The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown [64]
How can we ever hope to find a love to live up to that?
TEN
Cordy, come on!” Bean hollered from the foot of the stairs.
“I’m coming!” Cordy shouted back. We were headed to a medical supply store to pick up some things the nurse had arranged for but that they had refused to deliver all the way to deepest, darkest Barnwell—a seat for our mother for the shower, a special camisole that wouldn’t press the drain into her skin, a pillow to allow her to sleep without moving too much, some kind of hand exerciser to help her recover the full range of motion in her arm.
In her room, Cordy was frantically digging through her clothes, trying to find a shirt that fit. Her breasts had been tender for a long time, but in the past week it seemed they had grown enormously, and June was busting out all over. Her hippie skirts were doing the trick on the bottom half, but the little T-shirts and tank tops she was accustomed to wearing made her look like a stripper. She had snuck one of Bean’s sports bras out of the laundry, its compression making the change at least slightly less noticeable.
“Cordeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeelia!” Bean shouted again.
“I am coming!” Cordy howled, stubbing her toe on the edge of the bed as she leaped over a pile of shoes she’d abandoned in the middle of the floor. “Dammit.” She finally found one of Rose’s loose tops, also liberated from the laundry room, and yanked it over her head. She shoved her feet into two sandals from the pile, fairly certain they belonged to the same pair, and clomped down the stairs.
“Nice outfit,” Bean said. “Good that you took the time to put it together.”
Cordy looked down. The top was batik, the skirt patchwork. She looked like she’d rolled in a bin of fabric remainders. “W.E.” she said.
“We?”
“What. Ever. Let’s go.” She hopped down the last two steps and grabbed her bag. How much longer was she going to be able to get away with forgiving elastic waistbands and pilfering clothes from our laundry piles? It was a good thing she’d given up the indie rock look—the miniskirts and baby tees would have given her away already. She’d have to buy new clothes soon. Maternity clothes.
And she’d have to tell us.
She sat in the passenger seat biting at her ragged cuticles as Bean drove, singing tunelessly along with the radio. It was all happening too fast. She’d already gained weight, back in our parents’ house where food was plentiful and actually tasted good, and her nausea was abating slowly. Time was ticking away. Maternity clothes were just the beginning—there needed to be doctor’s appointments and baby clothes and all those things meant money.
She was going to have to take Dan up on his offer of a job. But how much would that pay? And what if our parents kicked her out when she told them?
She could tell Rose first. Rose would come up with some kind of plan. Except Rose was even touchier than usual. Cordy tugged at a scrap of skin at the edge of her nail with her hands and it started to bleed.
It might not be too late to have an abortion. The fog around her head cleared for a moment. The father—if you could call him that—wouldn’t care. He didn’t even know. And our family wouldn’t care if they didn’t know, either.
But she cared. She didn’t want to but she did.
Putting a hand on her stomach, she pushed against the tiny swell. We knew what the church had to say about abortion—we knew what it had to say about a lot of things, but that had never stopped us before. Cordy would be hard-pressed to say that it was anything to do with our faith that was giving her pause.
She looked over at Bean, whose eyes were hidden behind designer sunglasses, still singing along with the radio, wandering in and out of pitch as though she were embroidering around the notes. Bean would have an abortion, no doubt. Probably already had had one. Rose would have the baby.
But what would she do?
She pictured herself with an infant, a toddler, a preteen, a teenager. Impossible. Hadn’t she just been a teenager herself? Wasn