the weird sisters

ELEANOR BROWN

Dedication

TO CHRIS

For springtime, for a rock-and-roll show, forever

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eightteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Epigraph

But we only called the fire brigade, and soon the fire engine came and three tall men in helmets brought a hose into the house and Mr Prothero got out just in time before they turned it on. Nobody could have had a noisier Christmas Eve. And when the firemen turned off the hose and were standing in the wet, smoky room, Jim’s Aunt, Miss Prothero, came downstairs and peered in at them. Jim and I waited, very quietly, to hear what she would say to them. She said the right thing, always. She looked at the three tall firemen in their shining helmets, standing among the smoke and cinders and dissolving snowballs, and she said, ‘Would you like anything to read?’

– DYLAN THOMAS,

A Child’s Christmas in Wales

I dreamt last night of the three weird sisters.

– WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Macbeth

Prologue

We came home because we were failures. We wouldn’t admit that, of course, not at first, not to ourselves, and certainly not to anyone else. We said we came home because our mother was ill, because we needed a break, a momentary pause before setting off for the Next Big Thing. But the truth was, we had failed, and rather than let anyone else know, we crafted careful excuses and alibis, and wrapped them around ourselves like a cloak to keep out the cold truth. The first stage: denial.

For Cordelia, the youngest, it began with the letters. They arrived the same day, though their contents were so different that she had to look back at the postmarks to see which one had been sent first. They seemed so simple, paper in her hands, vulnerable to rain, or fire, or incautious care, but she would not destroy them. These were the kind you save, folded into a memory box, to be opened years later with fingers against crackling age, heart pounding with the sick desire to be possessed by memory.

We should tell you what they said, and we will, because their contents affect everything that happened afterward, but we first have to explain how our family communicates, and to do that, we have to explain our family.

Oh, man.

Perhaps we had just better explain our father.

If you took a college course on Shakespeare, our father’s name might be resident in some dim corner of your mind, under layers of unused telephone numbers, forgotten dreams, and the words that never seem to make it to the tip of your tongue when you need them. Our father is Dr James Andreas, professor of English literature at Barnwell College, singular focus: The Immortal Bard.

The words that might come to mind to describe our father’s work are insufficient to convey to you what it is like to live with someone with such a singular preoccupation. Enthusiast, expert, obsessed – these words all thud hollow when faced with the sandstorm of Shakespeare in which we were raised. Sonnets were our nursery rhymes. The three of us were given advice and instruction in couplets; we were more likely to refer to a hated playmate as a ‘fat-kidneyed rascal’ than a jerk; we played under the tables at Christmas parties where phrases like ‘deconstructionist philosophy’ and ‘patriarchal mal -feasance’ drifted down through the heavy tablecloths with the carols.

And this only begins to describe it.

But it is enough for our purposes.

The first letter was from Rose: precise pen on thick vellum. From Romeo and Juliet; Cordy knew it at once. We met, we woo’d and made exchange of vow, I’ll tell thee as we pass; but this I pray, That thou consent to marry us to-day.

And now you will understand this was our oldest sister’s way of telling us that she was getting married.

The second was from our father. He communicates almost exclusively through pages copied from The Riverside Shakespeare. The pages are so heavily annotated with decades of thoughts, of interpretations, that we can barely make out the lines of text he highlights. But it matters not; we have been nursed and nurtured on the plays, and the slightest reminder brings the language back.

Come, let us go; and pray to all the gods/For our beloved mother in her pains. And this is how Cordy knew our mother had cancer. This is how she knew we had to come home.

Chapter One

Cordy had never stolen anything before. As a matter of pride, when our friends were practising their light-fingered shuffles across the shelves of Barnwell’s stores in our teens, she had refused to participate, refused even to wear the cheap earrings and clumpy lipstick or listen to the shoplifted music. But here she was in this no-name desert town, facing off against the wall of pregnancy tests, knowing full well she didn’t have the money to pay for one. A Wild West shootout: Cordy versus the little pink sticks at high noon.

She’d wanted to do this somewhere anonymous, in a wide-aisled store that hummed with soft, inoffensive music and belonged to a company, not a person, but those stores had long ago gotten smart, put anti-theft devices like hunch-shouldered guardians at the doors. So she was in this dusty little mom and pop drugstore, her stomach churning, cheeks bright with fire.

‘Strike up the drum; cry “Courage!” and away,’ she whispered to herself, and then giggled, one thin hand sneaking out to grab one of the boxes – any one, it didn’t matter. They’d all tell her the thing she already knew but refused to admit.

She slipped the box into her gaping shoulder bag with one hand, the other rooting around at the bottom for the remnants of her last, months-ago paycheck, the few loose coins buried in a grave of stale breath mints, lint, and broken pens. Along the way, she grabbed a toffee bar off the shelf and presented it to the cashier, digging for a few more pennies, her hand burning when she brushed against the box hidden in the loose depths.

Outside the store, a rush of elation. ‘Too easy,’ she said aloud to the empty street, her skirt whispering against the sidewalk, already gone hot and sullen in the rise of spring, her sandals so worn that she could feel the insistent warmth against her heels. The pleasure of the forbidden lasted until she had made it back to the house, ramshackle and dark, where she was staying, a few people crashed on the broken furniture in the living room, sleeping off last night’s excess. She yanked open the box, tossing the instructions in the direction of the trash can, and did the deed. Huddled on the toilet in the bathroom, tile cracked and shredding beneath her feet, staring at the pink line, pale as fading newsprint, her conscience caught up with her.

‘It doesn’t get much lower than this, old Cordy, old sock,’ she could hear Bean telling her cheerfully.

‘How are you going to take care of a baby if you can’t even afford a pregnancy test?’ Rose harped.

Cordy brushed our imaginary voices aside and buried the evidence in the trash can. It didn’t make a difference, really, she told herself. She’d been headed home anyway, wandering a circuitous loop, going where the wind or the next ride took her. This just confirmed what she’d already known – that after seven years of floating like a dandelion seed, it was time to settle down.

Settle down. She shuddered.

Those words were a bell ringing inside her. That was, after all, why she’d left. Just before exams in the spring of her junior year at Barnwell College, she’d been in the study lounge in the psychology department, lying on the industrial carpet, her arms locked as she held a textbook above her face. Two women, seniors, were talking nearby – one of them was getting married, the other going to graduate school. Cordy lowered the book to her chest, its weight pressing harder and harder against her heart as she listened to the litany of What Was to Come. Wedding favours and student loans. Mortgages and health insurance. Careers and taxes. Unable to breathe, she shoved the book onto the floor and walked out of the lounge. If that was the future, she wanted no part of it.

It was our fault, probably, the way we’d always babied her. Or maybe it was our father’s fault – Cordelia had always been his favourite. He’d never said no to her, not to her breathless baby cries, not to her childhood entreaties for ballet lessons (dropped before they got to fourth position, though she did wear the tutu for an awful long time after that, so it wasn’t a total waste), and not to the desperate late-night calls for cash infusions in the years she’d spent drifting around the country, accomplishing nothing in particular. She was the Cordelia to his Lear, legendary in her devotion. He always lov’d our sister most. But whoever’s fault it was, Cordy had thus far refused to grow up, and we’d indulged that in the same way we’d indulged every other whim she’d had for nearly her entire life. After all, we could hardly blame her. We were fairly certain that if anyone made public the various and variegated ways in which being an adult sucked eggs, more people might opt out entirely.

But now? Growing up didn’t seem so much like a choice any more. Cordy fumbled around through one of the bedrooms until she found a calendar, counting backwards. It was almost June now, she was fairly certain. And she’d left Oregon, the last stop on that long, strange trip, in, what, February? She rubbed her knuckles on her forehead, thinking. It had been so long since things like dates mattered.

