Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [8]
Bridget wasn’t so sure she wanted to be the most beautiful woman at that thing. There was the bride to consider, first of all. And besides, she didn’t have much to prove in that way. She knew she was put together well. She had always known that. She had the attributes that people thought they wanted: blue eyes, long legs, a graceful neck, genuine yellow hair. She’d thought her hair would fade a bit as she got older, but it hadn’t. It was her mother’s hair, her grandmother’s hair, her bittersweet birthright; she wouldn’t get rid of it that easily.
Bridget didn’t suffer from those ailments that picked at you over a lifetime, like allergies or acne, dandruff or a sore back, floaters in your eyes or lust for food that made you fat. She went straight to the hard-core stuff, the rough waves in the gene pool, like the depression so severe it had taken her mother’s life. Sometimes she felt that the outside of her gave a very incomplete account of the inside of her.
She knew she should do a better job of strutting her stuff once in a while for Eric’s sake. She certainly did take pleasure in the way he looked. But she hadn’t accumulated much in the way of clothes and makeup. She couldn’t really afford it. Eric thought her disinterest resulted from a puzzling lack of confidence, but it wasn’t that. She knew how she was.
Eric cocked his head and walked to the back window. “Do you hear that?”
“No. What?” Eric had weirdly good ears.
“It sounds like a phone ringing. It sounds like your ring.”
Bridget went over and craned her neck out the window. It sounded like her phone, all right. “I had a feeling it might be down there,” she said.
With his weirdly good ears, Eric followed the sound down the stairs and out the back door to the large square plastic trash bin. She heard his laughter rising to the back window. “God, Bee, have I been calling the garbage all day?”
A whole stack of memories
never equals
one little hope.
—Charles M. Schulz
“Big surprise,” Jones told Carmen when she walked into their loft two nights later. “I got your dad a room—a nice room, an upgrade—at the SoHo Grand for this weekend.”
Jones still had his jacket and tie on, which indicated to her he’d made a reservation at either a good or a trendy restaurant, where she would be able to eat barely anything, because she’d eaten a sandwich for lunch and hadn’t had time to go to the gym. You didn’t stay a size 0 by eating lunch and dinner, not if you had an ass like hers.
Carmen hung up her jacket and checked the mail. Jones was talking to her from his seat in front of the giant glow of their living room computer.
“But I told him he could stay here,” she said.
“Of course he can stay here. But you gotta admit it’s a lot cooler to stay there.”
Her dad came to visit her in New York from his home in Charleston every few months since his wife, Lydia, had died, whereas Jones’s parents tended to stay put in Fresno, where he liked them. Her and Jones’s loft wasn’t the SoHo Grand, maybe, but it was pretty nice. A lot nicer than any of her friends had.
“I’ll ask him,” she said.
“I already asked him. He’s into it.”
“You talked to him?”
“Yeah, he called here about an hour ago.”
Carmen sighed. Would her father never learn to call her on her cellphone? “All right.”
“You gotta love that bar. Maybe he’ll meet a girl.”
“Jones.”
He smiled and she couldn’t help smiling back. His conciliatory smile was always pretty winning.
She watched him clickety-clacking on the keyboard. She considered how the light gathered on his bald head, which he shaved as assiduously as she followed any of her beauty regimens. He said it was the only way he liked it. Jones was all about choosing, but she also knew that certain patches of his scalp were going to stay bald whether he liked them to or not. It was amazing, really, the effort that went into the absence of things.
“Is this all the mail?” she asked.
“I think so. Why?”
“Tibby said she was sending something.”
“Tibby?”
“Tibby.”
“You hardly ever talk about Tibby anymore.”
“That’s not true.