The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown [37]
This, unfortunately, hadn’t turned out to be the best strategy.
Bean thought of the ugliness that these envelopes contained. She thought of the way the men in the bar had turned away from her the other night when the girls had come in. She thought of the empty days she’d spent at home so far, and all the empty ones spreading out ahead of her. She thought of the way our mother collapsed against the pillow after fighting another losing battle with her nausea, out of breath, ashen and sore, smudges of purple around her eyes. She thought of the new priest asking her if she’d be at church.
She sat down at the table and opened the first envelope slowly.
Cordy slept late, awakening only when the noises of the house and the insistent sunlight became too obvious to be believably incorporated into her dreams any longer. A near-decade of roaming had made her cautious upon opening her eyes—she had grown used to a slow awakening, testing the space, telling herself the story of how she had landed in that particular bed, in that room, at that moment. She lay in bed for a few minutes, staring at the ceiling of her childhood. The same crack curved over the door, the same fluted light fixture hung from the rippling, aged plaster. She had the corner room by our parents, under the attic, and the dormer windows in Rose’s and Bean’s rooms were offset here by the sharply sloping eaves that made the room seem shaded and womb-like.
Sometime during the night, she had climbed under the covers, and she emerged now, rummaging through her bag for something with a semblance of cleanliness. For months now, she had been living out of people’s vans, crashing periodically in some youthfully enthusiastic group home, mixing with people who were milling around, desperately trying to find some lost Kerouacian glory.
It had sucked.
All of her clothes were dirty and smelled like a well-marinated mixture of sweat and pot. Her hair had grown long and shaggy, and she had been clean so rarely that she had begun to scratch idly at the film on her skin, leaving dull marks down her arms. When she woke in the morning, often staring at the scruffy-haired, anonymous boy-man lying beside her, the first thought that had sprung into her mind had usually been, I am too old for this crap. The people she had met had been kind, certainly, but not a natural kindness, more of a benevolence stemming from a cocktail of illicit substances and a quiet, frantic desire to be liked.
She was fairly certain none of them would have characterized themselves in this way. They were young enough to be fooled by the grandeur of their own plans, to be so absorbed in the intense romanticism of the lifestyle they were building, one hovel at a time, that they never cared to notice that there was nothing romantic about a case of scabies. But at the same time she couldn’t help but love them for it, in the condescending way an adult can love the idiocy of a child. Because, and Cordy had recently come to face this, she had aged into an adult among children, and it was past time for her to move on. But given there was nowhere to move on to, she had simply moved back.
Accepting the fact that her bag held nothing clean at all, Cordy yanked open the bottom drawer of the antique dresser in the corner alcove, and dug out a pair of loose-fitting bell-bottom jeans and a T-shirt that might fit, thin as she had gotten. The other downside to the lifestyle she had been living was that she had been hungry much of the time. If they were at a concert, for instance, given by one of the seemingly millions of interchangeable nostalgic folk-rock bands, there would be some dirty, dreadlocked couple selling sandwiches within her meager budget, but they would be dry, tasteless things, homemade twelve-grain bread with cruelty-free alfalfa sprouts and unsalted butter. She grimaced at the thought, but her stomach rumbled traitorously. She placed her hand over her belly to quell the sound, and instead felt the beginnings of the hard lump that reminded her of why she’d finally