Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [89]
There were so many things she wasn’t saying. There were so many memories pertaining to him and them in each of these images, many of them sad. Those were the only feelings, the only subject, that didn’t go into her letters.
Kostos left them out too. Probably without the same careful intention; he might not have been wallowing in those memories at all. But whatever the reason, he didn’t talk about love, good or bad, and that was a relief. Nor did he ever mention his fiancée/girlfriend. And that was a bigger relief.
Maybe this was the kind of relationship Lena and Kostos were meant for: abstract, contextual, but not intimate. She thought of Markos, the man her father had played tennis with every Saturday morning for the past twenty years. It was like a million other friendships in that it went along without their ever needing to talk about themselves or, God forbid, their relationship. Her father hadn’t found out Markos had gotten divorced until two years after it happened.
I think you and I are the last two letter writers on earth, she’d written to Kostos a few days before. Neither of them was suited to phone conversations or jotty emails employing only lowercase letters. But clearly they had found their métier.
It was a strange joy to get to know him again, to reveal herself honestly again, without all the heat.
She looked up from the current letter, on which she’d spent two hours making a delicate border of olive leaves. It would be hard to say there was no love in these letters.
“You have been an unbelievable help to me. To both of us. I don’t even know how to tell you.”
Almost three weeks had passed, and Brian was sitting at the kitchen table with a bottle of beer after having put Bailey to sleep. It was rare that he and Bridget had a moment to talk. He worked late and she went to bed early. He was working with a team in California and a team in Kolkata, he said, so he kept odd hours. Maybe they were avoiding each other.
“You don’t need to tell me,” Bridget said, mashing up ripe bananas in a bowl. She’d discovered that Bailey would eat anything that involved bananas, so she’d made up a recipe for whole-wheat banana muffins. Eric would like these, she found herself thinking.
“I don’t know how to thank you.”
“You don’t need to thank me.” She mixed the dry ingredients together and got the eggs out of the refrigerator.
“A package came for you today. Did you see it?”
“I got it,” Bridget said. She’d ordered a pile of books for Bailey. Bailey loved books about dogs and monsters, so she’d ordered all the ones she’d remembered loving, mostly from reading them at Tibby’s house: Good Dog, Carl; Martha Speaks; Harry the Dirty Dog; The Monster Bed; Marvin and the Monster. She’d also ordered the entire Schoolhouse Rock collection on DVD.
She poured the batter into the muffin tin, imagining Tibby buying the muffin tin. “How’s the project going?”
“It’s going. I have maybe another week and a half of work. I have to send it out before the move.”
He was silent and she knew he wanted her to stay. “Do you want me to stay?” she asked.
“Can you?”
“Yes.” She didn’t say she couldn’t imagine leaving.
She noticed he’d brought home a huge pile of flattened cardboard boxes when he’d made a run to the supermarket that afternoon. “I can help you move if you want.” She was really, really good at moving.
“Are you sure? You don’t have somewhere else you need to be?”
Bridget shook her head. She had never been big on posturing or pretending she had anything she didn’t.
She knew Brian probably wondered what had happened to her life, what had happened with Eric, why she didn’t call anybody. But he didn’t ask. The air was packed with the things they didn’t ask each other.
“I wish I could repay you.”
“You don’t need to repay me.” If she could have found a way to say it, she would have been honest and told him she wasn’t doing it for him or Bailey or even Tibby as much as she seemed to be doing it for herself.
But by the time she’d finished cleaning up from the muffins, she’d thought of a payment she would exact. She