The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown [138]
“Then how could I say no?” Bean tossed her hair and struck a pose.
“I’ll call you to set things up. Will Rose be back? We could always use extra people.”
“She might be. But I’m pretty sure most of what she’ll be doing when she comes back is packing.” Bean bent down and pressed a button, and the computer whirred to life.
“So she’s going, then?”
“Ayup. Odd, isn’t it? That she’s off to the jet-setting life and I’m consigned to indentured servitude to Barnwell?”
“England will be good for her,” Aidan said. He leaned against the counter, holding his books and papers beside his hip, long fingers curled around the edges. “She’s been long overdue to get the heck out of Dodge. And Barney will be good for you. You’ll see.”
“Sure,” Bean said, with a sharp little nod.
“I’ll see you in services tomorrow, then?” Aidan asked. He pushed himself back, stood, stepping away.
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Bean said. He smiled and sauntered off to the carrels in the back, where he settled down to work. She watched him walk, the easy swing of his gait, his T-shirt hanging from thin shoulders.
She did not want him. Had she ever? It is so easy to look at love when it is over and think it was never real. But there was no dismal residue of disaster to cast a once grand affair into gray, dirty light. There was only the world Bean had come back to, the world of truth and facts and consequences, and if there was less excitement in it, there was also no lingering threat, no fear of discovery and exposure. And with that calm came Bean’s solemn accounting of what she had dreamed, and what was.
Aidan was nothing magical. Burned by her own sin, unable to seek absolution anywhere, she had made of his attention the only thing she knew how to understand. And she knew now that despite our father’s request to him, Aidan considered her a friend, was happy to have her in his flock, and, perhaps most incredibly, never treated her as though she were less because of what she had told him. He had known at some level, possibly, what she had really needed, and she loved him more for that than she ever could have loved him as a partner.
Besides, she would have died in a relationship without sex.
Shuffling a deck of due date cards absently, she looked out the front doors, to the spread of the tree over the sidewalk, where her father had quoted As You Like It to her. Rose’s play, really, but no matter. I earn what I eat, get what I wear, owe no man hate, envy no man’s happiness, glad of other men’s good. The words of a poor shepherd, mocked for his simplicity. This was Barney to her, and she had played the clown, finding sin where there was none. Living here had so affected us all, Rose endlessly seeking its comfort, an infant suckling at the breast. Cordy and Bean fighting its inertia, sure the secret to life lay just over the next hill, past the next taxi rank idling smog into the air. But where had it gotten us, this tattoo of our birthplace? We were still the same people, and Cordy and Bean, who had wanted it least of all, come home to roost in the nest.
Bean sat down at the desk and pulled a long drawer of the card catalog over to her. She could do nothing to change Barney, she knew. Turning the blond wood of the card catalog into the binary code of a computer catalog was only cosmetic, would alter nothing at the heart of the town, which would still creep in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time, but she could change her place in it. She could leave her mark, pay her debts to man and to God, and someday, anchored in it instead of weighed by it, she would take the part of her that was Barney and spin it out into the world, and this time she would not fail.
As Bean had foreseen, Rose came home with her only thought leaving again. Spare months ago, when she had moved her belongings back into this house, she had knelt on the floor and rolled each of her belongings through her fingers