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By Root 1358 0

In the interests of fairness, though, we must remind you of the other side of this. Rose is the only one who can get us out the door on time when we have theater tickets or are trying to get to church services. When our mother left pans of carrots boiling away to charred messes on the stove, Rose made us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, cutting them neatly into sailboats for Cordy. When she got her driver’s license, she drove Bean to the nearest mall (which isn’t really near at all) almost every weekend night, and didn’t even tell on her the time she met those boys with the Trans Am and came home with vodka on her breath and vomit down the front of her blouse. And she helped Cordy sew her graduation dress even though she thought it looked hideous, and she was the professor in the math department whose course evaluations from her students always began, “I always thought math was boring until I met Dr. Andreas. . . .” and as much as she hates us for taking away her throne, she has never ever pushed us off of it.

And she would be none of those things if she weren’t the firstborn.

We had sent Bean to the store—Rose was helping our father move furniture in the bedroom for our mother’s impending confinement, and Cordy was too unreliable to be trusted. Even with a list she would wander aimlessly through the aisles and come home with a mysterious assortment of products: a bag of sugar-encrusted gumdrops, an apple corer wide as a cupped hand, an unloved, dented box of flavorless crackers that would sit, ignored, in the pantry until they crumbled to paste. Whatever we had sent her for in the first place would be mysteriously absent.

A list clutched in her hand, the ink gone sweaty and the paper soft from the heat, Bean strolled through Barnwell Market. We hated the occasional necessary evil of the supermarket outside town: its painfully bright, wide aisles, the cold industrial-tiled floor, the incessant chirp of the cashiers’ scanners twining with the music in an unsettling soundscape. We far preferred this tiny store a block from the Beanery, with the dusty shelves holding homemade jams from the farms on Route 31, local produce teetering dangerously in piles outside the store, and Mr. or Mrs. Williston waiting patiently behind the counter to ring up our purchases on a cash register that shook agreeably with each press of a key.

Bean filled a tired bushel basket, the bottom bowed with use, with the items on her list, and headed toward the front, stopping short at the sound of her name.

“Bianca Andreas,” a man’s voice said, and she turned, surprised. She had brushed right past Mr. Dr. Manning, who was standing behind her, wearing a long-sleeved white T-shirt and blue nylon running shorts. He seemed older than she remembered, though it had been less than a decade; his blond hair going silver in the dim light, the tiny creases at the corner of his eyes deeper, his bare legs indecently muscled.

“Mister Doctor!” she said, the old name coming naturally to her.

He laughed, a deep, warm sound that purred along Bean’s spine. “Oh, come now. Call me Edward. You passed the Mister Doctor stage the moment you walked across the quad in your cap and gown. What are you doing back in the cornfields? I thought you’d abandoned us all for your big-city dreams.”

“We are such stuff as dreams are made on,” Bean sighed, with a coquettish little shrug that pushed the light cotton of her shirt down in a deep vee. She was rewarded when his eyes followed the line of her cleavage and then darted back up to her face. Perhaps she hadn’t lost her touch after all. Take that, bar boys.

“And our little life is rounded with a sleep,” he said in agreement. “Still queen of the Shakespearean retort, I see.”

“It’s in my blood, sadly. How are you? I hear Mrs. Doctor is off in sunny California.”

“With the offspring. I’m back to lonely bachelorhood,” he said, and we swear to you he winked.

Perhaps if Bean had been a stronger person . . . perhaps if it hadn’t been so cold when she lay alone with her regrets in bed at night . . . perhaps if one of the only