Authors: Eleanor Brown
“I figured we’d go for the cancer trifecta. Skin, lungs, breast.”
“It’s not funny,” Rose said, frustrated by Bean’s obvious callousness, by our mother’s unwillingness to speak up for herself. Rose waved her hand in front of her face, fanning away the smoke in a melodramatic motion. She was wearing another one of her seemingly endless supply of tunics and loose-waisted pants. The pattern made her look like an angry art teacher.
“It’s fine, Rose,” our mother said. She flipped a page in the magazine. “I’m upwind of her anyway.”
“It’s not fine,” Rose insisted. Bean took a final defiant drag and crushed the cigarette in an ashtray by her feet.
“Relax, Rosie. I have to go to work anyway.” Bean stood up, gathering the jelly jar from which she had been drinking, and kissed our mother on the forehead. “Have a nice day.” She breezed inside, smelling of coconuts and sweat and the burning sting of cigarette smoke. She’d been going to thank Rose for putting in a good word for her at the library, but the constant attacks made it hard to be grateful. We were all hoping that whatever was bugging Rose would get resolved, and soon. It was like living with an unusually bossy thirteen-year-old. Again.
With a melodramatic sigh, Rose dropped into Bean’s empty chair, still warm from her body and slightly slick with suntan oil. “It’s not fair,” Rose said.
“What’s not fair?” our mother asked. She leaned the magazine against her chest, where it hung, lopsided. Rose averted her eyes. Somehow, the intimate act of helping our mother bathe was not as hard as looking at the empty spot inside her clothes.
Rose pursed her lips. “How is it that they get everything? I did everything right, and they do nothing right, and it all turns out okay for them.”
“You’d rather they be punished for their mistakes?”
Rose considered this.
Some shall be pardon’d, and some punished.
She pictured Bean stretched on the rack, charm bracelet jangling, stilettos askew as her torturers pulled her limbs farther and farther apart. For Cordy, perhaps water torture, a slow, painful dripping. Neither of these thoughts gave her any pleasure. She rather thought less of herself for having them in the first place.
“Not punished. Just . . . how come it always comes out right for them and not for me?” Rose stood up and pushed her chair back away from the heat of the sun.
“What is it that hasn’t come out right for you? You have a career, a lovely fiancé. You’re beautiful and bright and you’ve earned everything you’ve worked for. You have a blessed life, Rosie.”
Rose grumbled something disagreeable under her breath, and our mother reached out and put her fingers lightly on Rose’s hand.
“We’ve always been so proud of you. Of all of you. And if your sisters have had a little more trouble finding their way, then it’s nothing to be disappointed in them for. They just need a little more support than you do. You’ve always been so independent. Even when you were a baby, you stopped breast-feeding so much earlier than Bean and Cordy. You wanted the bottle, because you could look around while you were drinking it.” She paused for a moment, then laughed. “I swear, you started crawling out of sheer spite because I didn’t move fast enough for you.” Her hat, wide and floppy, threw a tremble of shadows across her face when she moved her head. She smiled, and Rose could see the lines traced along her eyes, her lips.
Despite the sour curdle inside her, Rose smiled. She loved to hear stories of herself as a baby. The memories made her feel warm and special, like she was the One again, instead of one of Three.
“It just doesn’t seem fair,” Rose sighed. Bean had the beautiful clothes and the body to wear them, Cordy was the one everyone wanted to be around, the one whose smile seemed to cast a light on its recipient. And she was—and always would be—stodgy, dependable Rose. No one beautiful, no one special. Did she hate us, or herself? The difference had seemed so clear to her when she sat down.
“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 the busy part. I just like a schedule. I like to know what’s going to happen. And I don’t want to become lazy.”
“I know you, Rose. You’d never allow yourself to sit still long enough to gather moss.”
“So you think I should go?” Rose asked, turning earnestly toward our mother like a sunflower in the light of approval.
“I think opportunity is knocking,” our mother said, and tapped on the metal arm of her chair for good measure. The contact made a hollow, echoing sound that to Rose sounded ominous and sour.
B
efore work one morning, Bean drove her car to the mechanic. She had bought it for $300 on the way out of New York—no one, after all, has a car in the city—and now it was nothing but an albatross, a reminder of her need to make an escape. When our father had made a remark about its continued presence as a blight upon the driveway (
“What ugly sights of death within mine eyes!”