But she could trace the journey back, before she’d started feeling so empty and nauseated in the mornings, before her breasts had grown tender enough that even the material of a T-shirt seemed like it was scraping against her skin, before the endless fatigue that swept over her at the strangest times, before she’d known. Washington, California, Arizona. Her period had come in Arizona; she dimly remembered a tussle with a recalcitrant tampon dispenser in a rest stop bathroom. And then she’d gone to New Mexico, where there’d been a painter, much older, his hair painted with shocking strands of white, his skin wrinkled from the sun, his hands broad and callused. She’d paused there for a few weeks, waitressing a handful of shifts to make money for the rest of the trip home, not that it had lasted. He’d come into the restaurant to eat, all by himself, and it had been so late, and his eyes were so lonely. For a week she’d stayed with him, spending the days curled on a couch in his studio, reading and staring out over the arroyos while he painted in silence: strange, contorted swirls of colour that dripped off the canvases onto the floor. But he’d been gentle, and blessedly quiet, and after so much Sturm und Drang, she’d nearly been sad to leave. The last night, there’d been a broken condom, a hushed argument, dark dreams, and the next morning she had been gone.

Slumping on the bed, Cordy let the calendar fall from her hands. What was she supposed to do now? Go back to New Mexico and tell the painter? She doubted he’d be excited to hear the news. She wasn’t exactly thrilled herself. Maybe she’d have a miscarriage. Heroines in novels were always having serendipitously timed miscarriages that saved them from having to make sticky decisions. And Cordy had always been awfully lucky.

Until now.

Cordy stepped over the piles of dirty clothes on the floor and back into the hallway. The crashers in the living room were still snoring as she tiptoed through to the kitchen, where she’d left her backpack. She’d lived here one winter – it seemed like years ago, but it couldn’t have been that long, since this was the address the letters had come to. Had it been years ago? Had it really been years since she had been in one place long enough to have an address?

Gritting her teeth, Cordy began shoving things into the bag. She didn’t know what to do. But that was okay. Someone would figure this out for her. Someone would take care of her. Someone always took care of her.

No problem.

Bean absolutely and positively did not believe in anything even vaguely paranormal. But for the past week or so, she’d had the strangest feeling that something bad was coming. She woke up in the morning with a hard pit in her stomach, as though she’d swallowed something malignant, growing, and the weight stayed with her all day, making her heels clack more sharply on the subway steps, her body ache after only a few minutes of running on the treadmill, jewel-toned cocktails simmer in her stomach until she left them in their glasses to sweat into water on the mahogany bars of the city’s trendiest watering holes.

Nothing in her bag of tricks made the feeling go away – not seducing a hapless investment banker over the din of a club, not a punishing spin class that left her so rubbery and tired that she vomited into the toilet at the gym, not a new pair of shoes that cost as much as the rent she paid for her tiny closet of a bedroom in a shared apartment in Manhattan. As a matter of fact, that last one made the rock inside her turn into steel.

When the moment she had been dreading finally came, the managing partner of the law firm she worked at arriving at her desk and asking to see her in his office, it was almost a relief. ‘If it were done, when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly,’ she quoted to herself, following his wizened steps into his office.

‘Have a seat, Bianca,’ he said.

In New York, everyone called her Bianca. Men, upon asking for her number in a terminally hip watering hole, would have to ask her to repeat it, and then, upon comprehension, would smile. Something about the name – and, honestly, few of them had the synapses to rub together at that point in the evening to make any sort of literary connections, so it must have been something else – made her even more attractive to them.

To us, however, she would always be Bean. And it was still the way she spoke to herself. ‘Nice going, Bean,’ she would say when she dropped something, and her roommates in the city would look at her curiously. But being Bianca was a part she played well, and she wondered if part of the sickness she felt inside was knowing that performance was coming to an end. Forever.

She perched on the edge of one of the leather wing chairs in his sitting area. He sat in the other. ‘We’ve been doing a bit of an accounting audit, you see,’ he said without preamble.

Bean stared at him. The pit inside her stomach was turning into fire. She stared at him, his beetled, bushy eyebrows, his soft, wrinkled hands, and wanted to cry.

‘We’ve found a number of . . . shall we say, anomalies in the payroll records. In your favour. I’d like to think they’re errors.’ He looked almost hopeful.

She said nothing.

‘Can you tell me what’s been happening, Bianca?’

Bean looked down at the bracelet on her wrist. She’d bought it at Tiffany months ago, and she remembered the strange seizing in her stomach as she’d handed over her credit card, the same feeling she’d gotten lately when she bought anything, from groceries to a handbag. The feeling that her luck was running out, that she couldn’t go on, and maybe (most terrifying of all), maybe she didn’t want to.

‘They aren’t errors,’ Bean said, but her voice caught on the last word, so she cleared her throat and tried again, louder. ‘They aren’t errors.’ She folded her hands in her lap.

The managing partner looked unsurprised, but disappointed. Bean wondered why they’d chosen him for this particular dirty work – he was practically emeritus, holding on to this corner office for no good reason other than to have a place to escape from his wife and while away the hours until he died. She considered trying to sleep with him, but he was looking at her with such grandfatherly concern the idea withered on the vine before she could even fully imagine it. Truthfully, she felt something that could only be described as gratitude that it was him, not one of the other partners whose desperation to push themselves to the top had made their tongues sharp as teeth, whose bellows of frustration came coursing down the hallways like a swelling tide when things dared not go their way.

‘Are you well?’ he asked, and the kindness in his voice made her heart twist. She bit her tongue hard, blinked back tears. She would not cry. Not in front of him, anyway. Not here. ‘It’s a great deal of money, Bianca. Was there some reason . . . ?’ His question trailed off hopefully.

She could have lied. Maybe she should have been picturing this scene all along, planning for it. She was good at the theatre of life, our Bean, she could have played any part she wanted. But lying seemed desperate and weak, and she was suddenly exhausted. She wanted nothing more than to lie down and sleep for days.

‘No,’ she said. She couldn’t meet his eyes. ‘No good reason.’

He sighed at that, a long, slow exhale that seemed to make the air move differently in the room. ‘We could call the police, you know.’

Bean’s eyes widened. She’d never thought about that. Why had she never thought about that? She’d known stealing from her employers was wrong, but somehow she’d never let herself think that it was actually criminal (criminal! How had it come to that?). God, she could go to jail. She saw herself in a cell, in an orange jumpsuit, stripped of her bracelet and her makeup and all the armour that living in the city required of her. She was speechless.

‘But I don’t think that’s entirely necessary. You’ve done good work for us. And I know what it’s like to be young in this city. And it’s so unpleasant, involving the police. I’d imagine that your resignation will be enough. And, of course, you’ll repay your debt.’

‘Of course,’ Bean said. She was still frozen, wondering how she’d managed to miscalculate so badly, wondering if she really was going to squeak out of here with nothing but a slap on the wrist, or if she’d be nabbed halfway out of the lobby, handcuffs on her wrists, her box of personal effects scattering on the marble floor while everyone looked on at the spectacle.

‘It might be worthwhile for you to take a little time. Go home for a bit. You’re from Kentucky, aren’t you?’

‘Ohio,’ Bean said, and it was only a whisper.

‘Right. Go back to the Buckeye State. Spend a little time. Re-evaluate your priorities.’

Bean forced back the tears that were, again, welling out of control. ‘Thank you,’ she said, looking up at him. He was, miraculously, smiling.

‘We’ve all done foolish, foolish things, dear. In my experience, good people punish themselves far more than any external body can manage. And I believe you are a good person. You may have lost your way more than a little bit, but I believe you can find your way back. That’s the trick. Finding your way back.’

