The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown [43]
We had a limited history of embarrassing conversations with our father. It had traditionally been our mother’s role to explain the birds and bees, menstruation and its attendant supplies, and anything else in the feminine arena. Breast self-exams definitely fell into that category, and we were a little sorry for him that he had to bring up the subject.
We ate silently for a moment and then Cordy spoke. “Fine. I solemnly swear to feel myself up in the shower once a month.”
“Cordy!” Rose said.
“I’ll perform it to the last article,” Cordy continued. Bean was snorting laughter across the table. “Everyone happy? Can we talk about something less uncomfortable now?”
“It’s not funny,” Rose said, but everyone else seemed mollified. She sighed into her soup. Was she the only one who saw how serious this was, that we might lose our mother, and one day, each other?
She wasn’t, in fact, the only one. That night in bed, Bean lay under her sheets, a strip of moonlight falling across her feet, and she lifted one arm above her head and probed the skin gingerly. Just in case.
Cordy, whose breasts were tender for entirely different reasons, and had taken to wandering around holding them up just to relieve the tension under her skin, gave herself a desultory grope and fell sound asleep.
Rose didn’t sleep at all.
I’m going for a run,” Bean told us. “Anyone want to come?” She hadn’t been running outside in years, but without daily visits to the gym, her body was starting to itch for activity. Or maybe it was being trapped in the house with us. Either way, after her brief period of hibernation, she was grateful to feel like herself again. When we turned her down, Rose with a brief shake of the head, Cordy with a horrified shudder, she headed out the back gate and along the trails that looped through the woods, curving in and over themselves until she came out on the end toward town behind the church.
“Bianca,” someone shouted from behind her, and she gasped, tripping slightly over a root. She’d been running numbers in her head, calculating to the sound of her feet slapping against the dirt, figuring out how she was going to juggle all the money she owed with the kind of job she would be likely to get in Barnwell, and when she heard her name, she was ridiculously sure it was some creditor chasing her down. She regained her balance and turned around to see Father Aidan.
He was kneeling by the back gate of the vicarage, a word that made it sound like it should have been a small, crumbling stone cottage with a thatched roof, but was really a perfectly ordinary clapboard house whose only distinguishing feature was its proximity to the church itself (which was also not crumbling stone, as it well should have been, but brick, and not crumbling at all). Father Cooke had always encouraged the vines—honeysuckle, blackberry, clematis—to crawl their way up and around, covering the wooden fence until it was only white apostrophes among thick greenery. The sunlight shafted through Aidan’s hair, catching gold and red.
“Hey, Bianca!” he called again, waving at her with one arm and shielding his eyes from the sunlight with the other.
She approached him slowly, like a wary cat, pulling her ponytail tight and wiping the sweat from her face. Bean does not like to be caught unprepared for any meeting with a man, pastor or no.
“How are you?” he asked as she came to the fence. He placed his hands on his thighs and pushed himself up with the slight, slow edge Rose knew well—the caution born of newly awakening cracks in one’s joints.
“Good, good. Just out for a run.” Thanks for that, Señorita Obvious.
He pulled off his gloves and ran his hand through his hair. His hairline curved back in two swoops at his temples. Bean had always shunned, on principle, men who were losing their hair, but she caught herself admiring him. Maybe she’d been too hasty at the library. He wasn’t bad-looking at all. She cleared her throat and adjusted her ponytail