Sisterhood Everlasting (6) by Ann Brashares

Author:Ann Brashares [Brashares, Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ann Brashares
ISBN: 9780679605096
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-06-14T04:00:00+00:00

Lena’s parents didn’t torture her with questions or advice, as she had dreaded. They took her out for dinner to the Lebanese Taverna, ordered seven plates of food and a bottle of wine, and talked about the troubling state of Greece’s economy.

“It’s not going to be easy, selling a house in this market,” her father said.

Lena allowed her mind to take a slow walk up the hill to her grandparents’ house. She had to see how much it hurt before she went inside.

Lena cleared her throat. “The tourist places will be okay. If any place will survive this, it’s Santorini.”

Ari nodded. “That’s what I said too.”

“I’ve got to go over,” her father said resignedly. He looked exhausted at having uttered the sentence. “We can’t just let the place sit there moldering for another year.”

Lena thought of Kostos sitting on the ground, surrounded by tools and bits of hardware, taking apart the hinges of the back door. There was pleasure in the image to balance out the pain. She nodded.

“He’s canceled the trip twice already,” Ari said.

“I had a case go to trial.”

Lena nodded sympathetically. But she knew it wasn’t the case going to trial that gave her father the haggard look. She imagined how it would be for him, confronting his parents’ world, their clothes, their smells, and confronting the guilt for having left them so completely and so long ago, always vowing that there would be a time when the office got calm and he would go for a good long visit, maybe even a sabbatical, but never doing it.

Her dad wouldn’t talk about any of that. He’d talk about the case that went to trial or nothing at all. Was it too late not to be like him?

Lena thought of the two sealed letters stuck between the pages of her sketchbook. With an accelerating heartbeat she thought of her project.

“If you want, I could go,” she said.

Her father turned to her as though she’d disappeared and resurfaced in her chair with a new face on. “What do you mean?”

“I could go and take care of selling the house.”

“By yourself?”

He said it as though she were still twelve.

“Of course.”

A look of eagerness and relief was mixing into his cramped features. “Do you think you can?”

“I do. I know the house. I know the island reasonably well. I don’t think you need to be a native or a lawyer to figure out how to sell a house.”

“You do need to speak Greek,” her mother pointed out.

Her father raised his hand. “Not necessarily. Everybody is speaking English there these days.”

“You wouldn’t want to get cheated or manipulated. It’s helpful to be able to read all the paperwork,” her mother cautioned.

Her father had now seized on this and he wasn’t going to let it go. Lena didn’t even get the chance to mention that she did, in fact, speak pretty good Greek these days. He was suddenly so flushed with the prospect of not having to go himself, he’d probably have sent Bubbles, the neighbors’ cat, over to do it.

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