‘Sure,’ Bean said, and her tongue was thick with shame. It might have been easier if he had been angry, if he’d taken her to task the way he really should have, called the police, started legal proceedings, done something that equalled the horrible way she’d betrayed their trust and pissed on everything she knew to be good and right in the service of nothing more than a lot of expensive clothes and late-night cab rides. She wanted him to yell, but his voice remained steady and quiet.

‘I don’t recommend you mention your employment here when you do seek another job.’

‘Of course not,’ Bean said. He was about to continue, but she pushed her hair back and interrupted him. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.’

His hands were steepled in front of him. He looked at her, the way her makeup was smudging around her eyes, despite her impressive ability to hold back the tears. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘You have fifteen minutes to get out of the building.’

Bean fled.

She took nothing from work. She cared about nothing there anyway, had never bothered to make the place her own. She went home and called a friend with a car he’d been trying to sell for junk, though even that would take nearly the last of her ill-gotten gains, and while he drove over, she packed up her clothes, and she wondered how she could have spent all that money and have nothing but clothes and accessories and a long list of men she never wanted to see again to show for it, and the thought made her so ill she had to go into the bathroom and vomit until she could bring up nothing but blood and yellow bile, and she took as much money as she could from the ATM and threw everything she owned into that beater of a car and she left right then, without even so much as a fare-thee-well to the city that had given her . . . well, nothing.

Because Cordelia was the last to find out, she was the last to arrive, though we understand this was neither her intention nor her fault. It was simply her habit. Cordy, last born, came a month later than expected, lazily sweeping her way out of our mother’s womb, putting a lie to the idea that labour gets shorter every time. She has been late to everything since then, and is fond of saying she will be late to her own funeral, haw haw haw.

We forgive her for her tardiness, but not for the joke.

Would we all have chosen to come back, knowing that it would be the three of us again, that all those secrets squeezed into one house would be impossible to keep? The answer is irrelevant – it was some kind of sick fate. We were destined to be sisters at birth, and apparently we were destined to be sisters now, when we thought we had put all that behind us.

While Bean and Cordy were dragging their baggage (literal and metaphorical) across the country, Rose was already safely ensconced in our childhood home. Unlike Bean and Cordy, Rose had never been away for very long. For years she had been in the habit of having dinner with our parents once or twice a week, coming home on Sundays. Someone, after all, had to keep an eye on them. They were getting older, Rose told Bean on the phone, with exactly the right amount of sighing to convey that she felt she was doing Bean and Cordy’s duty as well as her own. And usually her visits to our house for Sunday dinner felt like duty, equal parts frustration and triumph as she reminded our father that he had to mow the lawn before the neighbours complained, as she bustled around the living room putting bookmarks in books left open, their spines straining under the weight, as she reminded our mother that she actually had to open the mail, not just bring it inside. It was a good thing, Rose invariably told herself when she left (with not a little satisfaction on her face) that she was here. Who knows what kind of disarray they’d fall into without her?

But moving home? At the advanced age of thirty-three? Like, for permanent, as Cordy might say?

She should have been living in the city with her fiancé, Jonathan, having recently signed her first contract as a tenured professor, waving her engagement ring around wildly whenever she came back to Barnwell just to show that she was, in fact, not just the smart one, that Bean was not the only one who could land a man, and our father was not the only pro fessorial genius in the family. This is how it should have been. This is how it was:

ACT I

Setting : Airport interior, and Jonathan’s apartment, just after winter break

Characters : Jonathan, Rose, travellers

Rose had changed positions a dozen times as the passengers on Jonathan’s flight came streaming through the airport gates. She was looking for the right position for him to catch her in; the right balance of careless inattention and casual beauty, neither of which would betray how much she had missed him.

But when he finally did emerge, cresting over the gentle grade of the ramp that led from the gate, when she could see his rumpled hair bobbing above the heads of the other passengers, the graceful way his tall, reedy shoulders were bent forward as though he were walking into an insistent wind, she forgot her artifice and stood, dropping her book by her side and smoothing her clothes and her hair until he was in front of her and she was in his arms, his mouth warm against her own.

‘I missed you,’ she said, running her hand down his cheek, marvelling at the fact of his presence. Light stubble brushed against her palm as he moved his chin against her touch, catlike. ‘Don’t ever go away again.’

He laughed, tipping his head back slightly, and then dropped a kiss on her forehead, shifting his bag over his shoulder to keep it from slipping. ‘I’ve come back,’ he said.

‘Yes, and you are never allowed to leave again,’ Rose said. She’d think back on that later and wonder if his expression had changed, but at the time she didn’t notice a thing. She picked up her book and slipped her hand into his as they headed to pick up his luggage.

‘Was it that awful? Your sisters didn’t come home when they got your father’s letter?’ He turned to face her so he was standing backwards on the escalator, his hands spread over the rails.

‘No, they didn’t come home, and thank heavens, because that would have been even worse. It’s just been me and Mom and Dad.’

‘Lonely?’ He turned back and stepped off the escalator, holding his hand out to help her step off. Swoon-worthy, as Cordy would have said.

‘Ugh. I don’t want to talk about it. How was your trip?’

Jonathan had been gone for two weeks, nearly the entire break, presenting at a conference in Germany and stopping on the way back to visit friends in England. Rose had carefully crossed each passing day off in her day planner, feeling like a ridiculous schoolgirl with a crush but unable to stop herself. Ridiculous, she knew. When they had been a couple for only a few months, she’d been the one to utter the magical four-letter word first, breathless and laughing as they lay on his bed and he alternated between kissing her neck and tickling her mercilessly. She’d been thinking that this was love for weeks, but she couldn’t say it first, and then the words slipped out in a rush of giddiness. She’d frozen, horrified at her own lack of control, but then he’d whispered back that he loved her, too, and her relief and happiness made her feel faint. Being without him had felt like a cruel amputation, and she reached out for his hand to remind herself that he was there, after all.

He took her hand in his and lifted it to his mouth, kissing her fingertips. ‘You look lovely,’ he said. ‘I’d forgotten how beautiful you are.’

Rose blushed and shook her head, smoothing her clothes again with her free hand. ‘I look awful. I didn’t have time to change and –’

Jonathan cut her off with another kiss, this time in the centre of her palm. ‘I wish you could see yourself through my eyes,’ he said softly. ‘My vision is better.’

She drove them back to his apartment and they hauled his suitcase inside. She hadn’t been here since he’d left – he had no pets, no plants, and there was no reason for her to visit unless he was there – and the air was thick and stale. She opened the windows and turned on the fan, and they sat together on the sofa, fingers entwined, until he cleared his throat awkwardly. ‘I’ve got a little news.’

‘Good or bad?’ Rose wasn’t quite listening. She reached out with her free hand and stroked a wayward lock of hair behind his ear. It had gotten long – she’d have to make an appointment for him to have it cut.

‘Excellent, actually. While I was in Oxford with Paul and Shari –’

‘How are they, by the way?’ Paul had been Jonathan’s roommate in their doctoral programme, and many of Jonathan’s best stories revolved around their misadventures.

‘Great – sleep-deprived, you know, but head over heels with the baby, and they seem happy. I’ve got pictures. They’d love to meet you.’

Rose laughed. ‘Not likely, unless they’re considering a transatlantic flight with a newborn.’

Jonathan swallowed awkwardly. ‘Well, that’s the thing, love. When I was over there, Paul and I had lunch with his dean.’ He paused, searching for the next words, and Rose felt her heart growing colder, a thin sheet of ice covering its surface like frost on a windowpane.

‘He’s very interested in my research. He wants me to join the faculty there – a lab of my own, graduate students to work with me. It’s ideal. A perfect opportunity.’

