Ann Brashares_Sisterhood_02 by The Second Summer of the Sisterhood

Author:The Second Summer of the Sisterhood
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Social Issues, Juvenile Fiction, Fiction, Coming of Age, Friendship, Pants
ISBN: 9781417642953
Publisher: Ember
Published: 2002-01-02T06:00:00+00:00

Bridget had memorized Greta’s schedule. Monday evenings she played bingo at church. Wednesdays she played bridge with her neighbors across the street. Today was Thursday, the day Greta went to the Safeway to do her weekly shopping and splurge on a shell steak. On the third Thursday of every month, her son Pervis came from Huntsville to have dinner, and Greta bought two shell steaks. Bridget volunteered to tag along. The real draw for Bridget was the cold of the meat aisle. She’d become a girl of simple pleasures.

“What’s your son like?” Bridget asked, lazily watching the signs flash by on the interstate.

“Quiet. Not so social,” Greta said.

“What’s he do in Huntsville?”

“Custodial services at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center.” She looked at Bridget in confidence. “That’s a fancy way of saying janitor. He cleans and buffs the floors.”

“Oh.” She remembered her uncle Pervis always in his bedroom, always at the window looking through his telescope. Once, when she’d been older, he had come to Washington, D.C., and stayed with them overnight. It was the only time she remembered him coming. He’d set up his telescope, got it all set and trained, and let her look through it. Pervis saw a thousand familiar pictures in the sky, and Bridget saw chaos.

“His father and I saved up our money and sent him to space camp there the summer he was nine. I don’t think he ever wanted to leave. He’s happy with it.”

“Did he ever get married?” she asked.

“No. He’s always been real shy with girls. I don’t see him getting married. He’s got his ham radio friends. That’s about as social as it gets for him.”

Bridget nodded. Pervis had realized his dream of working at the Space Center, yet he spent his days looking down.

Thinking of Pervis made her think of Perry, his namesake, who was like him in many ways, minus the ham radio. Bridget had finally spoken to Perry for a few minutes on the phone the night before. He’d been curious about Greta, but guarded. He didn’t want to hear anything about Marly.

At the Safeway, Greta marched around purposefully with her cart and her coupons, while Bridget drifted through the refrigerated and frozen aisles, letting her mind go to places it had never gone before.

She wondered about Perry and she wondered about her father. Tragedy brought some families together, maybe, but not hers. Her father never talked about what had happened. He never talked about the things that might lead to talking about what had happened. There were so many things they couldn’t talk about, they had stopped trying to talk about much of anything.

She pictured her father, when he wasn’t at school, sitting in his den, wearing his earphones tuned to NPR. He never played the radio to the whole room, even when he was alone.

Perry spent his time in front of the computer. He played elaborate fantasy games on the Internet. He spent more time interacting with strangers than with people he knew. Bridget sometimes forgot she lived in the same house with him, let alone that they were twins.

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