Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [38]
“That makes me glad to know,” he said. He considered, his eyes down. “I disappointed her, though.”
“Valia?”
“Yes.”
“Impossible.”
“I did.”
“In what way?”
His face had turned inward and complicated, and she found herself unsure about wanting to follow him in. He rarely paused to search for words as he was doing now. He glanced down and then looked up at her. He smiled, but not easily. “I didn’t marry her granddaughter.”
Lena’s caution seemed to slow her thoughts—she could almost watch them going by like words on a very slow ticker tape. Kostos didn’t marry Valia’s granddaughter. Lena was Valia’s granddaughter—one of her granddaughters, most likely the one he meant. Kostos didn’t marry her, was what he meant. Kostos was supposed to marry her, Lena, and he hadn’t.
Lena looked up at him in alarm. She hadn’t thought he would ever say that out loud. She was too far gone to process the impact of these words and also too far gone to make any attempt to hide from them.
No, he hadn’t married her, had he? He had married somebody else. He had divorced somebody else. He had gone on with his life, clearly not held back by any of it. You couldn’t let a grumpy grandmother—somebody else’s grumpy grandmother—tell you whom to marry.
Kostos’s eyes were cast slightly down, but not focused on anything. She sensed he was looking at Valia in his mind’s eye. “Before she died she asked me why. And I couldn’t explain it to her satisfaction, but I told her I loved you, and she said, ‘What good does that do me?’ ”
Kostos looked up, refocusing his eyes on Lena.
He smiled, trying to lighten the mood, but her face was stricken, she knew. She didn’t have the wherewithal to compose it in another way.
He looked regretful, sorry for her. “It was all a long time ago.”
She didn’t know what to say. She gaped at him like a gutted fish.
“So much has changed since then,” he added quickly. He didn’t want her dangling on the hook.
She nodded. She couldn’t seem to speak. She sat up and withdrew her feet.
“I’m sorry I brought it up,” he said.
Lena wanted to say so many things. She wanted to close this abyss, to cover it graciously, to make him feel okay, cross over it carefully, to get to the other side and keep on walking.
She also wanted to dive into it and ask him whether his love was only in the past tense anymore. A part of her wanted to tell him she still loved him, and that even though this love was hopeless and long over, it still consumed her year after year. It was a tangled hair-ball of feelings and she couldn’t pull forth any one strand.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “You don’t have to say anything.”
He got up off the couch and went into the kitchen. Lena hugged her knees. She wondered if she was having a stroke, if the entire speaking apparatus of her brain had flooded and shut down.
He came back with a loaf of bread and cheese, two apples, and a bottle of red wine. He carefully sliced the bread, cut into an apple. He poured the wine, letting the strange air in the room begin to settle back toward normal.
She held the glass and balanced a plate on her knees. “Thank you,” she choked out.
He lifted his glass. “To friendship,” he said.
She nodded and lifted her glass in return. She worked on a smile. Even that would help.
They chewed and sipped in silence for a few minutes.
“You know what I’d like to do?” he said.
She shook her head.
“I’d like to write you a letter about Tibby. I’d like to write something that could help, I really would.” He looked almost tearful. “But I don’t know what it would say.”
She was moved by the sympathy in his face. It took her a while to pick her words. “I don’t know what it would say either.”
He nodded. His face expressed something like defeat, and she hated for him to feel that way. He’d spoken to three local bureaucrats on her behalf. He’d fixed her eggs and tea, bread and wine. He’d repaired the kitchen faucet and the back door, and had even cleaned out the cabinets when she wasn’t looking. He’d lain with her for hours on the couch. He’d held her feet.
Who knew why? Who knew what