Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [94]
“Ready.”
“ ‘At least I tried.’ ”
Lena sighed. “Okay. I get it. I do.” She was too pathetic for words. “But will he come? I just want to know what you think the odds are. Tell me what you really think.”
“I think Tibby was a wise girl. I think she loved you.”
When we argue for our limitations,
we get to keep them.
—Evelyn Waugh
The afternoon she was getting on a plane to go to New Orleans, Carmen stopped in the Apple store downtown to switch her service from her old phone to the new one that Tibby had left for her.
She had to wait in line, and then wait endlessly for the so-called genius salesperson to transfer all her contacts, so that by the time she got out of there she was running really late.
She saw as she raced back to the loft that the black town car was already waiting to take her to the airport. She finished packing in a hurry. She went down to the car and then raced up to the loft again when she realized she’d forgotten her makeup bag. By the time the car pulled onto the FDR Drive she was half an hour later than she should have been.
It ought to be fine, Carmen told herself. Travel departments always loaded on extra time. She immediately thought to pass the time checking her email and making calls, but the new phone was not booting up properly. She turned it off. Maybe AT&T needed a little time to switch the service. Her fingers itched.
She grabbed a copy of People magazine from the seat pocket. She remembered how much she used to love these gossipy magazines. At Williams, between Dostoyevsky and Marx, she’d be gobbling up Us Weekly and OK! She’d believed they were faithfully recording the magical world of celebrity. But the more she knew the business, the less she enjoyed the magazines. Every page she turned, she saw the manipulations, the gears showing. She saw how much of the coverage was bartered and bought. She used to look at the red carpet pictures and be dazzled, but now she saw Botox and fake teeth, starvation and double-sided tape.
Maybe they lost their thrill the day she had seen herself in one of the pictures. It was a red carpet photo of her at the Golden Globes, and it probably looked as glamorous as the next one to the outside eye. But when she saw it all she could think of was the sweat that had been dripping down her back, the gross taste in her mouth from not eating for three days, the tape holding up her dress, her confusion at photographers barking her name, the smile pasted on her face. There had been nothing magical about it.
“What time is your flight?” the driver asked her.
Carmen looked up. “Uh. Five forty-five, I think?” She looked at her dead phone. The flight time was on the phone. The airline and terminal information was on the phone. She wondered what time it was. Damn, that was on the phone too. The phone company might as well have switched off her brain while they were at it.
“That might be tough,” he said.
“What?” Now that he mentioned it, it did seem as though the car hadn’t moved in a while. She looked out the window. She scooted up to look through the front windshield. “What’s going on?”
“There must be an accident. Nobody’s moving.”
She could see the Triboro Bridge in the distance, but there were about a million other cars between them and it. She heard sirens behind them, trying to get through. The lanes of the FDR were so packed, no cars could get over to make way for them. A blast of honking began.
At last she spotted an old-fashioned clock on the dashboard. It was almost five. “Can you get off this?” she asked.
The driver looked over his shoulder at her. He couldn’t get anywhere. It was too stupid a question to answer.
She tried to turn her phone on again, but it turned itself off. Was it the battery? Where could she charge it?
Another twenty minutes passed, and no one moved except two police cars and an ambulance that finally broke the sclerosis. “Shit,” Carmen said, as she did every couple of minutes. She stared at the phone in rising panic. What could