Sisterhood Everlasting by Ann Brashares Page A

she saw in them a couple of minutes of salvation. She recognized in herself the familiar old maneuvers: the dodge, the stall, the float-above-it-all. She recognized them from having watched him. And in his plaintive offerings she recognized an old self of hers who tried harder to be brave.
    “Do you want to sleep?” Kostos asked Lena as she yawned over her tea.
    “If I could, I would,” she said.
    He had an open and sympathetic face. He always had—even when he was crushing her hopes most brutally. “You lie down on the couch and I’ll answer the phone or the door. I’ll watch over everything.”
    I’ll watch over the sadness for you , he seemed to be saying. I’ll watch over the worry and the big, dark questions so you can get a little rest .
    “Thank you. I’ll try,” she said. She lay down, her hands under her head, and he gave her a wool blanket. He spread it over her as though it were his house, not hers. And it was his more than hers. He’d been spending time in this house his whole life, and she had only come four times, always to lose things—her heart, her grandfather, her pants, Tibby, and along with Tibby her sense of comfort that she understood anything about the world or ever had. He touched her anklebone by mistake.
    He sat in the green upholstered chair across from her. She watched him carefully, openly, as he got up and retrieved his bag from the other side of the room and took out his newspaper. She forgot that she was supposed to be sleeping and that it was a weird thing to do.
    He put his feet up on the coffee table and glanced at her. She closed her eyes, but they didn’t want to stay shut. Her lids felt notheavy but rubbery and light, and perhaps too short to even cover her eyeballs. Strange.
    She turned over to face the couch instead. Maybe her eyelids had become short because she wanted to look at him. She gazed at the pattern of the couch for a while—green, blue, yellow, ochre, garnet-red hydrangea puffs that didn’t really look at all like hydrangea puffs but like a fantastically druggy impression of them. This was a couch that wouldn’t go with any painting.
    And then she started to wonder what would happen to this couch. This would be one of the things her father wouldn’t know what to do with. She pictured it sitting out on the winding street, waiting for someone to claim it, the harsh island sun picking out every sign of wear.
    She pictured her grandparents buying it. She imagined the boxy furniture store in Fira in about 1972, her grandmother effusive over the colors and her grandfather with his sweet face and nothing to say. She pictured how the couch would look in her studio apartment in Providence. It wouldn’t fit. She’d have to get rid of her bed. It was a thought.
    When she flipped back over she discovered that Kostos’s newspaper had drifted to his lap, his head had drifted backward, and his eyelids had closed. With wide-open eyes she watched him sleep. I guess I can watch over you , she thought. The sight of his sleeping self seemed almost like a feast offered to her eyes, both inviting and overwhelming. She had hungry eyes, even now. The thing that always held her back was that she hated being caught looking. And now she could look all she wanted. For a time, his face belonged not to the important world, but to her.
    She did a strange thing, which was she got a sketchbook and charcoal from her bag. Those two items lived permanently in her bag, but she hadn’t gotten them out and used them in a long time. Kostos slept quietly and she drew his face, full as it was of dramas she could barely remember right now. Even if your brain didn’t understand anything, your eyes could still see. Even if you were high above, looking down on the thunderhead and not yet getting pummeled by it, you could still draw. That felt like a saving grace.
    When he opened his eyes it took him a few seconds to come back to her. A look of apology materialized on his face. He had wanted to