Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [63]
Lena thought of the two sealed letters stuck between the pages of her sketchbook. With an accelerating heartbeat she thought of her project.
“If you want, I could go,” she said.
Her father turned to her as though she’d disappeared and resurfaced in her chair with a new face on. “What do you mean?”
“I could go and take care of selling the house.”
“By yourself?”
He said it as though she were still twelve.
“Of course.”
A look of eagerness and relief was mixing into his cramped features. “Do you think you can?”
“I do. I know the house. I know the island reasonably well. I don’t think you need to be a native or a lawyer to figure out how to sell a house.”
“You do need to speak Greek,” her mother pointed out.
Her father raised his hand. “Not necessarily. Everybody is speaking English there these days.”
“You wouldn’t want to get cheated or manipulated. It’s helpful to be able to read all the paperwork,” her mother cautioned.
Her father had now seized on this and he wasn’t going to let it go. Lena didn’t even get the chance to mention that she did, in fact, speak pretty good Greek these days. He was suddenly so flushed with the prospect of not having to go himself, he’d probably have sent Bubbles, the neighbors’ cat, over to do it.
“Lena can fax the paperwork or send it electronically. I can look over everything. Anyway, I’m not expecting to get top dollar for the place.”
He probably would have authorized Bubbles to sell the house for any offer over five euros and a willingness to take it furnished.
Her mother was considerably less enthusiastic. “Lena, are you sure it’s a place you want to go back to right away?” she asked with honest concern.
Her father opened his mouth to respond too, and Ari shut him up with a look.
“I know,” Lena said quickly. “I was considering that also.”
Ari put her hand on Lena’s. “Sweetheart, it’s a generous offer. It really is. But why don’t you take a little time to think it over and make sure it feels right.” She cast another stern glance at her husband, who looked like he was going to explode.
Lena nodded.
“Because selling the house could take a while, you know,” her mom added.
“Not so long,” her dad spat out.
“It’s a big job.”
“Not necessarily so big.”
“And expensive to get there, of course.”
“I’ll pay for the plane ticket,” said her father.
Lena was tempted to laugh. “I’ve actually been thinking about it for a while. This isn’t the first time it’s occurred to me.” She sat back in her chair, oddly relaxed. “It’s a place with a lot of painful memories, no question about that. But I feel like I need to do something different than what I’ve been doing. It’s not good for me to be in Providence right now.” She was surprised at her own openness and hoped she could leave it where she wanted to.
Her parents looked surprised too. Instead of jumping in with queries they waited for her to say more, so she did. “I can’t keep avoiding it. I need to do something, and the idea of this feels all right.”
Ari nodded. She looked as though she had fifty questions and a hundred comments, but she didn’t say any of them, and Lena was grateful that she held back.
Lena thought of herself as Alice, turning the kitchen inside out so as not to have to engage, and her mother just wishing she would relax and sit down.
Her father clapped his hands together. “I think it sounds like a great idea,” he said.
I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different.
—T. S. Eliot
There was a list 119 items long of the things Carmen was doing. There was a list one item long of the things she wasn’t doing. And it was the second list she thought of more.
She’d put the envelope Tibby had left for her unopened in her underwear drawer. At first it was so she would see it there, and then she tried to cover it so she wouldn’t see it there, but it turned out her underwear was too flimsy to cover anything.
Sometimes she held the envelope, felt its weight, shook it, tried to guess its contents. Sometimes she studied Tibby