Rose reached for the glass of water he’d left for her on the coffee table. Her mouth was painfully dry, her throat ached. Alone again. It seemed it was Just Her Luck to have finally found her Orlando, her perfect love, only to have him leave her. Shakespeare’s Rosalind had never had this kind of problem; she was too busy cross-dressing and frolicking around in forests with her servant. Rough life. Rose set the glass back on the table and slipped her other hand from his.

‘So you’re leaving,’ she said dully, when she could push her parched lips into words again.

‘I’d like to,’ he said softly. He reached for her hand again, but she moved so she was facing forward, away from him, her ankles crossed primly, hands folded in her lap, as though she were waiting to be served at a particularly stuffy tea party.

‘But we were supposed to get married,’ she whispered.

‘And we will, of course we will. I’m not saying that at all. But I’d be a fool to turn this down. You can see that, can’t you?’ His voice was pleading, but she turned away.

‘When are you going?’

‘I haven’t said I am, as of yet. But I could start at the beginning of the third term, just after Easter.’

‘Your contract here goes through the end of the year, doesn’t it? You’re just going to break your contract?’

‘Rose, don’t be like that. Please hear me out. I want you to come with me.’

Rose turned her head towards him and barked a short, harsh laugh. ‘To England? You want me to come to England with you? You have got to be kidding, Jonathan. I have a job. I have a life here. I’m not like you. I don’t get to go globe-hopping every time I get a whim.’

‘That’s a bit harsh, don’t you think?’ he asked, recoiling from the bite. Our Rose, whose tongue more poisons than the adder’s tooth! He rubbed his hands quickly on his knees and stood up, rumpling his hair impatiently. ‘It could be good for us – for both of us. For me, yes, but for you, too. You haven’t got a job past next year, right?’

‘Is this supposed to make me feel better?’ Rose had been told this spring, in no uncertain terms, that her adjunct contract wouldn’t be renewed after this year. No hard feelings, nothing personal, but they hadn’t any tenure-track positions open, and it was so important to keep the department adjuncts fresh, to keep the curriculum vital, you know. Yes, Rose had thought sourly, and because you can keep milling through those brand-new PhDs and never have to give them a penny more than you think you can get away with. The thought of having to find a new job paralysed her, the thought of being without a job paralysed her, and she was highly tempted to stick her fingers in her ears and sing until the entire thing blew over.

‘I don’t know about better. But I’d hoped you’d be at least a little happy for me.’

She looked up at him, his eyes sad and wounded, and she crumbled a little. ‘I am. I’m sorry. But it’s so big . . . It’s such a huge change from what we were planning.’

‘We always knew we’d have to consider it, love. My position here is only temporary, you know that.’

‘But I thought maybe . . .’ Rose didn’t want to say what she had thought. She’d just assumed that he would give up this fancy academic jet-setting and find something nearby, something where she wouldn’t have to go anywhere. Where she wouldn’t have to change at all. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again.

‘Oh, Rose, I’m sorry, too. Let’s not talk about it any more. Let’s just enjoy being together for a bit.’

He came over to her and put his arms around her and kissed her, and that did only a little to soothe the ache inside where her heart had been bruised. So that was it. He wouldn’t stay, and she wouldn’t – couldn’t – go. It was ridiculous to even think about it.

His hands were in her hair, slowly pulling the pins out and letting it fall down her back the way he liked it, stroking the tresses the way she liked it, the gentle pull against her scalp so soothing. She wasn’t paying attention. Bean and Cordy were sitting on her shoulders, whispering in her ears like a cartoon devil and angel. Or two devils, really. ‘You could go if you wanted to, Rosie,’ our youngest sister said. ‘Just pick up and go. It’s not so hard. I do it all the time.’

‘What are you afraid of?’ Bean mocked. ‘Don’t want to leave your glamorous life behind?’

Okay, so it wasn’t a glamorous life. But it was important. She was important. We needed her. Didn’t we?

Bean and Cordy didn’t answer. Bean was adjusting her horns, and Cordy was chasing her own forked tail. You need me, Rose thought fiercely. They turned away.

‘Hush,’ Jonathan said, as though he could hear the busy spinning of Rose’s thoughts, and he kissed her, and we fell off her shoulders as though we’d been physically brushed aside.

ACT II

Setting : Interior, the Golden Dragon, a small Chinese restaurant a few towns over, famed more for its convenience than its cuisine. Also the site of an infamous embarrassment for Bean, aged eight, in which she devoured a sweet and sour pork entrée all by herself and then regurgitated the entire thing tidily into the mouth of a fake dragon hidden behind a plant, certain it would never be found there. Characters : Rose, Jonathan, our father, our mother.

They sat around the table, the four of them, sharing dishes and companionable chatter. Tea steamed in tiny cups, and Rose was fumbling with her chopsticks, envying Jonathan’s easy grace with the infernal things.

‘We have something to tell you,’ our father said, clearing his throat.

Rose looked up quickly, warily. This was the sort of announcement that had preceded the game-changing births of both Bean and Cordy. Whatever the news was, it wasn’t bound to be good.

Our father cleared his throat again, but it was our mother who spoke, leaping in, tearing off the conversational Band-Aid. ‘I have breast cancer,’ she said.

The ice in Rose’s throat grew solid, and she grabbed for her still-scalding cup of tea, taking a long swallow, letting the liquid burn away the freeze inside her, leaving a bubble on her tongue she would feel every time she spoke for the next few days. There was silence. The few other diners in the restaurant kept eating, oblivious.

‘Mom,’ Rose finally said. ‘Are you sure?’

Our mother nodded. ‘It’s early, you see. But I found a lump – what was it, a month ago?’ She looked at our father for confirmation, the quiet ease of cooperative conversation they had developed years ago. He nodded.

‘A month ago?’ Rose’s voice cracked. She set down her teacup, hand shaking. ‘Why didn’t you call me? I could have . . .’ She trailed off, unsure of what she could have done. But she could have done something. She could have taken care of this. She took care of everything. How had she missed this? A month, they’d been going to doctors and having quiet conversations between themselves, and she hadn’t seen it at all?

‘We’ve been to the oncologist, and it’s malignant. It doesn’t look like it’s spread, but it’s quite large. So they’re going to do a round of chemotherapy before surgery. Shrink it down a bit. And then . . .’ Our mother’s voice caught and trembled for a moment, as though the meaning behind the clinical words had only just become clear to her, and she swallowed and took a breath. ‘And then a mastectomy. You know, just get the whole problem dealt with.’ She said this as though it were something she had woken up and decided to do on a relative lark. Like going on a cruise, say, or taking up tennis.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Jonathan said. He reached across the table and put his hand over our mother’s, squeezed. He was so elegant in his sympathy. ‘What can we do?’

Rose stared wildly around the restaurant, at the gilt and red and paper placemats. This is what she would remember, she knew, not the fear in our mother’s eyes, or the pounding of her own heart, but how desperately tacky this place was, how cheap it looked, how the chopsticks had not broken properly when she had separated them but splintered along the centre. This is what she would remember.

But when the shock passed, it had become something, forgive her for saying it, something of a relief. Thank God, a purpose. An excuse to be needed. A reason to turn Jonathan’s abandonment into something important. So the next day she broke her lease, packed up her things, and moved back home, uninvited.

It wasn’t until she had been home for a while, had straightened out the little messes around the house and helped our mother through the first rounds of chemotherapy that the shame of her situation had hit her. How humiliating to be living at home again. If she told people that she had moved back to help care for our mother, of course they would nod and sigh sympathetically. But still, where was she? Living with our parents? At her age? She felt like a swimmer who had been earnestly beating back the waves only to find herself exhausted and just as far from shore as when she had begun. She was lonely and tired.

