Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [3]
“I’ll try to be there before seven,” she said.
Carmen felt vaguely dissatisfied as she ended the call. It wasn’t that Jones didn’t care about charities. He did. Every month he put five percent of his earnings into a charitable fund. You couldn’t fault him for that.
“Was that your boyfriend again?” Rita asked.
Carmen nodded distractedly. Sometimes it was hard to know what you could fault him for.
“He’s an executive at ABC, isn’t he?”
She nodded again. Everybody in this business was looking for another contact.
“Lucky you,” Rita said.
“Yes,” she said. And not just because he was her boyfriend, but because he was her fiancé. If she was lucky, then she was extra lucky.
And what if she wasn’t lucky? Then what was she?
Lena put her feet up on her desk. The pink polish her sister, Effie, had applied to her toenails during her last visit had long since started to chip. Lena balanced a sketchbook on her knees and began to flip through it.
She’d promised herself she’d clear out her apartment today. She was committed to filling a couple of trash bags with stuff—her place was too tiny to store anything extra—but of her twenty-seven sketchbooks, she hadn’t yet been able to throw away even one. This one, for instance, was an old one. On the first page was a pencil sketch of Mimi, Tibby’s old guinea pig, fat and asleep in her shavings. As long ago as it was, Lena vividly remembered the joyful chaos of pencil lines that had gone into sketching those shavings. There was a drawing of Bridget at sixteen, knees up on the couch, watching TV with a tipping sombrero on her head. It must have been a week or two after she’d gotten back from her soccer camp in Mexico. It was a loose pencil sketch, and Lena smiled at the hatching lines she’d used to represent the suntan on Bee’s cheeks. Every few pages was one of the inescapable drawings of Lena’s feet. There was a half-finished sketch of grumpy morning Effie at fifteen, too grumpy to let Lena finish it. There were three studies of Carmen’s hand from when she still wore a mood ring and bit her fingernails. How could you throw this away?
The later sketchbooks would be easier, Lena decided. They were mainly just feet and dated from about two years earlier, when Lena had mostly petered out on drawing. Instead, these last couple of years she had been putting her energies into her paintings, which were composed, formal, and largely abstract. You weren’t going to build a career out of making messy little sketches of your friends and family and your feet.
Why all the drawings of her feet? They were not her best feature, probably her worst. They were size nine and a half, ten in some shoes, and prone to sweating when she was excited or nervous. Her toes were kind of long, especially the second and third—the Home and the Roast Beef, as Tibby’s mother would call them. The only advantages her feet had going for them as subjects was that they were attached to the bottoms of her legs and at enough distance that she could look at them from different angles. They were living and stayed still when she told them to, and they didn’t charge modeling fees. She imagined the far future if anybody ever cared enough to look back at her drawings. This girl really had a thing for her feet, they would think. Maybe she would throw those last two sketchbooks away.
The phone on her desk rang. She plucked it from its cradle without moving her sketchbook. She didn’t have caller ID (it added $6.80 a month to her plan), but she knew it was almost certainly one of three people: her mother, her sister, or Carmen. Whichever one it was, she was on her cellphone, she was in a hurry, and she was calling to “check in.”
Lena cleared her throat before she hit the talk button.