The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown [18]
Rose watched as Bean’s attention moved slowly from the book, or wherever her mind had been, back to the room. Our mother pottered around in the garden outside, a broad straw hat over the searf covering her tender scalp, anchored with a wide, elastic band. With great, solid yanks, she pulled weeds from the earth and tossed them carelessly over her shoulder, where they landed in a pile on the brick walkway, as though they had been ordered to do precisely so. “Do you think one of us should offer to help her?”
“I did,” Rose said flatly. “She said she wanted to do it herself. It’s ridiculous, but if she feels up to it, I suppose it’s not going to hurt her.”
“How generous of you,” Bean said.
“Do you want to come or not?” Rose snapped. “I was trying to be nice.”
Bean put the book down beside her, spine splayed wide. “Sure. It’s better than sitting here. God, is there nothing to do in this town?” She got up and walked to the door, slipping into a pair of espadrilles that perfectly matched her crisp cotton blouse and wraparound skirt. She looked like an advertisement. Rose sighed, pulled a bookmark off of one of the shelves beside the window, and inserted it in the book Bean had abandoned.
“It’s not that there’s nothing to do,” Rose corrected. “It just moves slower. You have to get used to the pace. If you’re going to stay.”
Bean scoffed as she moved toward the door, catching a look at herself in the heavy mirror over the hall table where we kept keys and mail and anything else that happened to need a home. She tossed her hair and it fell in sleek waves over her shoulders. Rose opened the door for her.
“Do the Mannings still live there?” Bean asked. They had passed a block in silence, listening to the faraway hum of lawn mowers and children shrieking in pleasure down by the lake. Rose looked up at the house, another of the many wide-clapboard Sears catalog homes with their long, heavy windows and broad porches.
“She’s on sabbatical, I think. Some exchange program with a college in California. He’s still here, though.” Bean looked at the empty house. A bicycle stood sentry on the sidewalk, and a watering can lay abandoned among the trampled pansies by the porch stairs.
“Oh,” Bean said, somewhat sadly. Professor Lila Manning—Mrs. Dr. Manning they had called her, to distinguish her from her equally academically inclined husband—had been one of her favorite professors: a small, somewhat elfin woman with a charmingly gruff attitude. She had become, at one point, a sort of mentor to Bean, who had spent evenings at their house, drinking red wine and watching the sun set in the backyard as the conversation drifted like clouds. They had been a young couple, though they had seemed worlds away at the time—married, two young children, a life of stability and normalcy she had hated as much as wanted. Her heart squeezed momentarily with nostalgia, but they had grown apart as Bean became immersed in city life and The Doctors Mannings’ world had filled with other students, china replicas of the ones who had come before.
The birds and insects kept up a low hum that pulsed in Bean’s ears as they walked along. She had lived in the city for so long that these sounds had become foreign to her, and she felt in a way assaulted by them, the way a tourist in New York would have felt at the sirens and screeching of taxi brakes. The thought of the city made her stomach flip, and she said the first thing she could think of, too loudly, the volume pushing aside the still of the summer morning. “So how’s the wedding planning going?”
Sweat stood out against Rose’s bare upper arms; Bean could see the way the drops arrayed along the pores from which they had emerged, like synchronized swimmers poised for a Busby Berkeley number. Rose shrugged. “Okay, I guess. I don’t know, I never really thought about weddings. I look