Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [40]
Davis was seventy miles away, a lot of it hot and relentlessly dry. Even on the smaller roads there were hours without shade. You want sun? the sky seemed to be taunting her. I’ll give you sun.
It was nearly five o’clock when she arrived at the little gray bungalow. She locked her bike up on the porch. She knocked and peered in the windows, but nobody was home. She could probably find her way into the house if she wanted to, but she decided against it. She didn’t want to be overwhelming right away.
She sat in a wicker chair on the front porch, grateful for the shade. She must have fallen asleep. She opened her eyes and saw Perry coming up the walk. She stood and hugged him. She pulled back and could see he was genuinely happy to see her and also awkward about what to say.
“I heard about—I’m so sorry about Tibby—”
“I know,” she said quickly. She didn’t know how to finish his sentence either.
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah,” she said, too quickly to convince anybody. She pulled her pack up onto her shoulder. “Do you mind if I stay with you and Violet for a couple of days?”
“No. You can stay as long as you want. Where’s Eric?”
“Home.” She said it in a way that didn’t welcome more questions.
“What did you do to your hand?”
She hesitated and then shrugged. “I hit it on something. It’s fine.”
Her brother was relatively easy to put off, and she was grateful for it. He turned to put his key in the door. His hair was blond again from living in California. He was much stronger and sturdier than he had been when he’d lived back East. Even though she’d seen him every few months since he’d moved here, she still somehow expected to see the old Perry every time.
“How’s school?” she asked.
“Good. Almost done. I start my residency in July.”
“Amazing. Do I get to call you Doctor?”
Perry laughed. “All you want. But I can’t offer you much medical care.”
“Unless I were a bird,” she said, following him into the cool house.
“Yes. Or a dog or a horse or a swordfish.”
“A swordfish?”
“Okay, maybe not a swordfish. A dolphin. Then I could help you.”
“Are you still doing the oily bird network?”
He smiled. “Oiled wildlife. Yes.”
Perry spent what seemed to her a million hours a week in school and doing schoolwork, and in his nonexistent free time he was part of a rescue network for injured animals. She knew that was the most important thing to him.
By the time Perry had made lemonade and changed his shoes, Violet had come home. She was surprised to see Bridget, but not unwelcoming. She gave Bridget a hug. “I’m sorry for what you’ve been through,” she said.
Violet had a pointy chin, black eyes, freckles, and serious-girl glasses. She worked in a lab at the vet school, doing research on infectious animal diseases. She and Perry had gotten married on the beach at Monterey among the elephant seals two years before. Violet was thirty-three. She told Bridget they were going to try to get pregnant as soon as Perry got his DVM.
Perry made pasta with pesto sauce and Violet made a salad. Bridget ate voraciously and then fell asleep on the couch without even brushing her teeth. She woke a while later, to the sound of them cleaning the kitchen. They must have thought she was asleep.
“Do you think she’s okay?” she heard Violet asking in a quiet voice.
Perry’s response was muffled.
“Do you think Eric knows she’s here? Should we call him?”
Bridget couldn’t fall back asleep, but she couldn’t get up off the couch either. What a reversal had taken place over the last decade. It used to be she who was the functional one. She had the best friends, went to a good college, played on a team, while Perry stayed in his room, so lost in his obscure role-playing games on the computer that he barely ate. It was Perry people whispered about, Perry they worried about. Not her.
Now Perry had a wife, a house, friends, a purpose, a graduate degree coming in May. And what did she have? The college didn’t matter, the team didn’t even really matter. But the friends. The friendship. Without it, she didn’t know who she was. Without