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Lena settled on a profile. Effie’s knees bent, her chin down, her toes flexed. She started sketching.
Effie was no Valia. She moved around as though modeling for Lena’s picture wasn’t even on her to-do list.
“Sheesh, Ef. Can you hold still?”
Effie flashed her a look. She went back to her toenails.
Lena tried. She really did. It was hard to draw a moving hand. Lena let it blur. It was hard to draw someone’s character when they kept their face turned away. She tried to suggest the resistance in Effie’s pose. It was the only thing that felt true.
And then Lena had to ask herself, why was Effie resisting so hard? It was true they’d been missing each other this summer. They’d both gotten jobs early. They’d both spent as much time away from the house as possible. Was her relationship with Effie another casualty of the Valia debacle?
Had it gone more wrong than Lena knew?
“Effie?”
“What?” Effie snapped, still not turning her head.
Lena’s mouth seemed to work a little better with a charcoal in her hand. She opened it. “Ef, I feel like you don’t want this to work. Like you’re mad at me.”
Effie rolled her eyes. She made a show of blowing dry the shiny pink polish on her big toe. “Why do you think that?”
“Because you won’t look at me. You won’t sit still.”
If Effie had been Lena and Lena had been Effie, this could have taken all day. But luckily, Effie was Effie. When she finally turned, her face was full of expression.
“Maybe I don’t want you to go to art school.”
Lena put down her pad. “Why not?” She couldn’t help showing her astonishment. She always just assumed that Effie sided with her in any struggle against her parents, just as she always sided with Effie, even when Effie was wrong. Did Effie actually agree with her parents this time? Did she resent that Lena was causing more turbulence in their already turbulent home?
Effie’s eyes were full of tears. At long last she capped her polish and tossed it aside. “Why do you think?” she demanded.
Lena felt her own eyes pulling wide open. “Ef. I don’t know. Please tell me.”
Effie put her face in her hands. “I don’t want you to go. I don’t want you to leave me here…with all of them.”
On her knees, Lena made her way the few feet to her sister. She put her arms around Effie. “I’m so sorry,” Lena said honestly. “I don’t want to leave you.” She felt Effie’s tears against her shoulder and she held her tighter. “I hate to even think about leaving you.”
The beautiful thing about getting someone to tell you what was wrong was that you could tell them something to make it a little better. Lena made a mental note that she should try it more often.
In the lobby a while later, Carmen was hugging her mom good-bye when she saw Win. He smiled eagerly, doubling his pace to get to her, like he was afraid she might slip away.
“Carmen!”
“Hey, Win,” she said. She couldn’t help smiling at him. He was too sweet not to. Win and Christina were looking at each other. Win was probably wondering which distant relative of which distant acquaintance Carmen would be accompanying to the hospital now.
“This is my mom, Christina,” Carmen said. “Mom, this is Win.”
“Nice to meet you, Win,” Christina said.
Carmen saw him through her mother’s eyes and was again struck by his exceeding gorgeousness. Carmen found most guys who looked that good intimidating, but Win was different. He was not arrogant or scary. He had a self-deprecating smile and a shuffling posture totally at odds with the usual “I’m gorgeous” swagger.
“Nice to meet you, too,” he said earnestly. “I thought you must be related. You’re beautiful like Carmen.”
If Carmen had just heard about this statement rather than actually listening to it in person, she would have groaned and rolled her eyes and told Mr. Slick to get out of town. But hearing him say it and seeing the look on his face as he did, she believed it was the most innocent and sincere compliment she’d ever gotten. And so did her mother, apparently.
Christina flushed with pleasure. “Thank you. I like to think I look like her.”
Carmen felt unbalanced, buffeted as she was by all the goodness. She had no idea what to say.
“Carmen saved me today,” Christina volunteered to Win, emotion all through her voice. “My husband couldn’t make it to childbirth class, and Carmen came to my rescue. She’s my partner and coach. Can you imagine?” Christina was laughing, but her eyes were full of tears. Carmen had heard about pregnant women being extra emotional, but jeez, this was a bit much.
