The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown [36]
“Weird,” Rose agreed.
“I heard Jonathan is in England? That stinks.” Cordy picked corn from between her teeth, examining each kernel before sucking it off the tip of her finger. Rose grabbed her hand and stopped her. Cordy ran her tongue along her teeth and then grinned. “Got it all anyway.” Her fingernails were filthy, Rose saw, and her hair had a greasy sheen to it. “How’s Mom, anyway?”
Rose stopped herself from rolling her eyes. Anyway. As though it were an afterthought. How nice to be Cordy, to assume that everything would always turn out just fine, to let everyone else watch out for the danger. “Doing okay. They’re doing chemotherapy to try to shrink the tumor before they operate. She had a treatment a couple of days ago, so she’s only just getting over that. She’ll be pretty tired, so no drama, okay?”
Cordy considered this for a moment. “Cool,” she said finally. “Well, I’m ready for bed. How about you?”
Rose shook her head. Typical Cordy. Not interested in anyone besides herself. Draining the last of her milk, Rose padded softly over to the counter, rinsing her glass and leaving it on the drainboard. “I’ll carry your bag,” she said.
Rose led the way, Cordy’s damp army green duffel resting on her back, soaking through the light fabric of her nightgown. Cordy followed behind, the neck of her guitar case bumping cheerfully into every available object. “Oops,” Cordy kept saying. “Oops.”
Rose opened the door to Cordy’s bedroom and walked inside. For some reason, Cordy had never redecorated the way Bean and Rose had as we grew older. The room was still the room of a child: pink and white, ribbons and bows. She had changed her own look a thousand times, but her room had always remained the same.
Cordy came inside and stepped out of her skirt, hurling herself on the bed wearing only her shirt and underwear. Her legs were hairy, and the bottoms of her feet nearly black with dirt, Rose noticed with a light sense of revulsion. “G’night,” she said, and closed her eyes, halfway to sleep in a moment. Rose paused for a minute, wanting to tell Cordy to brush her teeth, or wash her face, or some other motherly bedtime reminder. But she thought better of it.
For now, Rose would let her sleep.
“Good night, sweet prince,” she said finally, and closed the door on Cordy’s hollowed face.
Our father and Rose had taken our mother for a follow-up to have the tumor measured, so when Bean woke up, she wandered outside to pick up the newspaper to keep her company during breakfast. The flag on the mailbox was down—our mail had always been delivered egregiously early, so she grabbed that, too, flipping through the letters as she walked back inside.
There was a thick, padded envelope from New York, addressed to her. She recognized her ex-roommate Daisy’s passive-aggressive debutante scrawl.
She tore open the envelope, dropping the newspaper and the other mail on the table, and reached inside. There was a pile of envelopes, all addressed to her New York apartment. A couple of wedding invitations, two postcards inviting her to gallery openings, and then, what she’d been dreading. Bills. A dozen, at least. Credit cards, all of them maxed out, all of them with usurious interest rates.
And at the bottom of the stack, a note on Daisy’s obnoxiously proper Southern belle stationery. A detailed accounting of what she owed her erstwhile roommates: rent, electricity, water. The sum at the bottom made her swallow, hard.
Bean had purposely left no forwarding address, but clearly it hadn’t been beyond Daisy’s limited finishing-school ken to track her down, which meant that the credit card companies wouldn’t be far behind.
She’d been in the habit, for too long, of refusing to open the bills, as though not knowing the exact numbers she owed would make them smaller,