The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown [86]
“What’s eating at you, Rosie?” our mother asked. She brushed her fingers, light as satin, across our sister’s hand. Our mother’s skin has always been petal-soft, as comforting as her words. We may go to our father for intellectual stimulation, but our mother is the one who soothes our souls.
“It’s Jonathan,” Rose said. “He’s been offered”—offered, or taken?—“a visiting position at Oxford. For two years.”
“You mean on top of the year he’s already doing?” our mother confirmed.
Rose answered with a nod. Out in the garden, she could see the bees swerving back and forth between the flowers. She could see the dark curls and lines inside the pansies edging the path. There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pray, love, remember: and there is pansies. That’s for thoughts. “He wants me to come over there. To live.”
“And?” our mother asked.
“And it means I wouldn’t be able to apply for the position at Barnwell.”
“I see,” our mother said. She put the magazine back in her lap, flipped a page. “But you don’t know you’d get that job at Barnwell, right?”
“No, I guess not. They’d have to do a national search. But they’d pick me. I’m sure of it. Dr. Kelly said as much.”
Our mother laughed. “So you think you have to choose between your career and Jonathan.”
“That’s exactly what he’s making me do.”
“I don’t think he’s making you do anything. He hasn’t issued an ultimatum, has he? Did he say he’d be willing to talk about it?”
“Sort of,” Rose said grudgingly. “He wants me to come visit. He says we’ll talk about it then.”
Our mother nodded thoughtfully. “Well, you should certainly go visit the poor man. He’s probably quite lonely.”
“He doesn’t sound it.” Rose was petulant. If none of us were on her side, what were the chances that he would be?
“Don’t sulk, darling. It will give you wrinkles.” Rose looked at our mother, who gave a long, tinkling laugh. “I’m joking. So what’s the worst thing that could happen if he took the position and you went over there to stay with him?”
“I’d miss the position at Barney.”
“There are other schools.”
“I wouldn’t be able to get a job.”
“So Jonathan would support you for a while. It’s not like you’re an expensive habit to keep, Rose. You’re no Bean.”
Rose closed her eyes, but the bees still buzzed red patterns against the darkness of her lids. “What would I do there, anyway? I mean, Jonathan would be working, and I’d just be what? A housewife?”
A silence there, because of course this is exactly what our mother is. Rose thinks guiltily back to her conversation with Bean, but she cannot fight the feeling that our mother’s life is less than she wants for herself. What does our mother do with her days? She reads, she cooks, she tends to her garden. To Rose, it seems such a small life. And then she berates herself for thinking this, because how is her own life so grand? Bean or Cordy, their lives have drama, at least. Not to say that Rose wants drama; she may envy the reflective glamour it adds, but she has never been able to cope with any of its inroads into her own life. And hasn’t she had a good life, our mother? Hasn’t she raised children, and read good books, and traveled and laughed and had a marriage lasting for, what, thirty-three years? If you look at the statistics for Barnwell, they will tell you half of the town is unemployed, but that is, practically though not technically, false. Barnwell is full of people like our mother, married to spouses who dragged them to the middle of a cornfield and set off for the academic races with no more than a kiss and a cheerful exhortation to go ahead and build a life for themselves in the middle of nothing.
“I’m sorry,” Rose said. “I didn’t mean that . . .”
“Youth, thou bear’st thy father’s face,” our mother said unexpectedly. She is the least likely of us to quote the immortal. “He’d go mad if he weren’t busy all the time.”
“I don’t mind