The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown [101]
And kind of an asshole.
“I don’t see why it matters. If this is just a cheap affair, just sex, and you apparently have willing lovers lining up outside the door, then ending it will mean nothing to you.”
Bean squinted at Edward. With his wet hair pushed back, she could see his hairline receding. His chest was puffed out, and a tiny, self-satisfied smile played at the corners of his mouth.
No, Bean thought. His anger didn’t make her sad. It made her pity him. She didn’t want to be that way—bitter at getting older, living in a movie that played only in her own head, hurting anyone who dared to love her just because she was disappointed in herself. She could be better.
She distracted him the way she knew best—with a flash of bare leg against white sheets, the tumble of hair over her naked shoulders. But she couldn’t help but hate herself a little bit as his mouth moved over her skin and she drifted into another night empty of goodness.
You know, I wasn’t a virgin when I married your father.”
“Mom!” Rose said. She dropped the book into her lap, surprised. She had begged us to read to her; the light hurt her eyes too much. Everyone had said that radiation would be easier than chemo, but so far it didn’t seem to have been the case. Her skin burned an angry red across her chest, and the medication made her endlessly nauseated. She was constantly exhausted, a bone-deep fatigue she was hard-pressed to explain, but we saw it in the slow movements of her arms, the delayed reaction when sunlight spilled into the room and she tried to turn away, caught in the molasses of the fight inside her body.
Our mother continued, either ignoring or unaware of Rose’s discomfort at this particular bit of news. “I don’t know if your father knew. We never talked about it.” She spread her fingers across the covers, the sensation of softness against her aching skin.
“Do you want me to stop reading?” Rose asked, looking for a conversational escape. Our mother turned her head slowly to look at Rose, her eyes watery with pain, exhaustion, diluting the blue another shade toward white.
“Yes,” she said. Rose reached for a bookmark and placed the book on the edge of our father’s night table, perfectly aligned with the edges. They sat in silence for a moment, Rose’s hands folded neatly in her lap. We looked like our father in so many ways, but Rose and our mother together reflected photographic images of each other, sepia aged. The twist of their hair behind their heads, the tired lines at the corners of their eyes, the gentle slope of their shoulders, the way their mouths compressed in anger.
“It was the boyfriend I had before I met your father. Jack Weston. I loved him—not the way I love your father, you know, but I did love him.” We have seen pictures of this boy, this man who could have been our father. A camping trip in Pennsylvania, green mountains behind him, bare chest sunburned, a casual arm thrown around our mother’s shoulders. She is laughing, looking away from the camera, a joke told off-screen, but he stares into the lens, his eyes green and direct, teeth crooked and white against that slightly orange tone of early color photographs.
Rose sat, still waiting for the moment to pass, hoping the meat of the story would not turn out too meaty.
Our mother’s breathing was oddly thick and slow, and she paused between her sentences, summoning up the energy to continue. The light between the curtains grew heavy and yellow, sinking toward the horizon. “I thought we would get married. He was so passionate.” Here Rose tensed, but there was no need. “He was a dreamer. He believed in a better world. That’s why we didn’t get married. Not because I didn’t want what he did, but because he wanted it more. He signed up for the Peace Corps, to spend a couple of years in Africa. And he wanted me to come.”
Silence again, except for the rusty flow of her breathing. Rose nearly said something, should have asked—would later regret