The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (19 page)

She nodded yet again and let the tears fall.

She wanted his profession of feelings to do the trick. She really did. She knew he wanted that too. Whether he spoke the truth or not, he thought he could make her feel better, and he really, really wanted to.

But it wasn't what she needed. Her need was as big as the stars, and he was down there on the beach, so quiet she could hardly hear him.

U
nder the tent in the backyard, Carmen's father hugged her for a long time. When he pulled away his eyes were full. She was glad he didn't say anything. She could tell what he meant.

Lydia hugged her too. It was pure duty, but Carmen didn't care. If Lydia loved her father that much, all the better. Krista pecked her cheek and Paul shook her hand. “Welcome back,” he said.

If anyone noticed the fact that she was wearing jeans, they didn't say so.

“Bridal party! Time for formal pictures!” called the photographer's elderly assistant, taking no note of the fragile air. “Bridal party! Please gather under the magnolia!” she cried into Krista's ear. It was as though there were hordes of them rather than just four.

Carmen headed for the drinks table, but her father caught her hand. “Come,” he said. “You belong with us.”

“But I'm . . .” She gestured toward the Pants.

He waved away her concern. “You look fine,” he said, and she believed him.

She posed with the four of them. She posed with Krista and Paul. She posed with Lydia and her dad. She posed with her dad. The old assistant made a sour observation about Carmen's jeans, but nobody else said a word. She couldn't help feeling impressed by Lydia letting her fairy-tale wedding pictures be mucked up by a dark-skinned girl in a pair of blue jeans.

The drinks-and-dinner part of the wedding seemed to rush by. Carmen made small talk with her neurotic aunts until the bride and groom took the floor to loud applause. Shortly afterward, Paul arrived at her chair. “Would you like to dance?” he asked her formally, bowing slightly.

Carmen stood, deciding not to worry that she didn't really know how to waltz. She put her arm through his. On the parquet platform he began whirling her in time with the music.

Suddenly she remembered the girlfriend. She began studying the surrounding tables to see where the poison looks would be coming from. Paul seemed to sense her distraction.

“Where's . . . uh . . .” Suddenly Carmen couldn't think of her actual name.

“Skeletor?” Paul supplied.

Carmen felt her cheeks grow hot. Paul laughed. He had an unexpectedly sweet, hiccupy laugh. Had she really never heard it before?

Carmen bit her lip shamefully. “Sorry,” she murmured.

“We broke up,” he offered. He didn't appear to be the slightest bit sad.

When the song ended he drew away, and she saw her father striding over. Before Paul left the dance floor, he bent close to her ear. “You make your dad happy,” he said, surprising her, as he did pretty much every time he opened his mouth.

Her father pulled her into his grasp and waltzed them along the perimeter of the dance floor.

“You know what I'm going to do?” he said.

“What?” she asked.

“From now on, I'm going to be as honest with you as you've been with me,” he said.

“Okay,” she agreed, and let the twinkly white lights blur into a smeary snowstorm.

At the end of the night, on her way up to bed, she noticed the dining room window. Smooth glass followed a web of fracture lines to a hole. The pane wasn't fixed, but rather covered by clear plastic and a messy arrangement of silver duct tape. For some reason, this made Carmen feel ashamed and happy at the same time.

Lena,

I finally did something right in these Pants. I think Tibby did too. So we're sending them to you with some good Carma attached (heh heh heh). I can't wait to tell you about everything when we're all together again. I hope these Pants bring you as much happiness as they brought me today.

Love,
Carmen

Tibby went to work in her pajama top. She had to borrow a smock. Duncan pretended to be surly, but she could tell he was happy to see her after she'd called in sick for so many days. He complimented her on Carmen's pants.

At four o'clock her treacherous mind slipped back into the assumption that Bailey would show up. And then Tibby had to remember again.

“Where's your friend?” Duncan asked. Everybody at Wallman's knew Bailey now.

Tibby went to the back entrance to cry. She sat on the high concrete step and buried her face. Every so often she wiped her flowing nose on the borrowed smock. Her skin was sticky under her flannel pajama top.

Somebody was there. She looked up. It took her a moment to adjust her eyes to the sight of Tucker Rowe.

“Are you okay?” he asked her. Absently she wondered if he ever got hot in all that black.

“Not particularly,” she answered. She blew her nose into the smock.

He sat down next to her. She was too deeply into crying to stop, so she just cried like that for a while. Awkwardly he patted her hair once. If she had been her regular self she might have been ecstatic that he was touching her, though mortified that he was touching her filthy hair. As it was, she only gave it a glancing thought.

When the tears finally subsided, she looked up.

“Why don't we get a cup of joe and you tell me what's up,” he offered.

She looked at him carefully, not through her eyes but through Bailey's eyes. His hair was overgelled, and his eyebrows were plucked in the middle. His clothes and his reputation seemed fake. She couldn't for the life of her remember why she had liked him.

“No thanks,” she answered.

“Come on, Tibby. I'm serious.” He thought she was turning him down out of insecurity. As though someone so much cooler than her couldn't possibly take an interest.

“I just don't want to,” she clarified.

His face registered the insult.

I used to have a huge crush on you,
she thought as she watched him walk away.
But now I can't remember why.

Not long after he left, Angela, the lady with the long fingernails, came out carrying two clear bags of garbage to the Dumpster. When she saw Tibby she stopped.

“Your little friend is real sick, isn't she?” Angela asked.

Tibby looked up in surprise. “How did you know that?” she asked.

“I had a little niece die of cancer,” Angela explained. “I remember how it looks.”

Angela's eyes were teary too. She sat down next to Tibby. “Poor thing,” she said, patting Tibby's back. Tibby felt the scratchy tips of her fingernails on the polyester.