Win stared at Christina with rapt attention. And then he turned to look at Carmen. She’d wished many times for a boy like Win to look at her this way. But now it was wrong. The stuff her mom was saying made it all worse.
She opened her mouth to say something. And then she realized. “Oh, my God! I have to get Valia! I’m gonna be late for her.” Oh, God. She could practically hear the bone-splintering howl from the eighth floor.
“I’ll come,” Christina said, running after her to the bank of elevators.
“Bye, Win,” Carmen shouted over her shoulder.
He looked a little sad as she waved to him through the narrowing gap of the elevator door. As soon as it closed, Christina burst. “Nena, who is he?” She was obviously excited. “He is…he is just adorable! And the way he looked at you.”
Carmen’s face was hot. “He does seem…nice.” She didn’t want her mother to see her flustered smile. She wished she could get her mouth into a normal shape.
“Nice! He’s more than nice! How do you know him?”
Carmen shrugged. “I don’t really know him. Or I guess I do kind of know him.” She chewed the inside of her lip. “But he doesn’t know me.”
To the man who only has a hammer in the toolkit, every problem looks like a nail.
—Abraham Maslow
It took four evenings for Tibby to pounce on the garbage bags and take them out to the alley before Margaret could get there first. Margaret was so experienced at her job, having worked at this very Pavillion Theater for well over twenty years, and so dedicated to it, that it was nearly impossible for Tibby to manage to do her coworker even this one small favor.
“Tibby, thanks!” Margaret said brightly when she saw the empty cans. “You’re jis sweet.”
“I’m returning a favor,” Tibby said.
Tibby watched as Margaret put her sweater in her employee locker (no pictures pinned up inside, Tibby noticed) and collected her purse, in exactly the same manner she did every evening. Tibby knew Margaret would take the bus on Wisconsin Avenue to her home, which was somewhere north of here. She couldn’t exactly guess what Margaret did with her free time, but she felt almost sure Margaret did it alone.
Suddenly Tibby felt inspired. “Hey, Margaret?”
Margaret turned, her purse dangling neatly from the crook of her elbow.
“Do you want to get some dinner with me?”
Margaret looked utterly bewildered.
“We could just get something quick, if you want. We could go right around the corner to that Italian place.”
Why not spend some time with a gravely lonely person? Tibby thought, silently applauding herself. Wasn’t that a worthy thi
ng to do? Tibby felt sure it was something a good person would do.
Margaret looked around, as though to see if perhaps Tibby was talking to someone else. The muscles around her mouth twitched a little. She cleared her throat. “Excuse me?”
“Do you want to have dinner?”
Margaret looked a bit frightened. “You and me?”
“Yes.” Tibby was beginning to wonder if she had overstepped.
“Will, uh, okay. I giss I could.”
“Great.”
Tibby led the way around the corner. She had never seen Margaret outside the movie theater. It was kind of strange. She wondered how many times Margaret had been out of the movie theater—other than when she was home. In her pale pink cardigan, with her white vinyl purse with gold buckles and her bewildered expression, Margaret looked like an innocent victim of some time-travel mishap.
“Is this place okay?” Tibby asked, holding open the door to the restaurant.
“Yes,” Margaret agreed in a slightly quavering voice.
Tibby had been to this restaurant before and it had seemed perfectly normal. But now, with Margaret at her side, the place struck her as raucous, dark, nightmarishly noisy, and totally wrong.
The hostess showed them to a table. Margaret perched on the very front of her chair, her backbone stiff, as though ready to flee at a second’s notice.
“They have good pizza,” Tibby said feebly.
Did Margaret eat pizza? Did she eat anything? Margaret was terribly thin, nearly as small as a child. There were certain clues to her age: the loose skin of her neck, the texture of her blond ponytail. Tibby knew she had to be in her mid-forties. But in almost all other respects, Margaret looked just shy of puberty.
What had happened to her to make her like this? Tibby wondered. Had there been a tragedy? A loss? Was there some terrible thing that had caused her to step off the conveyor belt of life around the age of fourteen?
