietary tones, as if he belonged to her and not Carmen.
“He’ll be down,” the woman informed her.
“Thanks,” she said.
She settled into a chair with a view of the elevators. She quickly checked her three different email accounts on her phone.
She realized she had an idea of the man who would emerge from the elevator, and though the one who appeared in the blue Izod shirt was certainly recognizable, it wasn’t him. Her father was tall, and this person was sort of bent over. Her dad had light brown hair, whereas this man was mostly gray. Her father was confident, where this man looked slightly bewildered. When her dad was in her apartment, she didn’t need to see these things. Leave it to an elevator in the SoHo Grand to make you change everything you thought.
She stood. “Hi, Dad.”
He came over to hug her. “Hi, bun.”
She held on to him for longer than usual. She felt sad. “How’s the room?” she asked when she let him go.
“Great. Great. It’s got everything. In the minibar there are these fantastic nuts. Kind of spicy nuts.”
She was glad Jones wasn’t there to hear her father talk so eagerly about the nuts. Her dad seemed sophisticated to her in places other than here. And then she wondered why she let Jones judge her dad when Jones wasn’t even around.
But it wasn’t Jones, really; it was her, wasn’t it? She could blame Jones because she didn’t want to be the one questioning or judging her dad. She preferred to stay innocent.
“That’s great,” she said. “So do you want to go somewhere and get a cup of tea? Or a drink? Or we could just sit here in the bar. Jones is meeting us at eight at a restaurant on Bond Street.”
“Is that nearby?”
“Pretty near, yeah. Maybe a ten-minute walk.”
“What do you want to do?”
“I know a place around the corner. Let’s go there.” She didn’t like what the SoHo Grand was doing to either of them.
She realized as they crossed the lobby that her dad was wearing jeans. He almost never wore jeans. It broke her heart to think of him choosing his outfit, thinking this would be good for the chic hotel in SoHo.
They settled into an Irish bar on Grand Street. She waited for her dad to grow back into himself.
He ordered a whiskey sour, which came with a maraschino cherry, and she ordered a glass of white wine. She still felt a little weird ordering a drink in front of him.
“How’s Paul?” she asked. She actually knew how Paul was, because she exchanged emails with him almost every week, but Paul was such a hero to them all he seemed like a safe subject to talk about.
“It’s good to have him back from Afghanistan. He’s doing well. He always asks about you. What a life, you know?”
“Yeah,” Carmen said. She thought of Paul as her stepbrother, but was he still her stepbrother, since his mom had died? He was the only one in the family Jones hadn’t met yet.
“He sent me a video of F16s taking off from the aircraft carrier. One of