The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown [38]
Judging by the angle of the sun, she figured it was almost eleven in the morning, so she padded out of her room and down the hall to the bathroom, dropping an enormous pile of laundry down the chute on the way. Bean’s door stood open, and she could see her back, taut and crooked forward like a beckoning finger. She held a phone to her ear, her fingers mottled white and red against the receiver, and she was crying. Cordy stopped, putting her palm lightly against the door as though she could give comfort through the walls.
“I’m not coming back,” Bean said, giving the choked gasp that is the sign of exhausted bawling. When she spoke again, her voice had lowered to a whisper. “No, it won’t,” she hissed.
Silence again. Cordy shifted slightly on her feet, goose bumps rising on her bare legs. “I’m going to,” Bean said, and then, “I know. I know.”
Something in our sister’s tone made Cordy pull back, step away from the door. There was a secret here, a secret Cordy was not sure she wanted to know, because she could not remember the last time Bean had cried, at least not in someone else’s presence. Something smelled sour and painful to her. She turned on grimy feet and walked down the hallway loudly, stepping purposefully on every aching board, making her presence known.
Cordy sat slumped at a table in the Barnwell Beanery. Nothing had changed, really. Mismatched furniture, heavy and chocolate brown, swaybacked and tired from constant use; battered wood floors crossed with the dark streaks of traffic patterns. There were Magic 8 Balls and Barrels of Monkeys on the tables, and paintings by local artists hung beseechingly on the walls. Cordy, looking pure Beanery—olive cords, a faded T-shirt, and a woven hemp bag—rested her head on her arms on one of the tables, her sandaled feet curled around the chair’s legs. A glass mug sat in front of her, the tag of a tea bag resting on the lip, sending smoke signals of steam into the air. Cordy looked at it morosely.
“Hey, Cordy! I heard you were back in town!” Dan Miller sat down across from her, tossing a dirty dish towel over his shoulder. “How you been?”
Cordy pushed herself up sleepily. She had pulled her hair into two messy braids, which she flipped over her shoulders as she turned to him. “Miller,” she said, smiling. “Bad news travels fast.”
He chuckled, his smile breaking his face into a dimpled glow. His hair was darker than she remembered, nearly black, and his face was stubbled with a day’s growth of beard. “It’s not so bad. The bad news is that Bean is back, too.”
“Oh, man. What’d she do to you?”
“Nothing. Dicked over one of my roommates pretty bad, but I think we’ve all recovered from it by this point. I shouldn’t be picking on your sister anyway.”
Cordy waved her hand magnanimously and picked up her drink, wrapping her fingers around the glass, warming herself despite the summer sun pouring in through the windows, oozing its way across the floor. “Pick away.”
“So how the heck are you? You look like crap.”
“I see your legendary charm hasn’t faded,” Cordy said, eyeing him over the rim of the glass before she set it down again, fiddling with the string of her tea bag. “I’ve been on the road for a while. Following bands, you know. Hanging out.”
“Wow. That’s awesome. I thought most of us had gotten too old fart for that.”
“Well, I am two years younger than you. Obviously thirty is the cutoff point for old fartdom.”
“But you’re back,” Dan observed. He reached up, tugging at the neck of his camo green T-shirt with a broad finger. The backs of his hands were furred with dark hair. “Obviously old fartdom has come early for you.”
“Okay, so maybe I hit my cutoff point, too. You know it’s bad when Barnwell starts looking good by comparison.”
“Hey now,” he warned, tut-tutting a finger at her. “Forget not to whom you speak. I live here voluntarily.”
“Yeah, what’s up with that? Aren’t you from Philly or something?”
“In a former life, yeah. And I just liked it better here. That’s not such a bad thing, is it?”
Cordy shrugged and picked up her glass, taking another