Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [6]
She stood and kissed him on the lips. “We don’t really need this anymore.”
“That’s my nightstand.”
“You can just pile the books on the floor, can’t you?”
Bridget was carefully laying clothes on top of the nightstand before she carried the whole setup from the front steps to the sidewalk.
“But I like having a nightstand.”
“I need to move the plants in from the kitchen, because they aren’t getting near enough light in there. The leaves are turning yellow. Our bedroom has the best light. It’s like the plant ICU.”
“I can’t rest my coffee cup on a plant.”
“You can rest it on the floor,” Bridget said reasonably as she hobbled to the sidewalk with the nightstand. “It’s not like we have a real bed. The nightstand looks weird with just the mattress on the floor.”
Eric was shaking his head, but he didn’t look mad. Not really. “Bridget, I’ll be lucky if you don’t leave me on the sidewalk to be carried away.”
“You won’t be carried away,” she assured him.
The truth was she was always looking for things to put out on the curb. There was a large community of homeless people who convened in Dolores Park, and she’d gotten to be kind of friendly with them. She didn’t like to give handouts, but she was happy to leave things that might be useful, or things they could sell at the Mission flea market. Twice she’d actually bought her own possessions back by accident.
Eric jokingly accused her of wanting to be homeless herself, and she did frankly romanticize a life of sleeping under the stars. “I’d probably rather be a cowboy or an explorer,” she told him. Maybe she’d been born in the wrong era.
“What’s for dinner?” he asked her cheerfully, following her up the stairs to their second-floor apartment.
“I don’t know. What do you feel like? Maybe Pancho’s?” She could tell he was hoping she’d made something, or shopped for something to make. She should’ve. She hadn’t worked today. She was still temping and she hadn’t gotten called in a week.
What had she done? She’d spent the first part of the day searching the apartment for things to give away or throw away. She’d spent the middle part of the day waiting in the express mail line at the post office to send Lena and Carmen each a package of authentic corn tortillas she’d bought from a Mexican lady with a cart on Sixteenth Street, spending five times as much on the postage as she’d spent on the tortillas. (She’d gotten some for Tibby too, even knowing that she didn’t have Tibby’s current address and that Australia was too far to send something that would spoil.) She’d spent the last part of the day realizing she’d been a bit too zealous in throwing stuff out and searching for her cellphone in the garbage cans out back. She’d called herself from her neighbor’s landline about ten times, listening for the trash to ring.
“We had Pancho’s last night.”
“We did? That was last night?”
“Yes, it was. Do we have any eggs? I could make an omelet,” he offered.
She checked the refrigerator. “We have five.”
“That’ll do.”
“And I got some handmade corn tortillas.”
“Perfect.”
“We could eat outside,” she suggested as she began assembling ingredients. They shared a tiny backyard with the two other tenants. It consisted of recycling bins, a plastic table, two chairs, and a gorgeous Meyer lemon tree.
He went into their tiny bedroom to change into jeans and a T-shirt.
“How was work?” she asked through the open door.
“Good. I got a new case.”
“Immigration?”
“Yes. Has to do with a second grader named Javier. A great kid.”
Eric always had a huge load of cases, and half the time he ended up doing it for almost no pay. His mother was from Mulegé, so Eric spoke Spanish like a proper Mexican. Half the cases came with stories that could break your heart, and Eric never turned down any of them. People from his graduating class at NYU Law worked at fancy firms making twice the money, pushing paper for big corporations, but Eric never wanted that. “My heart wouldn’t be in it,” he said.
She looked up as he came out of the bedroom in his oldest jeans and