Embarrassed even by the thought of herself in this rudderless life, she flushed and stood impatiently from the window seat, where she’d been staring in irritation at our mother’s wildflower garden. The garden had, in the way of wildflower gardens, grown out of control. Our mother loved it – the way it drew butterflies and fat bees, the dizzy way the purples and yellows blurred together as the stems tangled – but Rose preferred her gardens to be more obedient.

She turned to look back into the living room, one dim light behind our father’s favourite sun-paled orange wing-back chair spreading shadows over the opened books that covered every surface despite her attempts to keep them orderly. Our family’s vices – disorder and literature – captured in evening tableau. We were never organized readers who would see a book through to its end in any sort of logical order. We weave in and out of words like tourists on a hop-on, hop-off bus tour. Put a book down in the kitchen to go to the bathroom and you might return to find it gone, replaced by another of equal interest. We are indiscriminate. Our father, of course, limits his reading to things by, of, and about our boy Bill, but our mother brought diversity to our readings and therefore our education. It was never really a problem for any of us to read a children’s biography of Amelia Earhart followed by a self-help book on alcoholism (from which no one in the family suffered), followed by Act III of All’s Well That Ends Well, followed by a collection of Neruda sonnets. Cordy claims this is the source of her inability to focus on anything for more than a few minutes at a time, but we do not believe her. It is just our way.

And it wasn’t that Rose regretted being home, exactly. Our parents’ house and Barnwell in general were far more pleasant than the anonymous apartment she’d rented in Columbus – thin carpet over concrete floors, neighbours moving in and out so quickly she’d stopped bothering to learn their names – but after she filled our parents’ pill cases and straightened the living room, after she had finally hired a lawn service and balanced the cheque book, after she went with our parents to our mother’s chemo treatments, sitting in the waiting room because they didn’t need her there, not really, they would have been fine just the two of them, her life was almost as empty as it had been before.

The tiny clock on the mantelpiece chimed ten, and Rose sighed in relief. Ten was a perfectly acceptable hour to go to bed without feeling like a complete loafer. She walked towards the stairs and then paused by the mirror, warped and pale, that had hung there since any of us could remember. Rose stared at her reflection and spoke six words none of us had ever said before.

‘I wish my sisters were here.’

The fox, the ape and the humble-bee, Were still at odds, being but three.

Our father once wrote an essay on the importance of the number three in Shakespeare’s work. A little bit of nothing, he said, a bagatelle, but it was always our favourite. The Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit. The Billy Goats Gruff, the Three Blind Mice, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog ). King Lear – Goneril, Regan, Cordelia. The Merchant of Venice – Portia, Nerissa, Jessica.

And us – Rosalind, Bianca, Cordelia.

The Weird Sisters.

We have, while trapped in the car with our father behind the wheel, been subjected to extended remixes of the history of the word ‘weird’ in Macbeth with a special encore set of Norse and Scottish Sources Shakespeare Used in Creating This Important Work. These indignities we will spare you.

But it is worth noting, especially now that ‘weird’ has evolved from its delicious original meaning of supernatural strangeness into something depressingly critical and pedestrian, as in, ‘“Don’t you think Rose’s outfit looks weird?” Bean asked,’ that Shakespeare didn’t really mean the sisters were weird at all.

The word he originally used was much closer to ‘wyrd’, and that has an entirely different meaning. ‘Wyrd’ means fate. And we might argue that we are not fated to do anything, that we have chosen everything in our lives, that there is no such thing as destiny. And we would be lying.

Rose always first, Bean never first, Cordy always last. And if we don’t accept it, don’t see, like Shakespeare’s Weird Sisters did, that we cannot fight our family and cannot fight our fates, well, whose failing is that but our own? Our destiny is in the way we were born, in the way we were raised, in the sum of the three of us.

The history of this trinity is fractious – a constantly shifting dividing line, never equal, never equitable. Two against one, or three opposed, but never all together. Upon Cordy’s birth, Rose took Bean into her, two against one. And when Bean rebelled, refused any longer to play Rose’s games, Rose and Cordy found each other, and Cordy became the willing follower. Two against one.

Until Rose went away and we were three apart.

And then Bean and Cordy found each other sneaking out of their respective windows onto the broad-limbed oak trees one hot summer night, and we were two against one again.

And now here we are, measuring our distance an arm’s length away, staying far apart and cold. For what? To hold the others at bay? To protect ourselves?

We see stories in magazines or newspapers sometimes, or read novels, about the deep and loving relationships between sisters. Sisters are supposed to be tight and connected, sharing family history and lore, laughing over misadventures. But we are not that way. We never have been, really, because even our partnering was more for spite than for love. Who are these sisters who act like this, who treat each other as their best friends? We have never met them. We know plenty of sisters who get along well, certainly, but wherefore the myth?

We don’t think Cordy minds, really, because she tends to take things as they come. Rose minds, certainly, because she likes things to align with her mental image. And Bean? Well, it comes and goes with Bean, as does everything with her. To forge such an unnatural friendship would just require so much effort.

Our estrangement is not drama-laden – we have not betrayed one another’s trust, we have not stolen lovers or fought over money or property or any of the things that irreparably break families apart. The answer, for us, is much simpler.

See, we love one another. We just don’t happen to like one another very much.

Chapter Two

Summers are always the same in Barnwell – thick, listlessly humid days, darkened occasionally with rolling thunderstorms that keep lushness in the lawns and fields. We remember the heat like an uninvited guest. When we were small, it was not so bad; we ran through the sprinkler, bribed our parents into trips to the college’s outdoor pool, let our hair stick to our foreheads as we cooled ourselves with homemade Popsicles. But as we grew older, it became our enemy. We sat in our bedrooms, the largest fan we could find placed inches away, beating the still air into an angry frenzy that did nothing at all to reduce the heat. Sleeping was impossible, and we would often be found wandering the house, our white nightgowns gleaming in the darkness, a trio of Lady Macbeths, driven mad by the mercury.

After we had all moved out, our parents had central air-conditioning installed, too late to save the doors from warping, or halt the omnipresent mildew that plagued books that alit anywhere for longer than a few weeks, but making living here in August at least bearable. In the winter, we were still subject to clanking, hissing radiators, liberal use of space heaters, and, in one disastrous experiment on Cordy’s part, the employment of an antique colonial warming pan that had obviously lost its ability to insulate the coals and keep them from burning through the sheets.

Bean arrived in the afternoon, clad in a designer suit completely inappropriate for Barnwell, sweating desperately and cursing violently. Rose heard a car pull into the driveway and, closing her book carefully around a bookmark, peered out the window. Bean hoisted herself from the front seat of a cheap white compact with a painful scrape down the driver’s side. She bent over, reaching into the back seat, and Rose could see a run down the back of one unquestionably posh stocking. Bean’s hair had escaped from the tight French twist she had spent countless hours in front of her bedroom mirror perfecting. She looked as though she’d slept in her clothes (which, as a matter of fact, she had, pulled over into a rest stop parking lot when she was too tired to drive any more, her legs draped over the gearshift, her suit wrinkling in the heat). Rose climbed up from the window seat in her bedroom and went downstairs.

‘You look dreadful,’ she said, opening the door for Bean. The heat rushed in, pressing itself against the coolness inside, leaving Rose struggling for breath.

Bean glared at her. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘That makes me feel loads better.’

Instantly contrite, Rose reached out to take one of the bags our sister was lugging. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing. I’m just hot and I’ve been in the car forever. Will you move?’

