Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [58]
And weddings were cheerful. Wedding planning was cheerful. The colors were bright and the people you talked to laughed and smiled easily. They cheerfully and laughingly took your money.
A wedding was an opportunity for control. You could present yourself and your life and your husband-to-be exactly as you chose, and there would be a million pictures to document it. For as long as you lived you could imagine that your wedding was what you really were and not just what you labored and paid to have it look like.
Control meant there were also things you could leave out of a wedding.
“Mom, do you know when Big Carmen’s going to be in Puerto Rico?” Carmen asked casually, when she called her mother from the set.
“First of March to mid-April.”
“Do you know the exact date in April? Are we talking the twelfth? The sixteenth?”
“I don’t know—more like the sixteenth. You could call her. Why?”
“I’m just trying to nail down the date for the wedding.”
“It won’t be before the sixteenth, will it?”
“Well …”
“Carmen.”
“What?”
“You are not attempting to have this wedding without Abuela, are you?” Her mother could be annoyingly perceptive on occasion.
“Well, if she’s going to be in Puerto Rico, then I’m not going to expect her to—”
“Carmen, I don’t care if your grandmother is in Timbuktu, there is no way she is missing your wedding. If she has to crawl to the church, she will be there.”
Carmen decided this wasn’t the best time to mention that it wasn’t going to be in a church. “Well, Mom.” She sounded like she was five. “What if it’s a really small wedding?”
Her mother sighed. “Even if your wedding is so small you don’t have a groom, Abuela will expect to be there. Honestly, Carmen, banish the thought. She has been talking about your wedding since the day you were born.”
Carmen slid her eyes down the long list of calls she had teed up. She huffed out her breath. “Fine.”
“Carmen?”
Carmen pressed the end call button as a new PA poked his head into the makeup trailer. “Yeah?” She couldn’t think of the guy’s name.
“They need you on set.”
“Now?” she asked grumpily, as though she were being prettied up and paid to do nothing more than plan her wedding on her iPhone.
By day Bridget weeded the unimpressive garden of the Sea Star Inn and repaired a stone wall. By night she washed glasses and plates in the cocktail lounge, where the smells were really killing her. Through all the hours she found herself thinking of Tibby. She’d kept those thoughts at bay before, but now she let them come. She remembered and wondered and conjectured.
Some days she started with the earliest memories of childhood and worked forward through high school, college. The Traveling Pants years. And then after they graduated, Tibby living in New York and waiting tables and writing her scripts. And then about nine months later, both herself and Carmen landing in New York too. She remembered the two-plus years she and Tibby and Carmen and unofficially Lena had been roommates on Avenue C. And then Tibby moved in with Brian, first to Long Island City, then to Greenpoint, then to Bedford-Stuyvesant, always in search of cheaper apartments, as Tibby tried to get her screenplays bought and her films produced and Brian tried to get his software company off the ground.
About a year later, shortly after their twenty-seventh birthdays, was when Tibby disappeared. With almost no warning she moved to Australia. Bridget remembered going to surprise her at her and Brian’s ground-floor apartment in Bed-Stuy on Halloween. Bridget was in her full Indiana Jones costume, including the hat and the whip, carrying a box of caramel apples, ringing their buzzer and banging on the door, but no one was home. Finally Bridget climbed up to peer in the front window and saw that the apartment was empty.
Tibby