The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown [92]
“How about next month?” Bean suggested. “I think people like to have their weekends. Not me, of course, as I am now officially a spinster librarian and must stay home with my cat and drink tea.”
“Really? That seems awfully unfair.”
Bean shrugged. “Them’s the rules. It’s in the manual.”
“Well, I guess we should hit the road. I’ve got to finish writing my sermon for tomorrow and it looks like everyone else is ready to go.”
“Ooh, Father Procrastination,” Bean said, nudging him gently as they walked toward her car.
“It’s not that. I just like it to be . . . fresh out of the mental oven.”
“Piping hot homilies.”
“Exactly. And you?”
“Home,” she said, but that was a lie.
Bean herself could not define the gravitational pull that drew her to Edward’s, only that it made her as sick inside as it delighted her.
“Don’t say anything,” Bean said as Edward held the screen door back for her. He was smoking a cigar, the sour smell turning her stomach a little as she brushed past him. “I’ve been doing good all day, and I know I look like hell.”
“So you came by to do a little evil?” he asked, holding his cigar to his mouth and waggling it before he took another puff.
“I came by to take a little shower,” she said.
“And then?” he asked teasingly.
“Meet me upstairs in ten minutes and find out,” she said.
“You are a very bad apple,” he said, gesturing up the wide stairs to the second floor, and giving her a slap on the bottom with his free hand. There was blues playing on the stereo, and the newspaper was scattered around the living room. He’d adjusted so easily to the bachelor life, it was easy to forget that every time she was here, she burned away any good she could possibly do with a measly day of community service. His wife, his children, she wronged them all just with her presence. All the sermons we’d heard growing up, all the Bible storybooks we’d read until they fell apart, it had all been for nothing. It had occurred to Bean that she was ticking her way down the Ten Commandments, violating each one in an orderly fashion until there’d be nothing left of her soul but a tiny, torn shred, fluttering in the empty darkness inside her.
She walked toward the steps and turned back to look at Edward over her shoulder. He grew less handsome every time she saw him, she thought, his teeth still white, his hair still candidate-perfect, but his face distorted by alcohol and disappointment. But when he winked at her, toasting her with the tumbler in his hand, she winked back. And when she stood under the spray, washing away the sweat and the dirt of the day, and he joined her, she ignored her better judgment and let him dizzy away the cold, uncertain world and her new place in it. This was her life, then. Good on the outside, rotten on the inside. She was a bad apple, all right. Rotten to the core.
Our father was sitting at the kitchen table, reading his Riverside Shakespeare. Rose came in and sat down at one of the straight-backed chairs across from him. “Daddy,” she said, but he held up one finger, not taking his eyes from his book. This was his signal—just a moment, I’m reading. Rose rolled her eyes. It wasn’t like he didn’t know the ending, whichever play he was reading.
When he finished, he placed the book facedown on the table. Rose’s fingers itched to take it and mark his spot. “I need some advice.”
“Neither a borrower nor a lender be; For loan oft loses both itself and friend, and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry,” he said with a self-satisfied little grin. Oh, Daddy, a Hamlet joke. How lovely. You shouldn’t have.
Rose forced an answering smile. “Thanks. But this is about work.”
“Ah. The lure of tenure,” he said. “What did Jonathan say?”
“He wants to stay in England. It’s ridiculous. Because then two years from now we’ll have to look again.”
“There are other universities. People move from college to college all the time.”
“You didn’t,” Rose said accusingly.
“No,” our father admitted.