The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown [116]
“I have made a million mistakes,” Cordy said, staring down at the table. “I’ve been a child. I’ve allowed you—I’ve begged you to support me.” She paused, looking up at him, searching his dark eyes for a sign to allow her to go on. He nodded, and Cordy nodded back and continued.
“I’ve been running for seven years, trying to make myself into someone special, someone important. I’ve fallen for men just so they would hurt me, and shied away from the ones who would help me.” She clenched her fingers into fists, loosened them again, spreading her palms flat against the table. “But I came home because I was done. Not because you asked me to. Because I was tired of spinning in circles. So the baby isn’t a new leaf. It’s part of the leaf I already turned over.” She looked up at him again, her speech finished. He was sitting, his arms folded across his chest, his glasses slipping down his nose so he looked at her over the rims as though he were teaching one of his classes.
Our father sat silent for a long time. In class, he often did the same thing, listening to a student’s comment and then staying silent, holding it in his mind like a crystal, watching the light hit it from different angles before replying. The habit took some students time to get used to, those seemingly awkward pauses, but they grew to appreciate it, taking it as the compliment it was that he would so carefully consider their words, this Great Man who could have felled their ideas with one verbal blow. “You cannot support a child on what you make at the Beanery,” he said. “And you don’t have insurance.”
Bean nodded. “I know. I’m working on that.”
“And you’ll live here?”
“I don’t have to. There’s the apartment above the Beanery. Dan usually rents it to college kids, but he said I can have it if I want.”
“Your mother wants you to live here. I think she wants to have a baby around, but I don’t know if it will be good for her. Babies . . . You get so little sleep.”
“She’ll be finished with the treatments by then,” Cordy said. “And it might make her feel better. I think it makes her feel like she has something to look forward to. But I haven’t decided yet.”
He stood, clearing his dishes, rinsing them slowly, deliberately, setting them in the dishwasher. He held his hands along the rim of the sink and stared out the window, the palest breath of light allowing him to see out before the glass became a mirror in the darkness. “Why do you make it so hard for yourself, Cordelia? Why can you girls never choose the easy way?”
“I don’t know,” Cordelia said sadly.
When Cordy turned the conversation—the argument, really—over in her mind that night, her cheeks flushed with chagrin. Rubbing angrily at the red stains of embarrassment, she tried to stop herself from saying aloud the words that sounded so childish to her now. An apartment above the Beanery. A leaf she had already turned over.
How did he have this power to make her sound so young, so silly? Those words that sounded so strong in her mind and her heart fell from her lips like jump-rope rhymes. Staring out into the garden, she blew sharply against the glass. He was right. She wasn’t prepared. She couldn’t do this—couldn’t take care of a baby when she was such a baby herself.
It hardly seemed like a surprise when she heard a car in the driveway and then a soft knock at the door, a muffled tap in the sleeping house. She pulled herself from the window seat and opened the front door to find Max, the friend who had dropped her off in the middle of the night when she’d first come home. His hair fell over his forehead in greasy strings, and he wore a T-shirt studded with holes over a long-sleeved shirt and a pair of threadbare cargo shorts. It seemed to her that it had been years since the last time they’d seen each other, and Cordy felt inexplicably relieved at the sight of him.
“Cordy,” he said with a quick jerk of his