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“No, we are not married. Yes, we live together. Lena, where are you staying? I know it’s late, but do you mind if I come by? I’d really like to talk to you in person.”
She knew exactly what he wanted to talk to her about and she didn’t want to listen. Somewhere his own words were probably ringing in his head, the words he’d said to her more than ten years before, after he’d shocked and devastated her by getting married to Mariana less than a month after he’d promised to love Lena forever. I love you. I’ll never stop. I never will.
He probably felt bad about hurting her now, just as he’d felt bad about it then. He must have seen by her face how she felt. She’d tried to hide it, but she’d never been good at that. Especially not around him. At least she hadn’t collapsed this time.
This time. How many times could you let one man break your heart? What was the matter with her? And if she was being honest with herself she also had to ask, how many times had she broken his?
He was going to try to ease this painful reality on her, make a few excuses, attempt to salvage her pride and preserve their old friendship. He wanted to continue to feel good about himself. Not cause Valia to roll over in her grave.
But seeing him wouldn’t help anything. Not for Lena anyway. It would only make everything worse.
“Just tell me where you are and I will come.”
God knew she wasn’t going to tell him where she was staying. That she was too poor and delusional to have booked a hotel. “You’ve got a life, Kostos, and I respect that. I should have called before I came. I’m sorry I didn’t.”
“Please, Lena? Please tell me where you are. I need to see you.” His voice sounded strange, distorted. She wondered if he’d been drinking with “Harriet” on their big night out.
She realized that the reason her throat ached so badly was because she was going to cry. She was grateful that he couldn’t see. That nobody could see, except the janitor rolling her mop and bucket out of the women’s room.
“I can’t. I don’t want to. I made a mistake by coming here.”
“Lena, you didn’t. If you would just give me a chance.”
“I can’t,” she said again. She needed badly to blow her nose. She hoped he couldn’t hear the wetness of tears and mucus.
He was silent for a moment. “Can I call you again? Tomorrow?”
She closed her eyes and willed her voice not to sound as wet and sad as it felt. “Please don’t.”
“But you don’t understand anything.”
She wished she could hold herself back, but she couldn’t. She was crying hard, and he was going to know it. “Understand what? There’s nothing you can say that changes anything.”
They were both quiet for a moment. She held the phone away until she could pull herself together.
When he spoke again he sounded subdued. She had observed this transition in him before. His voice had flattened. “All right. If you don’t want me to, I won’t.”
She was scared to say anything. She stayed quiet.
“So what about this letter?” he said, clearly perplexed by it and its origin.
She tried to even out her breathing. “It’s from Tibby. I don’t know what it says. She left one just like it for me too. She left me instructions to deliver yours to you in person.”
“I see,” he said. “I guess that explains it.” It was that flat voice.
Lena wasn’t sure what it explained, and she didn’t have the wherewithal to ask.
“Are we supposed to be together when we open them, or something like that?” he asked. She wasn’t sure if his voice sounded mocking.
“No, that wasn’t part of it.”
“It says on the back I’m not supposed to open it until the middle of March.”
“I know,” she said. “That’s what mine says too.”
The angels come to visit us,
and we only know them
when they are gone.
—George Eliot
Carmen had never dreaded an audition before. Usually she went with a kick of her expensive heels and a kind of ferocity in her heart. I’ll show them a thing or two, she would think, with all the delusional verve of an only child. If she didn’t get the role, they didn’t get her. That was that. But she felt sober and wary when she thought of this one.
“The wedding is on April seventeenth. How can I possibly get everything ready if I’m in New Orleans at the end of March for a week and a half?” she complained to Jones from the bathroom a few evenings later as she slogged through the removal of her makeup.
“You’ll have your phone. You can do it from there.” She noticed he didn’t offer to do it himself.
“What about tasting the menu? What about trying on the dress? I can’t do that from there.”
Jones was trying to read something in bed and not savoring her pouty diatribes. “Listen,” he said finally. “You need to concentrate on this meeting. I’m serious. You need to get your head into it. If you want to postpone the wedding for a month or two, we can do that.”
Carmen looked down at the cotton ball blackened with stuff from her eyes. Jones wouldn’t have wanted to postpone the wedding for her grandmother, but he instantly tossed it aside for an audition. Grant Arden was a lot more important in his world than Big Carmen.
Did she want to postpone it? Or did she just want to get it over with? If she rushed into the wedding headlong, she wouldn’t have to think very much. Things like what to do about Tibby’s family, whether to involve bridesmaids or just blindly skip that whole morass, those questions could be largely avoided. Thoughts like God, Carmen, what in the world are you doing? could be politely stepped over on her way up the aisle. It was a built-in excuse for herself and everyone else—We just slapped it together. Maybe it was even an excuse in case she needed one later. We probably should have taken more time with it. She could almost hear herself five years in the future saying it.
“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 br
okers 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 her Pucci-style housedress. She put both of them in her suitcase.
Her bapi had died long ago. Most of his stuff had been cleaned out and given away years before. But when she wandered into his closet she found a pair of silver cuff links in the shape of lions in the back of a drawer. She also saw, still pinned to the wall, two small drawings she had made that first summer, one of a church in the village and another of the fishing boats in Ammoudi. She remembered showing them to Bapi when she’d first made them, and his wordless appreciation. She’d left them in her room when she’d gone back to the States. It felt self-important or presumptuous of her to have given them to him, but she was moved that he had liked them enough to keep them and hang them in his closet. She was moved at the idea that he would have looked at them and thought of her when she wasn’t there.