“She's a sweet, sweet kid, your friend,” Angela went on. “One afternoon she was waiting for you. I got off first, and she saw I was upset about something. She took me out for ice tea and listened to me cry for half an hour about my rotten ex-husband. We made it a little Wednesday afternoon ritual, Bailey and I did.”

Tibby nodded, feeling equal parts awe for Bailey and disappointment in herself. All she'd ever noticed about Angela were her fingernails.

In a miracle fitting the magic of the Traveling Pants, they arrived in Greece on Lena's last day. The package was so crumpled, it looked as though it had gone around the world and back, but the Pants were there, unharmed—though they were wrinkled and softer and a little more worn than when she'd seen them last. They looked almost as exhausted as Lena felt, but they also looked like they'd hold up for about a million more years. These Pants were Lena's final mandate: Go tell Kostos, you big loser.

As she put them on, they gave her more than guilt. They gave her courage. The Pants mysteriously held the attributes of her three best friends, and luckily bravery was one of them. She would give the Pants what meager gifts she had, but courage was the thing she would take.

She also felt sexy in the Pants, which couldn't hurt.

Lena had once participated in a charity walkathon that took her eighteen miles through Washington, D.C., and its suburbs. Amazingly, the walk to the forge was longer.

She meant to go after lunch, but then she realized she couldn't eat any lunch anyway, so why wait?

Which turned out to be a good thing. When she saw the low building around the bend, she would have thrown up, but she didn't have any food in her stomach, so she managed not to.

Lena's hands were sweating so profusely she was afraid they might smear her painting. She tried drying them on the Pants and switching hands, but wet handprints on your pants weren't exactly the hallmark of a cool customer.

At the entrance to the yard she stopped.
Keep walking,
she silently ordered the Pants. She trusted them more than her actual legs.

What if Kostos was busy working? She couldn't very well bother him, could she?
Whose terrible idea was it to pounce on him at work?
the cowardly part of her brain (representing a very large majority) wanted to know.

She kept walking. The very small, brave part of her brain knew that this would be her one chance. If she turned around, she would lose it.

The forge was dark but for the roaring flames contained in the massive brick firebox at the back. There was one figure working a piece of metal in the fire, and it was too tall to be Bapi Dounas.

Kostos either heard or felt her footsteps. He saw her over his shoulder, then carefully, slowly put down his work, took off his big gloves and mask, and came over to her. His eyes still seemed to carry the slightest reflection of the fire. There was nothing self-conscious or worried in his face. That appeared to be her department.

Lena usually counted on boys being nervous around her so she could claim the natural upper hand, but Kostos wasn't like that.

“Hi,” she said shakily.

“Hi,” he said sturdily.

She fidgeted, trying to remember her opening line.

“Would you like to sit down?” he offered. Sitting meant perching on a low brick wall that partitioned one part of the room from the other. She perched. She still couldn't remember how to start. She recalled her hand and then the painting in her hand. She thrust it at him. She'd planned a more elaborate presentation, but whatever.

He turned the painting over and studied it. He didn't respond right away like most people; he just looked. After a while that made her nervous. But she was already so nervous it was hard to tell exactly where the extra nervous started.

“It's your place,” she explained abruptly.

He didn't take his eyes off the painting. “I've been swimming there many years,” he said slowly. “But I'm willing to share it.”

She listened for something suggestive in his words—half hoping there was, half hoping there wasn't. There wasn't, she decided.

He handed the painting back to her.

“No, it's for you,” she said. Suddenly she felt mortified. “I mean, if you want it. You don't have to take it. I'll just . . .”

He took it back. “I want it,” he said. “Thank you.”

Lena swept her hair off the back of her neck. God, it was hot in this place.
Okay,
she coached herself,
time to get talking.

“Kostos, I came here to tell you something,” she said. As soon as her mouth opened, she was on her feet, shuffling and pacing.

“Okay,” he said, still sitting.

“I've been meaning to since . . . since . . . that day when . . .”
How to put this?
she wondered frantically. “. . . We, uh, ran into each other at the pond.”

He nodded. Was there the tiniest suggestion of a smile at the corner of his mouth?

“So. Well. That day. Well.” She started pacing again. Her father's lawyerly quickness on his feet was just another of the things she hadn't inherited from him. “There was some confusion and maybe, you know, mistaken ideas about what happened. And that was probably my fault. But I didn't realize it was happening until it had already happened and then . . .” She trailed off. She glanced at the blaze. The flames of damnation weren't the most comforting sight.

Kostos sat patiently.

When Lena started rambling like this, she counted on people to interrupt her and put her out of her misery, but Kostos didn't do that. He just waited.

She tried to get back on track, but she forgot what the track was. “After it happened, it was too late, and everything was even more confused, and I wanted to talk about it, but I couldn't really find the way to talk about it, because I was too much of a coward to make them talk about the thing they thought had happened, and explain that what they thought had happened hadn't really happened, so I didn't do it even though I meant to and I know I should have.” She suddenly wished she were in a soap opera, and that somebody would slap her across the face the way they did to people who blathered and raved on daytime TV.

She was now fairly sure she saw the hint of a smile on Kostos's face. That wasn't a good sign, was it?

With the back of her hand she wiped the sweat from her upper lip. She looked down at the Pants, and remembering that they were the Pants, she tried to imagine she was Bridget.

“What I'm really trying to say is that I . . . that I made a huge mistake and that whole crazy fight between our grandfathers was all my fault and I should never have accused you of spying on me, because I know now that you weren't.” There, that was better. Oh. But she'd forgotten something. “And I'm sorry,” she burst out. “I'm very, very sorry.”