The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown [58]
“What happened, Bean?” Cordy asked, and her voice was as gentle as her fingers had been on our mother’s hand. She watched a single tear roll down Bean’s cheek, moonlight-paled, but didn’t move to touch her. Bean let it trickle back toward her ear, and when she spoke, her voice didn’t waver.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said. We could see that her face was taut from holding in emotion. She looked old, Cordy thought, but she never would have said it aloud. “But yeah. I’m going to be here for a while. I’m going to get a job, too.” Bean sat up and lit another cigarette, and Rose didn’t even complain when she had to fan the smoke away from her face. Something in Bean’s tone was weak and unfamiliar, and slightly unsettling to us, who had grown used to the prickly pear of her nature.
“You could get a job at the college,” Cordy suggested. “You’re an alumnus. Alumnae?”
“Alumna,” Rose said.
“Hell, it’s bad enough I’m living here again,” Bean said, and her sharp edge returned, slicker than a knife blade. “I’m not going to go back and work there, too. It’d make me feel like a failure.”
We sat for a moment, no one pointing out that we were all failures, whether we allowed ourselves to feel it or not. Rose, least comfortable with that idea, finally slapped her hands on her legs, brushing away invisible dust. “I’m going to bed. Anybody need me to wake you up tomorrow?”
“Me,” Cordy and Bean both said.
When Rose had climbed inside, Bean finished her cigarette and stared into the quiet night. The full trees blocked our view of the town, but she knew somewhere in the sleeping darkness lay sin and salvation, both equally tempting. But the path of sin was so comforting, so well tread, so easy to slip down into quiet numbness.
“Seen the Very Reverend lately?” Cordy asked, as though she were reading Bean’s thoughts.
Bean exhaled, shook her head.
“Too bad. He’s cute.”
The words lingered on Bean’s lip a moment, hesitating, before she spit them out. “I’m going to have dinner with Dr. Manning tomorrow.”
“Oh, really? That’s cool. You haven’t seen her in ages.”
“Not her. Him. She’s in California or something.”
“Oh,” Cordy said. Did she know what Bean had meant? Did she know the way that he had been drawn to the curve of Bean’s lip, her breast, the quiet sadness that could be lost in a rustle of sheets?
But even if she knew, Cordy would not criticize. Who was she to judge our Bean and all that lay hidden inside her, when she carried her own secrets, warm and sweet in their pain?
Bean rubbed her forehead and then flicked her cigarette over the roof in the same trail as the first. Her mouth was dry and bitter from the smoke. “Could you live here forever, Cordy?”
Our sister considered for a moment, toying with the loose end of a braid, rubbing her fingers up and down the exhausted split ends. “It’s no different from anyplace else,” she said finally. “Just on a smaller scale.”
“Much smaller,” Bean said. She pulled her knees up to her chest and laid her cheek against her knee. “Sometimes I feel like I can’t breathe here.”
Cordy hesitated for a moment, and then reached over and gently ran the back of her hand along Bean’s bare arm.
“That’s not Barnwell,” Cordy said. “That’s you.”
NINE
It might seem callous that when we drove into Columbus the next morning, we went dress shopping instead of going to the hospital. We didn’t desert our parents entirely, of course, because we arrived at the hospital by eleven, but we didn’t go there immediately to commence with the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments.
Instead, there was trying on of garments at a discount bridal store with toothy saleswomen who cooed over us until Rose was sweating uncomfortably in stiff satin and Bean was nearly snarling. Cordy, her wide-legged jeans trailing into threads at the bottom, sat curled in a chair, shaking her head sadly at each meringued concoction.
“I look ridiculous,” Rose sighed at her umpteenth attempt in a stiff white dress. The store was quiet, which was good, because if Rose had had to contend with the