), Bean had taken the hint and called the mechanic’s wife, who had graciously agreed to take it off her hands. Bean knew that making the nine-hour drive back from the city had sucked whatever lifeblood remained in the engine, and to have them buy it was a gesture of goodwill, not commerce. So there it was, gone, and she had a hundred dollars in a purse that had cost five times that, and she was headed to her new, glamorous life as a small-town librarian.
The ripest fruit first falls.
But she had to admit that simply being in the library made her peaceful. There was so much to learn and yet nothing, because she knew by heart the way the light fell through each window, every pull in the carpet, the exact smell of the books that clung to her clothes at the end of the day. She felt safe. And Mrs. Landrige, figure of both love and fear, had become so frail. Bean hadn’t noticed the difference until they were together all day—Mrs. Landrige had hardly risen from her chair, and when she did, her brow furrowed at the effort and she used a cane to move slowly across the room.
With two of them there, there was little to do, so Bean was (needlessly) reading shelves, replacing or straightening the occasional volume that had been separated from its flock, when she saw Aidan come in. His hair caught her attention from the corner of her eye, but she had just enough time to brush the dust from her skirt and undo a button on her blouse before she felt the shock of his touch against her elbow. His hand felt warm and sweaty. He carried a stack of slightly rippled pages.
“Father Aidan,” she said. Her library voice had encountered her bar voice and it was low and husky, reverential. “What are you doing here?”
“Can’t get a thing done at the church. People keep coming by. It’s my secret sanctuary, this place.”
“No longer such a secret, I’m afraid, now that you’ve told me,” Bean said. She turned so she faced him, grateful for the unnaturally close personal space allowed by their surroundings. He looked more surfer than priest, sunglasses pushed up in his hair, a loose white shirt over cargo shorts, and impossibly strong calves ending in sandals. Even the hair on his legs glinted in the sunlight, cast copper in the glow.
“There are no secrets in a small town, I guess,” he said.
Oh, if only you knew.
“But I’m glad I ran into you. Are you working?” he continued.
“Vaguely,” Bean said. “What’s up?” She leaned back against the shelves, crossing her legs at the ankle, bringing forward the curve of her hips under the slim skirt she wore. Being Bean, she had flipped through her wardrobe in search of clothing to suit her role, and, being Bean, she had found it. Her blouse was short-sleeved and ruffled, and her skirt was knee-length. She had momentarily considered glasses, but decided against them.
“I’ve been thinking about getting together some of the younger members of the congregation for some community service works. Twentysomethings and young marrieds.”
“Are there that many?” Bean’s impression of church, especially during the summers, was of a great deal of white hair. She stifled the next question, You want me to do
community service
?
“We’ve probably got fifteen to twenty, which is more than enough. They’re building some Habitat for Humanity houses over in Cadbury. I figured we could go over on a weekend. Then take it from there. Maybe during the school year, we can head into the city, see if any of the churches there want to do something together.”
“That sounds great. I love that kind of thing,” Bean said. She was a liar. Bean, while a nice enough person, had never spent any sort of time considering community service. In spite of (or because of) having spent so much time in a city with so much misery all around her, she had willfully shut out the idea of doing for her fellow man until that very moment.
“Great. You want to come by and we’ll kick together some names and make some calls?”
“Sure. Day after tomorrow? After I finish here?”
“That’s fine. I’ve got to leave at six, though. I’m heading up to the city to see some friends.”
“Oh,” Bean said. Honestly, she had hoped they might do their business, and then she could suggest a glass of wine, and then they would talk....
“I’ll see you later, then,” he said, and disappeared into the stacks.
Bean stood upright, stretching her shoulder blades back where the books had dug into her skin. Looking casual was so much work.
She went back to straightening the shelves, flicking her finger along the uneven tops of the books. It interested her that some of the shelves were so much dustier than the others. Apparently nobody in Barnwell was big on self-help books or slow cooker recipes.
Aidan puzzled her. If this were New York, she’d have been fairly sure he was stalking her, what with the running into her all the time, but here, there were a limited number of people you could run into. It was all coincidence, she was sure. Except today he’d clearly wanted to talk to her. Was he . . . interested in her?
Someone had left a few books on one of the tables, and Bean scooped them up as she passed by, looking idly at the numbers and then searching out their homes. Dating Aidan wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility—he was young and single and cute, and so was she.
Her better nature leaped into her throat and she shook her head, slipping the last wayward book onto the shelf. Yes, Beany, you’d make a great partner for him. What with the embezzling and the adultery and the drinking. That’s what every man wants in a wife—a vaguely alcoholic, fornicating thief.