Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [62]
“I’m not staying. I came because I need to borrow money.”
He nodded. She expected him to ask why and what for, but he held back. She almost wished he would ask and demand and blame, because then maybe she could feel angry at him instead of this terrible missing.
“How much?”
She hadn’t even thought this far. “I guess …” She calculated. How much did it cost to get to Australia? She could buy a one-way ticket if it came to that and figure out the rest later. “A thousand? Eight hundred might be all right.”
“Okay.” His face was not only handsome, but a part of her. He had sweat circles under his arms and a splotch of ink on his fingers. “Will you walk with me to the bank?”
“Of course.”
He put his arm around her shoulders as they walked, and they fell into a comfortable step together. It felt sad and good to be with him.
She waited in the bank’s lobby while he went to a window and spoke with a teller. He came back to her and handed her an envelope.
She looked down so he wouldn’t see the emotion in her face. “Thanks,” she said. “I don’t deserve it.”
“Are you going right away?”
She stared at his slightly wrinkled pants, his scuffed office shoes. She was tempted to stay. They could walk to Chinatown and get dim sum together. They could slip into the bathroom and make love.
With a pang, Bridget thought of Tabitha. She put a hand to her abdomen. She could tell him. She could tell him the whole thing. Could she do that? She tried to think of one or two starting words, and she felt her vision closing in as though she might faint. She felt the agonizing restlessness in her joints and a tingling like an attack of red ants on the bottoms of her feet.
She couldn’t. “Yes, I am leaving right away,” she said. She leaned in and kissed him on the lips. There was obvious passion in it, even after all this. If she stayed near him too much longer, she wouldn’t be able to go, and she knew she couldn’t stay.
She walked away down Pine Street, toward Powell. Her chest ached. She meant not to look back, but she couldn’t help it. She turned and he was standing there, watching her go. He didn’t wave or smile. He looked sad. When she turned a second time he was gone.
She didn’t open the envelope until she’d gotten to the bus station and needed to pay for her ticket. He hadn’t given her the thousand dollars she’d asked for—he’d given her ten thousand.
Lena’s parents didn’t torture her with questions or advice, as she had dreaded. They took her out for dinner to the Lebanese Taverna, ordered seven plates of food and a bottle of wine, and talked about the troubling state of Greece’s economy.
“It’s not going to be easy, selling a house in this market,” her father said.
Lena allowed her mind to take a slow walk up the hill to her grandparents’ house. She had to see how much it hurt before she went inside.
Lena cleared her throat. “The tourist places will be okay. If any place will survive this, it’s Santorini.”
Ari nodded. “That’s what I said too.”
“I’ve got to go over,” her father said resignedly. He looked exhausted at having uttered the sentence. “We can’t just let the place sit there moldering for another year.”
Lena thought of Kostos sitting on the ground, surrounded by tools and bits of hardware, taking apart the hinges of the back door. There was pleasure in the image to balance out the pain. She nodded.
“He’s canceled the trip twice already,” Ari said.
“I had a case go to trial.”
Lena nodded sympathetically. But she knew it wasn’t the case going to trial that gave her father the haggard look. She imagined how it would be for him, confronting his parents’ world, their clothes, their smells, and confronting the guilt for having left them so completely and so long ago, always vowing that there would be a time when the office got calm and he would go for a good long visit, maybe even a sabbatical, but never doing it.
Her dad wouldn’t talk about any of that. He’d talk about the case that