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The Pants! They’d come back to her. With a clanging in her chest, she tore up the stairs, stripped off her running clothes, and jumped into the shower. You weren’t allowed to wash the Pants. She wasn’t crazy enough to try them on just after she’d run ten miles on an August day in Alabama.
She dried herself, put on underwear, and took up the Pants. Please fit, she begged them. She pulled them up and closed them in one fluid motion. Ahhhhh. They felt so good. She did a victory lap around the attic. She ran downstairs and outside and did a victory lap around the house. “Yay!” she shouted to the sky, because it felt so good to feel good again.
She put her hands on her thighs, soaking in the connection to Carmen and Lena and Tibby, and loving them so much. “It’s okay!” she wanted to shout loudly enough for them to hear. “I’m going to be all right now!”
Greta cast her a bemused look as Bridget shot past her, back up to the third floor.
The contents of the last box were still piled in the corner. Bridget was ready to put it all away and be done with it now. She grabbed the box to repack it, but as she did, she stalled. There was a yellowed square left in the bottom that she hadn’t noticed before. Her euphoria dimmed as she reached in after the paper. It was the back of a photograph, she realized as she put her fingers on it. She promised herself she would be okay, whatever it was.
The picture showed a girl, about sixteen, sitting on the steps of Burgess High. She was beautiful to behold with her giant smile and her yellow curtain of hair. Bridget’s first thought was that it was her mother. She just assumed it. But as she looked closer, she wondered. The picture looked too old to be of her mother. And besides, the character of the face was different….
Bridget thundered back downstairs.
“Grandma! Hey!” she shouted.
“Out here,” Grandma called from the yard. She was hosing down the little garden that hugged the back of the house.
Bridget thrust the picture in her face. “Who’s this?”
Greta looked at it. “Me,” she said.
“That’s you?”
“Sure.”
Bridget studied it again. “You were beautiful, Grandma.”
“Is that so surprising?” Greta asked, trying to look offended but not seeming to care very much.
“No. Well. A little.”
Grandma hosed Bridget’s foot. Bridget hopped around laughing.
When Bridget settled down she came back to the picture. “You had the hair.”
Grandma cocked her head. “Where do you think you got it from, missy?” she asked playfully.
Bridget’s answer was serious. “I always thought I got it from Marly. I always thought it meant I was like her.”
Greta transitioned easily into Bridget’s new mood. “You are like her in some ways—in some wonderful ways.”
“Like how?”
“You’re intense like she was. You’re brave. You have her beauty, no doubt about that.”
“You think so?” Bridget longed for reassurance on this point more than she ever had before.
“Of course you do. Whatever color you want to make your hair.”
Bridget liked that for an answer.
Greta turned off the hose and tossed it into the flower bed. “You’re very different from her too.”
“Like how?” Bridget asked again.
Greta thought. “I’ll tell you an example. The way you came into this house and remade that attic. You pulled it apart and worked day after day to put it back together. It made my heart grow to see your patience and your hard work, Bee. Your mother, God bless her in heaven, couldn’t pay attention to any one thing for longer than an hour or two.”
Bridget remembered that about her mother, how quickly she had become impatient. With a book, with a radio station, with her children. “She gave up too easily. Didn’t she?” Bridget asked.
Greta looked at Bee like she was going to cry. “She did, honey. But you won’t.”
“Grandma, can I keep this picture?” she asked. Of all the thousands of things she had sifted through in the attic, this one looked like hope. This was the one she wanted to keep.
Carmabelle: Len. Please answer me? Please? I’m coming over.
Lennyk162: Not right now. I’ll call you later, okay?
Distantly, from the bottom of the well, Lena heard the knock on the door. It came twice more before it occurred to her that it was her door and she was supposed to answer it.
She coughed up her voice. “Who is it?”
“Lenny, it’s me. May I come in?”
Carmen’s voice was so lovely and familiar, and yet it belonged to the world above.
“Not … right … now,” she managed to say.
“Lenny, please? I really need to talk to you.”
Lena closed her eyes. “Maybe later.”
The door opened anyway. Carmen walked straight over to the bed where Lena was huddled.
“Oh, Lenny.”
Lena made herself sit up, though her bones seemed to slump and cave. She began to cover her eyes with her hands, but then Carmen was right there. There was no hiding. Carmen put her arms around Lena and held her.
Lena let her heavy head fall into Carmen’s neck, giving way to the inexpressible mercy of her friend’s warm skin.
“Lenny.” Carmen hummed and held, and Lena cried.
Lena cried and shook. She cried, and Carmen cried for her.
After a while Lena realized she wasn’t at the bottom of the well, but here, with Carmen.
“Mark him! Rusty, go!” Bridget screamed from the sidelines. She paced the length of the field in the Traveling Pants, barking orders and ranting encouragement like any good coach. Her hair was free and incandescent, but her players didn’t care. They wanted her for her mind. Or her strategy, more specifically. At the half, eleven guys crowded around her, wide-eyed and attentive, as if she were an oracle.
Greta sat a few yards behind her in a beach chair, smiling and shaking her head, alternately studying the game and her crossword puzzle.
“Jesus, Corey, stop mooning around the goal. Rusty, don’t get so far ahead of Billy. You’re useless when you’re offsides; I don’t care if you are fast. And also, their right midfielder is dead on his feet and has no viable sub. That’s where you work ’em.” She rearranged her lineup a little and sent them back onto the field.
Eight minutes into the second half, Mooresville’s overworked midfielder took to the sidelines and got subbed by the backup goalie, who was at least forty pounds overweight. Bridget knew it was in the bag at that point.
Billy threw his arms around her after the win and lifted her off the ground. “All right, Coach!” he shouted. They all swarmed around her happily, shouting and yelling and celebrating.
“Let’s not get cocky,” she said. Then she realized how much she hated it when coaches said that. “Screw that,” she said, laughing. “Get cocky all you want. We’re gonna flatten Athens at four.”
Burgess didn’t flatten Athens at four, but they did beat them, securing a berth in the final the next day.
It turned out that the final pitted them against Tuscumbia, all the way from Muscle Shoals. Bridget woke up early and put on the Pants for another spin. She brought her clipboard down to breakfast and detailed her complex strategy to Grandma, who tried very hard to look interested but kept sneaking peeks at an article in Ladies’ Home Journal.
Billy appeared at the screen door, white-faced, at nine. “We’re dead,” he said.
“What?”
“Corey Parks took off for Corpus Christi with his girlfriend last night.”
“No!”
“Yes. She threatened she’d break up with him if he didn’t drive her.”
Bridget grimaced. “Oh, no.” She shook her head. “I never trusted Corey. Not since he faked the knee injury so he could go to King’s Dominion.”
“Bee, we were six,” Billy said.
Bridget didn’t back down. “Well, you know. The more things change …”
At the field half an hour later, with the two sides assembled and two towns present to cheer and harangue, the situation didn’t look any better. Burgess was no deeper a team than Mooresville. Bridget surveyed her bench unhappily. Their one reliable sub had left for Auburn two days earlier. Seth Molina had shin splints and refused to wear his game shirt. Rason Murphy had such bad asthma Bridget worried that if she put him on the field on a sultry day like today, he would up and die. She would do better to suit up Greta and throw her into the game.
She and Billy paced together, considering their options. There weren’t any options.
They looked toward their sorry bench. “This is hopeless,” Billy said.
