Sisterhood Everlasting (14 page)

They muttered prayers standing on hard grass, but nobody tried to do any real eulogizing. Only the minister spoke of Tibby, and he kept calling her Tabitha. They’d plan a proper memorial service for the spring, Alice said. It was too shocking, too soon, too rushed, too confusing to attempt more than burying the body that was supposedly Tibby that came off an airplane. In the spring, Alice said, they’d know what to do. Alice had given them relentless permission not to come, but only Bridget had taken it. “I’ll come in the spring,” Bridget had said woodenly, and Carmen had known it would hurt Bee
worse not to be there, but she hadn’t been able to bridge the gap to tell her so.

Carmen had thought that when the burial was over there would be some relief, but there wasn’t. Before, she had been able to aim the terrible feelings at the burial, so where was she supposed to aim them now? What was she supposed to do? She couldn’t haul this misery around through her normal life. She couldn’t fit it through the door of her loft. But what other life did she have?

She could stay here, curled up in the dark on her mother’s bed.

But she couldn’t. The skin of her back had begun to feel irritated under her mother’s hand. Her whole body felt uncomfortable. The pressure in Carmen’s chest forced her to sit up.

Christina withdrew her hand and she looked at Carmen sorrowfully. She knew she wasn’t helping. Her face was full of compassion, but Carmen could see that her mother was spooked and uncertain too.

Not even you can reach me here
, Carmen thought.

Perry and Violet were too quiet. They talked quietly. They ate quietly. When they played music it was quiet.

Bridget was loud. She stomped around loudly, wanting to drown out her loud thoughts, but it didn’t work. By the second week she couldn’t take it anymore. She left them a note and set off on her bike in the dark toward Sacramento.

She saw the neon lights of a pool bar on the outskirts of the city and pulled her bike into the parking lot. She locked her bike, heaved her pack onto her shoulder, and walked in. Now, this was loud.

She pulled her hair from its elastic and shook it out before she went up to the bar. She smiled at the fifty-some-year-old bartender and lifted her pack. “Do you think you could keep this back there for me?” she asked him sweetly. She smiled, and whatever reservation he had seemed to dissipate.

“Just this once,” he said, and swung it under the bar. “What can I get you, sweetheart?”

“I’ll take a Bud,” she said. She didn’t drink very often, and when
she did, she wasn’t prissy about it. She thought of Carmen and her white wine spritzers.

It was far from her last drink of the evening, but it was the last one she paid for. The guy who sent over the next two beers looked like he was barely out of high school. When he came over to ask her to dance he had an insistent look on his face and she didn’t like it. “No thanks,” she said with no coyness whatsoever.

He looked more irritated than hurt. “Come on, girl. I bought you two beers.”

“And I thanked you for the beers. You didn’t buy me.”

She left him at the bar and went over to the area with the pool tables. It was crowded and the music was loud.

A waitress materialized with a tray and a bottle of beer on it. “This is from the gentleman over by the jukebox,” she said, giving Bridget a little wink.

Bridget looked in the direction she pointed. The guy tipped his hat to her. He had tanned skin, straight dark hair down to his shoulders, and a worn cowboy hat. He wore a plaid shirt rolled up at the sleeves, revealing tattoos on both forearms. She walked over to him. “Hey, thanks.”

“With pleasure.” He studied her with obvious interest. “Can I talk you into a game of pool, beautiful?”

He was entirely relaxed and confident in the asking. He wasn’t old, probably in his midthirties, but his skin was weathered in a way that made her think he probably worked at a local farm or ranch. Where the collar of his shirt was unbuttoned, she could see another tattoo winding up from his chest. She wondered what it was a picture of.

“Sure thing.”

By the speed with which a table cleared when he made his intentions known, Bridget guessed he was a regular here and a serious player.

He saw Bridget pausing over the array of cues. “Is this a game or a lesson?”

Bridget feigned innocence. “Do you need me to show you how to play?”

He laughed, and it was a great big laugh. It was the first thing Bridget had enjoyed in many days.

