The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown [104]
Meet the new Bean, same as the old Bean.
In New York she and her roommates had had a housewarming party, at which Daisy’s boyfriend had been in attendance. As usual, Bean had drunk too much, and the next morning, easing her way back into sunlight, a cautious vampire, Daisy had confronted her in the kitchen. “Leave Michael alone,” she threatened, the power of her words for once not undercut by the sweet sway of her Georgia accent.
“What?” Bean asked. She was off-kilter, a sailor back on land, and she had to grip the edge of the tiny table to face Daisy. The woman’s face had gone so white with anger that her freckles stood out like stars.
“You were all over him last night. My boyfriend.” Daisy jabbed a finger perilously close to Bean’s chest. Too exhausted and hungover to focus, Bean had stared at the doughy flesh, noting the unmanicured nails, the wide palm that had stretched the seams of the gloves in her debutante portrait.
“I didn’t mean anything by it,” Bean had stuttered, searching her memory for an apology. There was a dim image, a twist of her arm around Michael’s shoulder, her mouth near his ear. Her hand went to her face involuntarily. Crap.
“That’s your problem, you know? Ya’ll just never learned how to deal with a man when you weren’t fucking him.” The profanity startled Bean, coming in such sweetly laced syllables. Daisy caught the emotion crossing over Bean’s face and nodded, satisfied that her sally had hit the mark. “Yeah, I’ve seen it. You slinking around those bars, coming home stinking of cigarettes and beer and who knows what else. But I’m not going to put up with it. Leave. Us. Alone.” Bean had felt so betrayed, so righteously wronged. But Daisy had known her better than she had ever wanted to know herself.
The new Bean. She wanted to laugh, but she was sure that if she did, she would cry without stopping instead. There was no new Bean. There was only the same rotten apple, hiding herself under layers of makeup, lying and stealing—money, another woman’s husband. It was all the same thing. She’d sworn to change, but she hadn’t. She knelt for communion in church as though she were worthy of it, she went to community service projects as if the darkness inside her wouldn’t seep into the foundations of the homes they built, leaving trails of decay under coats of paint. Her stomach lurched, and she put her forehead against the window, letting the air-conditioning against the glass cool off the heat of her skin.
How much lower was she going to go? How many more lies could she tell?
Who was going to save her?
Cordy was right. She had to end it with Edward. And Aidan . . . She pictured his face in her mind, the way he touched her shoulder when they spoke, his shoulders spreading wide and strong when he worked on a house, his warm greeting when he saw her at church with our family.
It wouldn’t be so bad to love Aidan, she thought. Something about his presence made her feel clean again, made her feel like someday she could be whole, pulled back from the edge, restored from damage. She wanted that feeling all the time.
Rose had been wrong before when she told Jonathan she thought Bean was after Aidan. Or maybe she’d just been prescient. Because even though Bean hadn’t seriously considered him before, she was definitely thinking about it now. And as she thought of him, flipped back through her mind, he grew taller, more handsome, more perfect.
He was the one. He could save her from herself.
SEVENTEEN
Our mother was recovering from her first week of radiation.
She’d been tired for so long now, we’d nearly forgotten her any other way. She didn’t complain, though we knew she’d been having chest pains, and even the tiniest effort seemed to exhaust her.
Bean was working, and Rose had gone into town, leaving Cordy alone with our parents. When our father had brought our mother home, she had seemed tired, but she played a game of Scrabble with Rose, and walked in the garden, and sat down with us at dinner, though she ate hardly