Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [35]
“Do what?”
“Get the house fixed up.”
“I could?”
He nodded. “I could help you.”
The storm cloud crackled below her. She blinked away tears. “But I have to go back.”
“Why?”
It wasn’t even that she was scared. Maybe she would have stayed. She looked at him in the eyes. “The burial.”
His face was pained. “Oh.” He nodded slowly. “Of course. When?”
“Tomorrow. I go back tomorrow. The burial is the next day. Thursday.” She was still of no mind to keep track of the days, but she remembered how Alice Rollins kept saying Thursday. In her mind Thursday had nothing to do with Tibby, but it was one of the few fixed points on her horizon.
He opened his mouth as though he was going to say something, but he didn’t. He wrung out the sponge in the sink and began wiping down the counters.
She went to the bathroom to wash her face and blow her nose, and when she came back, Kostos, star financier, was taking apart the hinges of the back door that would no longer open.
Bridget’s body was in pure revolt and her mind had nothing further to say about it. It had nothing to say about anything. She thought nothing, had nothing, belonged to nothing, owned nothing. Except her bike.
She went back the second day to retrieve it, when she was sure Eric would be at work. She wondered for the miles she walked back to the apartment how she would get it without the key to unlock the door to the garage. That was where she’d stored her bike the day she’d left for Greece.
She felt a pang. She’d been so happy at that moment right before Greece, imagining that her life would be coming together, not falling apart. She pushed the memory away.
Eric kept the garage key on his key chain. Bridget barely ever used it. She never used the car and preferred to lock her bike on the front porch for quick access. Could she jimmy the lock? Could she climb through a window? She was remarkably good at both of those things.
But when she got there, she found the garage door swung open, almost as if Eric had left it that way for her. There was her bike in the corner.
Her mind stayed mostly quiet, and it was better that way. She wheeled her bike out and all the way to Sixteenth Street before she got on. She wasn’t as glad to see it as she’d thought she would be. It didn’t feel so much like it was hers. The silk flowers looked stupid. She didn’t know why she had ever liked them.
She rode up through Pacific Heights, punishing her restless muscles on the most precipitous hills, and then down to the Presidio. She turned north and stopped at Fort Point long enough to unwind the flowers from her bars and basket. She stood on a wall and threw the silk flowers into the greedy water. It could have those too.
Kostos thought maybe a walk would help, and Lena thought maybe he was right. Maybe she would be better at moving than staying still.
When she stepped out the front door the sunshine was so strong her shoulders stooped under the force of it. She squinted and blinked, trying to adjust her eyes and her pores to the onslaught.
She glanced down the road to Kostos’s grandparents’ house. She was still slightly afraid of them from the time she’d made a spectacle of herself the first summer. It was many years ago, granted, but she had an acute memory for her mistakes. She’d imagined she would at least stop by and say hello. She’d imagined she would talk with Rena a little about her grandmother. She’d even packed a little gift for them, and a note from her mother. But then, early that first morning, all previous notions had been scattered or obliterated.
“Are you staying with them?” she asked, gesturing to the house. It was so close, she remembered thinking that first summer, that if she’d tripped and rolled, and the Dounases’ door happened to be open, she would have rolled right into the living room of Kostos’s house.
“No. I always see them when I come, but I have my own place.”
She tried to picture it. “You still have the apartment in Fira?” she asked. She remembered that when he’d been married to Mariana, that was where they had