She stuck out her hand. “My name is Bridget,” she said.

He shook it, mildly surprised by her sudden formality. “Travis,” he said.

“Travis,” she repeated. “I like to know the name of my opponent before I beat him.”

Travis bought Bridget two more beers while she beat him three games in a row. She was getting giddy. Giddy from drinking, giddy from winning, giddy from the crowd that had gathered around the table, giddy at the way Travis looked at her.

She was so giddy she lost the fourth game. She laughed as he got the whole bar involved in his victory lap.

He was obviously a local guy and well loved. He was as good a player as she was, if not better. But she’d taken advantage of his initial surprise and disorientation to win the first games. She was naturally gifted, and she’d played a shameful number of hours while getting Cs at Brown and in the first aimless years after she’d graduated.

“What do you say we team up?” he suggested. “We’ll hold this table all night.”

Their first opponents were two serious older Mexicans, and they gave them a long fight. When Bridget nailed the final shot, the entire population of the bar erupted. Travis picked her up off her feet and kissed her on the lips.

He might have expected her to pull away first, but she didn’t. The kiss lengthened and deepened as the cheering of the spectators faded. Bridget felt the blood pounding in her head, rushing down into her abdomen. She felt the beer sloshing around behind her eyes and she could barely remember what had broken her heart two and a half weeks ago. She could almost forget that the burial had taken place and she hadn’t been there.

They didn’t hold the table all night. They were far more interested in each other than pool after that. They couldn’t keep their
hands off each other. She clutched another beer as Travis led her outside. If she kept drinking and he kept kissing her, she could keep the sadness away longer.

He took her around to the side of the bar, where it was dark and quiet. He took off his hat and dropped it on the grass. He took her in his arms and pushed her against the wall. He kissed her like she hadn’t been kissed in a long time and she was breathless. The feeling was so strong she could lose herself in it.

She felt his hands on her back, then under her shirt. His hands came around the front. He pulled open her bra and then her shirt and she startled. It had been a long time since she’d had unfamiliar hands on her skin.

You are drunk
, she informed herself drunkenly, feeling the spin starting in the middle of her head.

She unbuttoned his shirt so she could see his tattoo, but it seemed to spread all around and she was too close to his chest to be able to tell what it was. He was pushing himself against her and she could feel his hardness through her jeans and his. She meant to ask him about the tattoo, but she forgot the question before she could.

His hands were on the waistband of her jeans and then he was pulling at the button.
Am I really gonna do this? Right here, right now?
the least drunk part of her was asking, while the rest of her was barreling along.

He undid the button and zipper before she could pay attention. She felt his two hands on her bare ass.

Intoxicated as she was, there was something she needed to know. She pulled her mouth away from his. “Do you have something?” she asked. “A rubber or something?”

“No. Do we need it?”

“We need it,” she said.

“Aw, shit,” he said. He took his hands out of her pants. “You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“All right.” He looked agonized in his impatience. “I’ll go in there and find one. You stay here.”

Bridget felt the first tendril of shame as she buttoned her pants,
the second as she fastened her bra and closed her shirt. She sat down on the grass. She looked up at the sky to a moon that was barely a sliver. She felt tears running down her face.

What am I doing?

Travis came back. He recognized the change in her mood. “Are you okay?”

“No,” she said. “I’m not.” Beer told the truth.

She wrapped her arms around her knees. Her body was closed for business.

“You gonna be sick?” he asked.

“No, it’s not that.” She paused and considered. “Yes, I guess I am.” She went around to the back of the bar and retched her guts out. She felt better in one way and worse in another. Nausea abated, reality came back.

She returned to sit on the grass and Travis sat next to her. “Feel better?”

“Not much,” she said. She put her arms around her knees again. She rested her head on them.
God, I hate myself
.

He patted her hair very sweetly. “You’re a beautiful girl and a fine pool player,” he said.

“Thanks,” she said into her knee.

“You want to go out sometime? Tomorrow?” he asked. “We can take it slow if you like.”