Rose complied, and Bean stepped into the foyer, her eyes casting around for changes in the landscape. She brushed past Rose, dropping her bag beside the staircase and heading into the kitchen. Rose followed dully, feeling underdressed, as she always did next to Bean. Even after what looked like an unfortunate encounter with a herd of angry cats, Bean still looked elegant, chic. Rose looked like our mother – they both favoured loose linen skirts, wide-legged pants, batik-print tunics. Normally, Rose felt exotically comfortable, but suddenly she felt dowdy. She tugged at the back of her pants, felt the line of her staid cotton panties, and swallowed a bubble of irritation, whether at Bean or at herself, she didn’t know.

When she walked into the kitchen, Bean was standing by the sink, one hand resting on the silver faucet, drinking water greedily from a jelly glass. She drained it with an exaggerated smack and leaned over to refill it, leaning on the counter. Rose saw, with some relief at the crack in Bean’s bedraggled perfection, a wet spot spreading on the fabric of her red suit where she had leaned against the counter. ‘What are you doing here?’ Rose asked. ‘Mom and Dad didn’t say you were coming.’

Bean, halfway through another glass of water, raised her eyebrows over the rim. ‘I didn’t tell them I was coming.’ And then, more to change the subject than to give any additional information, she said, ‘Oh, and I heard about you. Congratulations.’

‘Thanks,’ Rose said, her finger flicking to her ring. Not that we didn’t tell you all this months ago, Beany. Don’t rush on our account. It’s not like Mom might be dying or anything.

‘Ah, the ring,’ Bean said, seeing the movement of Rose’s hand. ‘I gave my love a ring and made him swear never to part with it. Let’s see.’

Rose took an awkward step forward, holding her hand out stiffly. Bean grasped our older sister’s thick fingers with her own manicured talons and peered at the ring. A gleaming sapphire set in antique worked white gold. Rose had treasured the romanticism and uniqueness of the ring when she and Jonathan had selected it. In front of Bean, however, she was sure it looked cheap.

‘Pretty,’ Bean pronounced. ‘Different. It’s better that way. Diamonds are so boring.’ As she released Rose’s hand, Rose caught a flash of Bean’s pinky finger, the fake nail snapped off in a jagged edge. Rose’s hand hovered uncertainly in the air for a moment before she pulled it back to rest on her thigh.

‘Thanks,’ Rose said. ‘I like it.’

‘How’s Mom doing?’

‘Fine. You know, as fine as you’d expect. She’s nearly finished with the chemo course. This is one of her off weeks – we’ll take her back next week for her next treatments. She’s tired, and she doesn’t eat much, but it’s not as bad as it could have been.’ There was more she could have said – that our mother had been so exhausted after her first treatment that she had slept for nearly three days; that a little while later the chemotherapy had torn out her hair, and Rose had found her crying on the bathroom floor, nearly bald, clumps of wet hair wrapped around her limbs like seaweed; that even after the worst had passed, it seemed the fight would never end, but Bean would understand the way things were soon enough. ‘We’re making it through.’

‘Huh,’ Bean said. She could have asked follow-up questions about our mother’s health, but she was more interested in the way Rose made it sound as if she were a vital part of the whole enterprise, when our parents had survived so long as a nation of two.

Rose squared her shoulders slightly. ‘We’re okay here. You didn’t have to come home.’

Bean sneered a little bit, reaching up and tucking her hair back into shape half-heartedly. ‘Yeah, I should have guessed you wouldn’t be glad to see me.’

‘That’s not it,’ Rose said, and the defensiveness in her voice surprised her. ‘I was just thinking the other day that I wished we were all here.’

‘Well, now you’ve got your wish,’ Bean said, spreading her hands out, palms up, in a what-more-do-you-want-from-me gesture. ‘Cordy’s not here, is she?’

‘No,’ Rose said. ‘I’m not even sure where she is. Dad sent a letter to the last address Mom had in her book, but you know how Cordy is.’

‘Good. I can’t deal with her right now anyway.’

‘So how long are you staying?’ Rose ventured delicately.

Bean shrugged. ‘For a while. Dunno. I quit my job.’

Well, that was news. Bean had worked in the human resources department – well, Bean was the human resources department of a tiny law office in Manhattan, though if you met her over drinks, she just would have told you she was in law, and let you assume the best. Or the worst. The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.

‘Oh,’ Rose said. ‘Why?’

‘Why does anyone quit a job? I didn’t want to work there any more.’ Bean pushed herself off the counter and strode over to the door. ‘I’m going upstairs to change. Where are Mom and Dad?’

‘Dad’s at school, and Mom went out somewhere. They’ll be back later.’

‘Great. Then I’m going to take a shower,’ Bean said, and clopped off down the hall. The excitement over, Rose followed Bean up the bare wooden stairs and went back to her book. If we had been sisters of a different sort, Bean’s reticence might have been cause for curiosity. As it was, it was simply another secret we held from each other, one of a thousand we were sure we would never share.

Our parents, more out of atrophy than intent, had not changed our bedrooms in any way since we had officially moved out. This often led to curious paths of discovery, as it preserved objects and memorabilia we did not want to have with us in our new lives, but were still valuable enough that we couldn’t bear to throw them away.

Bean threw her bags on her bed – the heavy, tulle-crowned four-poster that she had swapped Cordy for years ago. Cordy now had the heavy, wrought-iron white bedstead Bean had deemed not sophisticated enough. To her, at fifteen, the heavy wood posts at the corners of this bed had seemed the height of elegance. Now it looked sad, the tulle grown dark with dust, the wood dull and unpolished, the bedspread faded where the sun had fallen, leaching out the colour. She kicked off her shoes and walked over to the window, restlessly drumming her fingers against her stomach. The taut, trembling sensation in her belly would not release, even now, even five hundred miles from the city.

Pulling the curtain across the dormer, Bean walked back towards her bed, peeling off her clothes. The torn, sticky nylons went into the wastebasket, her suit she laid out on the bed. There was a grease stain on the skirt from a hamburger she had eaten on the road. She’d have to see if Barney had managed to get itself a dry cleaner while she was gone. When she took off her jewellery, a silver bangle watch and tiny diamond earrings, the tight feeling in her stomach welled up again.

She pulled off her underwear and wrapped a towel around her chest before she walked across the hallway to the bathroom the three of us had always shared. The heavy claw-foot tub still stood there, but with a new shower curtain wrapped around it in a circle. The shampoo she had left here the last time she visited – Thanksgiving? Last summer? Longer? – sat on the windowsill, thank heavens, because she hadn’t had time (or, let’s face it, money) to stop at the salon before she left. She turned the water on, icy cold to take away the sticky heat of the journey, and stepped under its punishing blast, baptismal, praying for the stone inside her to slip down the drain, to disappear.

Bean hadn’t thought of what she would do now. She’d been so focused on getting out of the city, sure that putting miles between that life and this one would grant her some kind of pardon. Annoyingly, this had proved untrue. In the car were boxes and boxes of clothes – for heaven’s sake, what had she needed all those clothes for? – each one a reminder of what she had done. Thief, she thought as she scrubbed her face. Thou art a robber, a lawbreaker, a villain. What was left of her makeup disappeared into the soap and water, but she kept pushing the washcloth over her face, her skin going raw and red.

No plan. No past. No future. She was at home, and of course Rose had to be here, too. She who might have been voted Most Likely to Judge You Harshly. Even Cordy, flaky as she was, might have been better. But Rose. Jeez.

Bean leaned down and shut off the water. She was going to have to solve this, somehow. Find a job. One that wouldn’t require a reference, of course.

If she could do that, could pay back the firm and get rid of everything she’d bought with that money, maybe she could make a fresh start. She couldn’t bear the thought of going back to New York yet, but another city – San Francisco? Better weather there anyway. There she could forget. There it would all be different.

