Sisterhood Everlasting by Ann Brashares Page B

watch over her. He really had meant to, but the sadness and the worry were like unruly children, very difficult to babysit.
    Kostos talked on the phone in her grandparents’ kitchen and Lena sat by the window and looked out at a small segment of the street and the house a few yards across it. She could have gone upstairs and given herself the whole magnificent expanse of the Caldera, but sometimes a close view was all a person could handle.
    She listened to his voice. It had been electrifying in the past, but it lulled her now. For some reason her mind strayed to an image of her hyperactive cousin who needed a stimulant to calm down.
    Kostos was, as she’d known he would be, the perfect person for this burden. He was already the trusted friend of the guy at the consulate, the go-to man for the last loose ends at the precinct. At some point she realized he’d switched from English to Greek, but she hadn’t noticed right away because she hadn’t stopped understanding.
    Lena thought for a moment of Eudoxia. I did call him after all , she thought sadly.
    Kostos was quiet for a while, and when she went to check on him, he’d taken apart the kitchen faucet to fix the drip. She watched him for a few minutes from the doorway, forgetting to be self-conscious and that he might be.
    “Nobody’s taken care of this house for a long time,” she said.
    “What’s going to happen to it?”
    “My father says he’s going to sell it. But that will require him coming here and putting it in order and sorting through all the old things.”
    He nodded. “I hate to think of this house belonging to anyone else.” When he’d finished reassembling the faucet he looked up. “You could do it.”
    “Do what?”
    “Get the house fixed up.”
    “ I could?”
    He nodded. “I could help you.”
    The storm cloud crackled below her. She blinked away tears. “But I have to go back.”
    “Why?”
    It wasn’t even that she was scared. Maybe she would have stayed. She looked at him in the eyes. “The burial.”
    His face was pained. “Oh.” He nodded slowly. “Of course. When?”
    “Tomorrow. I go back tomorrow. The burial is the next day. Thursday.” She was still of no mind to keep track of the days, but she remembered how Alice Rollins kept saying Thursday. In her mind Thursday had nothing to do with Tibby, but it was one of the few fixed points on her horizon.
    He opened his mouth as though he was going to say something, but he didn’t. He wrung out the sponge in the sink and began wiping down the counters.
    She went to the bathroom to wash her face and blow her nose, and when she came back, Kostos, star financier, was taking apart the hinges of the back door that would no longer open.
    Bridget’s body was in pure revolt and her mind had nothing further to say about it. It had nothing to say about anything. She thought nothing, had nothing, belonged to nothing, owned nothing. Except her bike.
    She went back the second day to retrieve it, when she was sure Eric would be at work. She wondered for the miles she walked back to the apartment how she would get it without the key to unlock the door to the garage. That was where she’d stored her bike the day she’d left for Greece.
    She felt a pang. She’d been so happy at that moment right before Greece, imagining that her life would be coming together, not falling apart. She pushed the memory away.
    Eric kept the garage key on his key chain. Bridget barely ever used it. She never used the car and preferred to lock her bike on the front porch for quick access. Could she jimmy the lock? Could sheclimb through a window? She was remarkably good at both of those things.
    But when she got there, she found the garage door swung open, almost as if Eric had left it that way for her. There was her bike in the corner.
    Her mind stayed mostly quiet, and it was better that way. She wheeled her bike out and all the way to Sixteenth Street before she got on. She wasn’t as glad to see it as