She lifted her head and tried to muster a smile for him. If she was going to have a hideously destructive one-night stand, she had at least picked a nice guy for it.

“I’ve got a boyfriend,” she said.

“Well.” He nodded. “Of course you do. Lucky guy.”

She shook her head. “I don’t think he feels so lucky.”

You have to be someone.

    —Bob Marley

“I don’t know if we should go forward with the wedding,” Carmen
said to Jones.

She sat at the table in the kitchen of their loft. The kitchen table at home with her mom was pine or cherry wood or something like that, with a million rings and scars on it. It was soft. This table, like everything else in their kitchen, was stainless steel. You could wipe off any marks, but it was hard under her mug, hard and cold under her elbow. Had Jones picked this one? Had she? Probably Annaliese, the designer, had picked it.
It turns out I hate this table
, Carmen thought.

Jones looked up from the espresso machine. She could tell he was about to press the button, but that he decided it would be unseemly to start up all the boiling, steaming racket when such a serious statement had been laid down.

“Carmen.”

“How can I think about that now? How can I think about flowers and hors d’oeuvres? I can’t.”

“How can you not? Come on. We’ve talked about this. What
are
you going to think about? Tibby? Are you going to think about her all day long? About your friendship? How many days or weeks in a row are you going to do that? And do you really think it’s helping, at this point?”

The tears were so warm in Carmen’s eyes and so cold by the time
they got to her chin and dribbled down her neck or dropped onto the table. “I don’t know what else to do.”

“Move on. Call your agents. Call your manager. Set up some auditions. Look at flowers, visit caterers, buy yourself the most gorgeous, most expensive fucking wedding dress in New York City.”

Carmen studied a teardrop as it sat pertly on the metal surface of the table as if it were the only one. Well, there were more where that came from. She wiped it into a wet stripe with the tip of her finger. “I don’t know if I can.”

Jones knew about grief. You couldn’t say he didn’t. His brother had died at eighteen of a drug overdose when Jones was sixteen. “You can’t let it define you,” he’d said at the time he told her about it, maybe three months after they’d met, and then he’d never spoken of it again. He was either very good at grieving or very bad, and Carmen wasn’t sure which.

“Do you think that sitting here in your sweatpants day after day is some kind of tribute to her?”

Carmen shook her head.

“Carmen, I could see it for the first week. Ten days. I get it. But you’re not helping anybody here.”

Carmen shook her head again.

“I’m not saying you try to forget about it. Of course you can’t. But you take the sadness with you, you keep moving and you integrate it into your life, and the burden gets lighter over time.”

Carmen nodded. He’d given this speech before.

“Okay?” he said, like a coach sending her back onto the field.

She shrugged. “I don’t know if I can.”

Jones stood there staring at her for an extra moment. She knew her hair was wild and her face looked sallow. The sweatpants were not attractive. He was probably thinking how ugly she really was. It was probably a relief not to have to get married to her. She thought of the beautiful girls in Jones’s office who were constantly fluttering around him with their straight, silky hair.

He dropped his coffee cup into the sink with a clang and it startled her.

“All right, Carmen. If you don’t want to get married, that’s your decision.” He walked to the door, then turned around. “I love you.
I want to marry you. I’d marry you today. I want to keep moving forward. You know how I am. But if you don’t want to, that’s for you to decide.”

Carmen put her hands over her face.

“But I’m not moving backward,” he said as he put on his coat. He opened the front door to leave. “That’s one thing I’m not going to do.”

Bridget slept in a field for the third straight night and woke up under a hot, damning sun. This bit of earth was positively the sunniest place in the state of California, and she was not enjoying it.

She was still nursing the hangover from the night at the bar, and she couldn’t shake it. Too much time had passed to blame the alcohol anymore. Was it the guilt? The self-loathing? She biked into Sacramento to look for something to eat that might settle her stomach. After she ate a sourdough roll and drank a cup of jasmine tea she rode by a Planned Parenthood office and stopped her bike.