At seven o’clock, the sun was finally considering its rest, bringing relief from the heavy heat of the day. In the kitchen, Bean sat on one of the counters, her back pressed up against the yellow wall, her arm hemmed in by the cabinets on one side. She hulled strawberries, as many going into her mouth as the bowl, it seemed, her fingers sticky with juice. The heavy ceramic bowl had come from our Nana, and it made Bean miss her.

Our mother stood in front of the sink, her fingers deftly flicking over a cucumber, peeling it with a knife, a skill none of us has ever mastered without risking serious bodily injury. She is a tremendous cook, but a notoriously unreliable one. If our mother is responsible, dinner is rarely served in our house before nine, and we remember, at times when we were young, our parents awakening us to eat, nodding heads drooping towards the table, thin legs in white printed pyjamas swinging sleepily like pendulums under the chairs. Our mother is capricious, likely to be struck by a whim to prepare a four-course meal on an ordinary Wednesday, and then struck by equally strong whims to wander off in the middle of that preparation and take a soothing bath, or to pick up the book she had been reading earlier and involve herself in that world for a while until the pasta water boils away and the smoke alarm (hopefully) brings her back to reality.

Summer, however, is different, because in the midst of all these farms, there are roadside stands, fertile with the bounty of the season in Ohio: crisp, sweet, Silver Queen corn; perfectly ripe, yielding tomatoes the size of baseballs; delicately flavoured cucumbers with satisfyingly watery flesh; strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, peaches – a dizzying array of colours, lush with juice. Often, in summer, this is all we eat, a table laden with fruits and vegetables, and Rose saw as she entered the kitchen that this was the case that night. Fortunate, as this also meant dinner would be ready before the crickets came out in earnest.

Bean popped a berry in her mouth and reached out under her legs for another, the bright greens nestled on top. She twisted the huller expertly and the head popped off. Seven in one blow. ‘What happened to the bookstore?’ she asked. She had noticed, on the drive in, the empty windows of the storefront, the sign that read, in angry letters, FINAL CLEARANCE!

Walking up beside our mother, Rose picked up one of the naked, pale cucumbers and began slicing it thinly, setting it in rounds on a platter beside her. We always ate the cucumbers and tomatoes the same way, pushed together in stacked ovals and drizzled with sharp balsamic vinegar and fresh-ground pepper. Rose’s mouth watered at the thought.

‘Oh, it’s a disaster,’ our mother said. ‘They’ve gotten too big for their britches, really. Remember how they used to handle the textbooks for Barney?’ We did. Barnwell, the name of both the town and the college where our father taught and therefore all three of us had matriculated, with varying degrees of success, had not had a bookstore of its own for years. The bookstore in town, nestled between a diner famous for its White Castle-esque burgers and the post office, took that honour, and during textbook sale and buyback season it was crammed with college students, looking hungry and desperate among the hand-knitted throws and souvenir Rice Krispie treats in the shape of the state (which, in Ohio, is not so far from the shape of a normal Rice Krispie treat).

‘Uh-huh,’ Bean said, flicking a strawberry into the bowl with a gentle ping.

‘Well, they said they didn’t want to sell the textbooks any more, accused the students of shoplifting, basically.’

‘They were shoplifting,’ Bean interrupted. ‘Their textbooks were a total rip-off.’ She remembered a friend of hers, a goateed, handsome boy with enthusiastically curly black hair, telling her the only reason he owned his winter coat was because the pockets were big enough to fit a chemistry book in.

‘Textbooks are expensive everywhere,’ Rose said.

‘I’m sure not all the students were shoplifting,’ our mother continued. ‘In any case, I don’t know what they were thinking. All those parents coming into town, wanting souvenirs, and now they are going to the booster store on campus instead for their sweatshirts and what-have-you.’

‘So they closed?’

‘Not at first. First they opened one of those coffee bars, which was a good idea, but Maura hadn’t the slightest idea how to run one. Barnwell Beanery is still open, you know, and the competition was too much.’

‘Oh, you know who runs the Beanery now?’ Rose asked. ‘Dan Miller. Didn’t he graduate with you?’

‘Yeah,’ Bean said, and she blinked a few times in surprise before she shifted and hopped off the counter, carrying the small bowl of discarded strawberry greens over to the trash can. She pressed her foot on the pedal and the lid popped obediently open. ‘Man, he’s still living here? That’s crazy.’

‘Bean? Compost?’ our mother said, raising her eyebrows and gesturing with the knife toward the container to the left of the trash can. Too late. Bean shook the last of the strawberry tops into the trash can. She shrugged, as though it had been out of her hands, and walked the bowl over to the sink.

‘It’s not so bad living here,’ Rose said, stung slightly.

‘Oh, stop. I’m not talking about you. We grew up here, it’s different. It’s not like you went to college here and then just decided to stay because it was so bucolic.’

‘It is bucolic,’ our mother said.

‘Not everyone wants to live in a city like New York,’ Rose said.

‘And that’s a good thing. It’s crowded enough there already,’ Bean said, and dropped the bowl in the sink, where it clattered enthusiastically.

‘What is the city but the people?’ Rose quoted.

‘So you’re going to go back?’ our mother asked.

Bean shrugged. ‘I’m not staying here, that’s for sure.’ The knife slipped in Rose’s hand, making the tiniest nick in the fleshy pad of her thumb. She lifted it to her mouth, sucking sour salt, sweet tomato.

‘You really quit your job?’ Rose asked, pulling her thumb from her mouth and examining the cut.

Bean looked at her. ‘Yes. Why is that so hard to believe?’

‘I don’t know. I guess I just thought you might have mentioned it to us or something. That you were planning to.’

‘What, in our chatty once-a-week phone calls?’ Bean sneered. ‘I didn’t realize I had to keep you apprised of my five-year plan.’ She could feel the meanness welling up inside her, but was helpless to stop it. It was anger that should have been directed at herself, but for crying out loud, couldn’t Rose ever leave anything alone?

‘You don’t have to bite my head off,’ Rose said. ‘I was just asking.’

‘You never just ask, Rose. You just want to criticize me.’

‘I’m not criticizing. Forgive me for showing a little interest.’

‘Girls,’ our mother said. We ignored her.

‘I quit my job. I didn’t want to work there any more. I was sick of New York. What more do you want? Take thy bond, take thou thy pound of flesh.’

‘Don’t get dramatic. If I were going to quit a job I wouldn’t just up and do it without planning. That’s all I’m saying.’

‘Of course you wouldn’t. But we just can’t all be as perfect as you are, Rose.’ Bean walked over to the refrigerator and yanked the door open, staring blindly at the contents inside. The cold air pushed the tears in her eyes away. She closed the door and turned back to face them.

‘You can stay as long as you want. It’s nice to have you girls home,’ our mother said, as though she hadn’t heard our fight, rinsing her hands and shaking them dry. The last of the sunlight drifted through the window, illuminating the lines on her face, and Bean was surprised, as she always was when she came home, by how our parents were ageing. Like the changes in the furniture, Rose hardly noticed it. It was gentle as erosion to her. To Bean, it was a seismic shift. Since we were young, our mother had gathered her hair in a large, loose bun near the crown of her head, secured with invisible bobby pins. But the chemotherapy had stolen her hair, the deep brown we’d always shared with her, and her eyes, an intense blue that had lost the genetic battle with our father’s chocolate brown, looked pallid. The scarf tied around her head outlined her paling skin, her eyes looking huge and lost in her face. There were the beginnings of a wattle under her chin, yet her hands seemed frail and bony, the skin taut over sharp bones.

Bean ran her own fingers nervously under her chin, which, thankfully, was still firmly hugging her jawline. When had this happened? When had our mother gotten so old? Was it just because she was sick? Or was this happening to all of us, without our noticing?

