Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [79]
But seeing him wouldn’t help anything. Not for Lena anyway. It would only make everything worse.
“Just tell me where you are and I will come.”
God knew she wasn’t going to tell him where she was staying. That she was too poor and delusional to have booked a hotel. “You’ve got a life, Kostos, and I respect that. I should have called before I came. I’m sorry I didn’t.”
“Please, Lena? Please tell me where you are. I need to see you.” His voice sounded strange, distorted. She wondered if he’d been drinking with “Harriet” on their big night out.
She realized that the reason her throat ached so badly was because she was going to cry. She was grateful that he couldn’t see. That nobody could see, except the janitor rolling her mop and bucket out of the women’s room.
“I can’t. I don’t want to. I made a mistake by coming here.”
“Lena, you didn’t. If you would just give me a chance.”
“I can’t,” she said again. She needed badly to blow her nose. She hoped he couldn’t hear the wetness of tears and mucus.
He was silent for a moment. “Can I call you again? Tomorrow?”
She closed her eyes and willed her voice not to sound as wet and sad as it felt. “Please don’t.”
“But you don’t understand anything.”
She wished she could hold herself back, but she couldn’t. She was crying hard, and he was going to know it. “Understand what? There’s nothing you can say that changes anything.”
They were both quiet for a moment. She held the phone away until she could pull herself together.
When he spoke again he sounded subdued. She had observed this transition in him before. His voice had flattened. “All right. If you don’t want me to, I won’t.”
She was scared to say anything. She stayed quiet.
“So what about this letter?” he said, clearly perplexed by it and its origin.
She tried to even out her breathing. “It’s from Tibby. I don’t know what it says. She left one just like it for me too. She left me instructions to deliver yours to you in person.”
“I see,” he said. “I guess that explains it.” It was that flat voice.
Lena wasn’t sure what it explained, and she didn’t have the wherewithal to ask.
“Are we supposed to be together when we open them, or something like that?” he asked. She wasn’t sure if his voice sounded mocking.
“No, that wasn’t part of it.”
“It says on the back I’m not supposed to open it until the middle of March.”
“I know,” she said. “That’s what mine says too.”
The angels come to visit us,
and we only know them
when they are gone.
—George Eliot
Carmen had never dreaded an audition before. Usually she went with a kick of her expensive heels and a kind of ferocity in her heart. I’ll show them a thing or two, she would think, with all the delusional verve of an only child. If she didn’t get the role, they didn’t get her. That was that. But she felt sober and wary when she thought of this one.
“The wedding is on April seventeenth. How can I possibly get everything ready if I’m in New Orleans at the end of March for a week and a half?” she complained to Jones from the bathroom a few evenings later as she slogged through the removal of her makeup.
“You’ll have your phone. You can do it from there.” She noticed he didn’t offer to do it himself.
“What about tasting the menu? What about trying on the dress? I can’t do that from there.”
Jones was trying to read something in bed and not savoring her pouty diatribes. “Listen,” he said finally. “You need to concentrate on this meeting. I’m serious. You need to get your head into it. If you want to postpone the wedding for a month or two, we can do that.”
Carmen looked down at the cotton ball blackened with stuff from her eyes. Jones wouldn’t have wanted to postpone the wedding for her grandmother, but he instantly tossed it aside for an audition. Grant Arden was a lot more important in his world than Big Carmen.
Did she want to postpone it? Or did she just want