The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown [52]
Rose and Cordy stood by the door for a moment and stared at each other expectantly, until Cordy rolled her eyes and climbed into the middle. “The hump,” we had called it when we were younger, because whoever sat there had to contend with the bump where her legs should go.
“I haven’t been the smallest for a long time,” Cordy complained as we squeezed her in on either side.
“You’re still the youngest,” Bean said, flicking Cordy’s bare leg with her fingertip. Rose noticed Bean had cleaned and trimmed her nails, and repainted them shell pink. The effect was both sad and a relief, and Rose felt the unfamiliar urge to hug her, to let Bean know that she didn’t have to try so hard anymore.
“Didn’t that stop meaning something about the time we could legally buy alcohol?” Cordy asked.
“Let’s leave this town; for they are hare-brain’d slaves,” our father said, settling himself into the driver’s seat and looking at Cordy in the rearview mirror.
“O-KAY,” Cordy said loudly, and pushed out with her knees so both Rose and Bean had to squeeze back to defend their space.
“Quit it,” they both whined. Cordy smiled angelically. She looked better. Her skin had lost the yellowish pallor it had gained on the catch-as-catch-can diet she had consumed in her stint as an American malcontent, and her hair looked shiny, bound in a thick braid that fell down her back. She had even gained some weight, Rose noticed, though she could still feel a sharp elbow digging into her ribs. That, however, was more malice than malnutrition.
“Isn’t it nice to have our girls home?” our mother asked our father, batting her eyelashes at him in false adoration.
“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child,” our father replied, and pulled out of the driveway. No one had yet mentioned where we were going.
When we were growing up, we took a trip each summer, driving somewhere in our old, wide-bodied station wagon with its painfully sticky vinyl seats that left angry red tattoos on our bare thighs below our shorts. Our parents traded driving duties, steering us down roads that split pastures in two, through tunnels blooming into mountainous vistas, along coastal roads where the only thing between us and our Maker was a thin, low afterthought of a guardrail. We alternated arguing in the backseat with reading, coloring, and playing our father’s infamous sonnet round-robins, in which we passed around a sonnet, each of us composing a line until we had an entire poem that, at the end, usually bore absolutely no resemblance to the initial topic.
The game did, however, make us uniquely good at extemporaneous iambic pentameter, not that this is a skill that benefits one much in any world other than our father’s.
In this way, we saw Fourth of July fireworks in Maine, were terrorized by bears in Yosemite (Bean’s fault—she had left the marshmallows out of the bear bag), had our photo taken by Mount Rushmore, sweltered through an unseasonably early hurricane in Florida, and had our tongues burned off by tamales in Austin.
When we look back on it now, it seems odd that we did not do things more fitting to our family’s named interests. These trips, many of which could have been summed up by a bumper sticker bearing the name of some self-referential tourist attraction like South of the Border or Wall Drug, seemed, if you will forgive the obviousness of it, so American. When we stayed at a motel with a pool and made friends with the other children shrieking around its concrete deck, half the time they might as well have been speaking another language. We didn’t know their television shows, the songs they sang from the radio. We didn’t know junk