The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown [95]
Bean looked up at Cordy, who was crying, silent silver tears streaking down her face, slipping—plop—off her chin and spotting the thin fabric of her T-shirt. “Hey,” she said, and stood, walking over to our sister, who sat on the couch. Though Cordy was not any smaller than us—we were all the same height—she seemed impossibly tiny right then in the middle of the couch, her legs crossed under the book, her tank top and olive green pants ill fitting and old. Bean sat down beside her, stroked her arm. Cordy kept crying.
“Hey,” Bean said again. “It’s going to be okay. You threw him for a loop, you know?”
“I know,” Cordy said, in the crying way of hearing without believing a word of it. She wiped her nose with the inside of her wrist. Rose stood up, grabbed a box of tissues, and carried it over to her, sitting on her other side. Cordy took a tissue and blew her nose.
We sat on either side of her, our hands consoling her in a steady rhythm. “He’s just surprised,” Rose said softly. “He’s not really angry.”
“He’ll come around. He’s going to have a grandkid. That’ll totally blow him away. And he’ll help you out, he always does. He’s just upset right now,” Bean said.
“I know,” Cordy said again. She took another tissue, wiped under her eyes. She looked up at us, our little sister, with dark circles under her eyes and streaks of tears drying on her cheeks. “I just wish he could be a little happy for me. Just a little. I know this is stupid in a million ways, but I want this baby. And I will be a good mother.”
“Of course you will,” Rose said. “And we will help you.”
“You’ll be a great mother,” Bean said, stroking Cordy’s hair. These were the supportive things to say, but we don’t think anyone on that couch entirely believed them yet. Lions make leopards tame.... Yea, but not change his spots. Will alone could not make Rose brave, could not make Bean honest, could not make Cordy sensible. Weren’t we proof of that, this sad sisterhood, bound as much by our failures as by our hopes?
A few days after Cordy’s announcement, Rose was sitting in the living room reading when she heard Bean and Cordy thumping around in Bean’s room together. Jealousy rose, a smooth wave inside her, before she pushed it down again. Had she come this far only to be twitched by the decades-old tug-of-war between the three of us? Resolutely, she put down her book and headed upstairs. She lingered for a moment, afraid we would not welcome her.
In Rose’s first two weeks as a freshman at Barnwell, she had lost twelve pounds. Not intentionally, but because, confronted with the daunting task of approaching the dining hall with no knowledge of its workings and no sure friend to sit with, she chose to eat in her room instead. Day after day, she ate cereal in the morning, milk from the tiny dorm fridge her roommate had brought, careful to keep the clatter of the spoon from waking said roommate. At lunch, she skittered into the Student Union, where our father had bought us hamburgers a thousand times, and ate alone. At dinner, she strolled into town, ate in the safety of the diner or the bookstore, or snuck home, claiming she missed our mother’s cooking, even when she had pulled one of her mental disappearing acts and there was no cooking of hers to be had. Not until a frothy, pretty girl with a hemp necklace and a slightly wide-eyed stare Rose would soon learn was chemically induced invited her to dinner with the other girls on the floor did she set foot in that place, and then she stepped so carefully after her savior, eating exactly what she did, placing her feet, her silverware in precisely the same