The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown [84]
“Shit,” Dan said, and exhaled. He put his hands on the bottom of the wheel, and where his palm had rested on her leg felt cold and bare. “Does your family know?”
“No,” she said. “Not yet.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I have no clue.” She turned toward the window, which had begun to steam up, and dragged her index finger along the glass in a series of disconnected lines. “See, this is why I’m not a grown-up. Grown-ups don’t make mistakes like this.”
“Grown-ups make mistakes—and I’m not saying this is a mistake—all the time. You’re being too hard on yourself.”
“Too hard on myself? I’m fucking pregnant, Dan! I’m going to have a baby! I, Cordelia Beatrice Andreas, am going to be responsible for the life of another human, when it’s been made more than clear to me by everyone I know that I can’t even take care of my own life. Is that the biggest joke you’ve ever heard or what?” She could feel herself starting to cry, and tried to push it back under her anger.
Dan sighed, leaning forward slightly and shifting in his seat before leaning back again. The engine hummed, and the rain poured down, beating against the roof, clamoring for attention. “Whatever I say, you’re going to bite my head off, so I guess I should just keep my mouth shut.”
With a swipe of her hand, Cordy wiped away the streaks she had made through the condensation. “I’m sorry,” she said without looking at him. “It’s not your fault. I’m just . . . I don’t know what to do.”
“You’ve gotta tell them, Cordy. You’ve gotta tell your family.”
“I don’t know. Rose would love it, of course, just another example of my being an idiot for her to point at. And Bean’s got her own crap to deal with.”
“So you’re just not going to tell them? Sooner or later, they’re going to figure it out.”
“I know. I guess I was just hoping I could wait until . . .” She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t know when she had thought it would be the right time to let us know.
“Until when?”
“I don’t know,” Cordy said. But she did. Until it was time to go. Until it’s time to shake some dust and disappear. Because that’s what Cordy does. Cordy leaves better than anyone we know. No heartbreaks, no recriminations, just a ghost trail in the night and she’s gone.
She flipped her braid over her shoulder and looked at Dan. Tears were streaking down her face and she sniffed hard, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. “There’s just so much going on. It’s not right to make them deal with this, too. My mom, you know, and my dad’s like not even on this planet. I shouldn’t be freaking out like this on you. I just feel like there’s no one to talk to.”
“There’s me,” Dan said, and at that moment he looked so sweet and generous, Cordy smiled through her tears. He reached out and took her hand and they sat like that, while the fan blew cool air against their faces, drying Cordy’s tears, and the rain slackened to mist outside.
The next day, the storms had cleared, leaving humidity rising thick from the wet ground as the sun pounded down. Bean and our mother were lying out on the patio chairs by the garden in the back. Clad in a bikini that showed the muscles in her thighs, Bean smoked a cigarette, sunglasses covering her eyes, fly-like, her hair pulled back away from her face. She looked ready for the Riviera. Our mother had pulled her chair back from the reaching fingers of the sun, and her legs poked, pale and vein-speckled, from her shorts. The scarf around her head was tied in a new style, the loose ends trailing over her shoulder like an echo of the tresses she had lost. She was reading a magazine of unknown provenance. We were not much for magazines, but there was always one or two lying around, usually courtesy of the five-finger discount afforded by our dentist.
“Bean! What are you doing?” Rose asked, the screen door banging behind her as she stepped onto the brick patio.
Slowly, as though she did not know what Rose was getting at, Bean lifted her cigarette to her mouth and French inhaled. Curls of smoke drifted up into the still air and hung, blue and frothy.