Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [60]
One night Bridget borrowed Sheila’s computer and searched for Tibby’s name in Australia. It took a few rounds and refinements, but eventually her name came up, along with an address. Bridget’s hands shook as she located the address on the map. She zeroed in closer and closer, and when she got right into the middle of town, she turned the map to the satellite setting. It was a small town. A village, really. Bridget could navigate over each of the buildings and study every street. She saw the figures in the satellite images and wondered how long ago the pictures had been taken, whether one of them could be Tibby.
That was when the idea came to her. She knew what she would do. It was something she wished, with excruciating remorse, that she’d done when Tibby was alive.
It would seem cowardly to make sure Effie wasn’t going to be home the weekend Lena picked to go back to Bethesda, but Lena was pretty cowardly. She called both her mom and her dad separately to tell them she was coming and to fish around a little. Her mom might be tricky enough to push her and Effie together without their knowledge, but her dad wasn’t. He always blurted out the thing he wasn’t supposed to say and forgot to tell you the thing he was supposed to say. He wasn’t trying to make trouble, she knew. He was just bad at keeping track, and the forbidden things stayed closer to the front of his mind.
“Sweetheart, I’m so happy you came,” her mother said for the third time as Lena sat in their big, shiny kitchen and drank the tea her mother had made. The tea had more milk and honey than Lena would have put in, but it tasted good.
“I’m happy too,” Lena said. She wanted to express herself honestly without indicating that she was open to a full examination.
Anticipating this trip, Lena had expected her mother to jump down her throat at the first possible opportunity, to ask a million jarring questions, to shine her maternal klieg light on all the tender, hidden spots. But she hadn’t. She was companionably quiet. She put some groceries away.
“Did you set a time with Alice?” Ari asked after the last bag was balled up in the recycling bin.
Lena shook her head. This was the part of her weekend where the real dread kicked in. “No, I just told her I’d stop by in the afternoon.”
Her mother nodded. “Do you want me to go with you?”
Lena looked up, surprised by the offer. She had forgotten, at her age, that her mother could do something like that for her, that there was anything truly helpful her mother could do to solve her problems. She could see the strain in her mother’s face, but also the willingness, and she admired her for it.
Lena considered. “Thank you for offering. I really appreciate it. But I think I should go on my own.”
“Okay,” Ari said.
“You’ve been over?”
“A couple of times.”
Lena nodded. “I bet you brought food.”
“Loads of it.”
Lena pictured it and it made her hungry. “Spanakopita, I bet. Nicky loves that.”
“And other things.”
Her mother sat down, something she rarely did. Her expression was thoughtful. “It’s hard to know what to do.”
Lena wondered if it was too late to turn out like her mother. “At least you try,” she said. “At least you do something.”
First they sat in the kitchen while Alice attempted to make them coffee. Lena sat at the table and watched Alice search for one thing and then another. The coffee filters. No coffee filters. She looked in a harried way in hopeless places, like in the refrigerator and under the sink. A piece of the grinder was broken. The instructions were around there somewhere. And the milk? They were just out of milk. It was a strange reversal for Lena.
“It’s okay. I didn’t really want any coffee anyway,” Lena said.
Alice was squatting on the floor, unloading the contents of the lower pantry by then. “I think we have instant.”
Lena wished she could say something to Alice to get her to relax and sit down at the table with her, but by that time Alice was on the phone to Loretta, the housekeeper they’d had for over a million years, asking where the