Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [80]
“How’d you two do?” Brian asked at the end of the first day when he emerged from his office and found Bridget and Bailey exhausted at the kitchen table.
Bridget shrugged. “Pretty good. I don’t know.” She looked at Bailey. “How’d we do?”
Bailey copied Bridget’s shrug.
Brian looked Bailey over carefully and kissed her pink ear. “Usually we change out of pajamas at some point in the day. And sunscreen is always a plus. But otherwise she looks good, I think.”
Bailey was eager to be back in her father’s arms and put to bed right after dinner. Bridget slept a longer and more innocent sleep than she had in a long time.
In the morning, Bee and Bailey carried their breakfast outside, and both screamed in delight when a yellow bird flew down and landed on the edge of Bailey’s cereal bowl and ate a Cheerio. They talked about it for the rest of the day.
They played for a couple of hours at the creek. They found a garter snake and taunted it with sticks. They tried to get it to eat a Cheerio, but it wouldn’t. Bridget felt the old childlike brutishness rising in her again.
In the heat of the afternoon they lay on their stomachs on the front porch and scribbled with crayons. This was exactly as far as Bridget’s artistic talent had ever taken her, and she was satisfied with it.
Listening to the sticky click of the crayons going on and off the paper, breathing in that old waxy smell, Bridget realized she was enjoying herself.
She realized this job suited her in unexpected ways. It was like temping, in that each day contained different activities, so you didn’t feel too tied down. It was better than temping in that you got to be outside and wear your oldest, dirtiest clothes. It was better than temping in that you got to follow your own ideas, and whatever you might say about toddlers, a two-year-old boss was a lot easier to please and impress than a representative from human resources.
Idly Bridget wondered what you needed to do to qualify for such a job and how much it paid by the hour.
Lena sold the house the third day she was in Greece. She called four different brokers the first day, cleaned like a madwoman the second day, and hosted an open house the third day, and by five o’clock she had accepted an offer for the place, furniture and all. The fourth day she signed papers, went to the bank, and faxed documents to her father. The fifth day she met with the moving company and worked alongside them boxing up papers, books, and personal effects to be shipped back to her parents in the States. She was astonished by the efficiency of it all.
On the sixth day she woke up without a project. She woke up in a cleaned-out house that didn’t really belong to her anymore, in a bed she couldn’t seem to get out of. She lay there and watched the sunlight creep over her blanket. She didn’t have a message to deliver in Tibby’s name anymore. She didn’t have a house to sell anymore. She didn’t have a man to contemplate a life with anymore.
She had … what did she have? She had large feet. She had self-pity. She had an ingrown toenail on her left big toe. She had four days until she could get on a flight back to the States.
She stayed in bed until after noon. She made herself an omelet. She sat cross-legged on the floor of Valia’s closet for a while. Then she got up and looked through the last of the clothes in her grandmother’s closet, the ones destined for the garbage. She tried on Valia’s pink cotton bathrobe and then