A rush of fevered guilt swept over her and she gripped the edge of the countertop, willing herself not to faint. There was no use wondering about it – we were all getting old. And while time had been passing her by, Bean had been drowning her youth in a sea of clothes and meaningless men.

‘I’m going to change,’ she whispered to herself, as if the words had the power to do the hard work for her. Beside her, our mother and Rose chattered away, ignoring her distress. It didn’t matter. Bean had a long road to go before her vow would mean anything anyway. We all did.

‘Bianca, will you help, please?’ our mother asked. She was hunched over, dragging a basket of wet laundry to the back door. The house had a perfectly functional dryer, but our mother insisted, when the weather allowed, on hanging sheets and towels out to dry. We’d put our collective foot down long ago about having our clothes swinging on the line for the neighbours to see, but we hadn’t won the linens battle, so we put up with slightly stiff sheets and towels.

Bean was lying on the couch, her feet hooked along the back, reading a history of World War II with one hand, staining the pages with the juice from the plum she was eating with the other. She’d been home for three days, and had done nothing but sleep and read and eat, and only the fact that our mother didn’t typically keep corn chips and chocolate in the house had kept her from turning her hibernation into a fully bear-like preparation for winter.

‘Oh, leave it,’ Bean said. She shoved the rest of the plum in her mouth, working the flesh off the pit with her tongue as she got up, wiping her hands on her shorts. ‘I’ll get it,’ she said, mouth full. She was barefoot and bare-legged, her shorts revealing the slight shadow of her last spray tan. There was a dribble of pale juice along the neckline of her tank top.

Our mother pushed open the back door and Bean hoisted the laundry basket up, in one motion stepping out the door and spitting the plum pit towards the garden in a graceful arc.

‘Lovely,’ our mother said. ‘Very classy.’

‘Hey, maybe you’ll grow a plum bush. Or tree? Do plums grow on trees?’

‘Yes, trees. Classy and lacking in horticultural education.’

Bean dropped the basket under the clotheslines, the whites inside jumping and resettling on impact. ‘I can do this, Mom. You should go inside and rest.’

‘All everyone wants me to do is rest,’ our mother said. ‘I feel like I’m on a rest cure in some Victorian novel.’ She bent over and shook out a sheet with practised ease, the damp fabric bursting against the thick air.

‘Sorry,’ Bean said. ‘I didn’t know.’ She knew she had missed so much of what our mother had been through, that her phone calls hadn’t yielded the entire story, wouldn’t have even if Bean had made them more regularly.

‘Get the other end of this, will you?’ our mother asked. ‘It’s not you, Beany, I’m sorry. I do get tired quite a lot, and it’s frustrating not to be able to do all the things I’d like to do.’

‘Rose and I can help.’ Together Bean and our mother spread the sheet across one line and fastened it with a pair of wooden clothespins.

‘You can, but that’s not entirely the point. The point is that I’d like to be doing these things myself, not having you girls do things for me. Getting sick takes some getting used to.’ She straightened the sheet with an impatient snap that matched her irritated tone.

Bean pulled a heavy towel from the stack of laundry, unwinding it from the lascivious position it had gotten into with a pillowcase. ‘How do you really feel?’

Our mother shook her head, and her face softened. ‘Not so bad right now. It goes in waves with the treatments. It’ll be bad for a few days after the next round – it’s worst on the third day for me, and then it’ll get better. But I think I’m going to be tired for a long time, and I’m already fairly tired of being tired.’

‘But the chemo won’t be forever. And then you’ll feel better.’

‘No, but then there will be the surgery. And maybe more chemo. And maybe radiation. And maybe more surgery, if I decide to have the breast reconstructed. It’s going to be a long road.’

Slinging another towel over the clothesline and snapping the pins around it, Bean felt the same clutching feeling she’d had when she looked at our mother in the kitchen. ‘Are you scared?’

‘Of course,’ our mother said. Her voice was sure, but her face looked troubled and distant. Our mother took the last pillowcase from the basket and hung it, her fingers confident and practised. The sheets and towels hung around them, a cool, damp fort in the blooming heat of the day. A slight breeze shifted through, and Bean watched the shadows of the fabric move across our mother’s face. ‘I’m not done yet,’ she said, as though she were a long way away, and then paused, shook it off. ‘But I’ve got wonderful doctors, and I’ve got your father, and you girls, of course. We will make it through.’

‘Whatever I can do to help,’ Bean said. ‘That’s why I’m here.’

Our mother lifted the empty basket onto her hip and speared Bean with a sharp look. ‘I appreciate it, Beany, but I don’t believe for a second that you are home just to help me.’

Bean froze. ‘What do you mean?’

‘How many pictures of New York did you cut out of magazines and paste up all over your room? How many times did you watch Breakfast at Tiffany’s – completely missing the point of the story, I might add? How many books about that city did you beg Mrs Landrige to order for the library?’

‘Thousands, on all counts,’ Bean said. She recalled, just barely, the way the city had seemed like the perfect escape, the way it had glittered like a mirage in the distance. But the promise had faded until it seemed like only a memory’s memory, a copy duplicated so many times it had gone pale and blurry. All she could remember now was the harsh reality of the dirty streets and the crowded subways and the ridiculous rent.

‘It’s not like I just met you, sweetie. Whatever made you give up that dream must have been awfully bad.’ Bean made a move to speak, but our mother held up her hand. ‘No, you don’t have to tell me. I’m not sure, honestly, that I want to know. I’m happy you’re here, and you’re welcome to stay as long as you like.’

‘Thanks,’ Bean said, and her throat was thick with tears that our mother was, thankfully, gracious enough to turn away in time to avoid seeing. The door to the house slammed behind our mother, and Bean turned to look at the back fence, where the honeysuckle grew in thick ropes around the pickets. So many of our favourite summer memories were here in this house: chasing the Morse code of fireflies in the yard at night, eating watermelon on the wide painted concrete of the front steps, the metallic taste of water from the hose, and the delicious spread of freedom in the hours arrayed across the sunlight. Even the smell of the laundry drying on the line could take us back. But that afternoon, none of those beautiful memories could reach Bean. Our mother was dying. Bean was a criminal. Rose was a bitch. Despite any promises, life was not going to get better any time soon.

Chapter Three

I’m walking into town,’ Rose announced to Bean, who was sitting in the living room, reading. The day had not yet launched into the still, stifling air that would bring real heat. Bean was leaning against the window, knees into her chest, toes curled under in the strangely feline way she had had ever since she was a little girl. She looked up from the novel she was staring at. She couldn’t remember a word of it, though she had turned fifty pages since breakfast. ‘Do you want to come?’

Rose watched as Bean’s attention moved slowly from the book, or wherever her mind had been, back to the room. Our mother pottered around in the garden outside, a broad straw hat over the scarf covering her tender scalp, anchored with a wide, elastic band. With great, solid yanks, she pulled weeds from the earth and tossed them carelessly over her shoulder, where they landed in a pile on the brick walkway, as though they had been ordered to do precisely so. ‘Do you think one of us should offer to help her?’

‘I did,’ Rose said flatly. ‘She said she wanted to do it herself. It’s ridiculous, but if she feels up to it, I suppose it’s not going to hurt her.’

‘How generous of you,’ Bean said.

‘Do you want to come or not?’ Rose snapped. ‘I was trying to be nice.’

Bean put the book down beside her, spine splayed wide. ‘Sure. It’s better than sitting here. God, is there nothing to do in this town?’ She got up and walked to the door, slipping into a pair of espadrilles that perfectly matched her crisp cotton blouse and wraparound skirt. She looked like an advertisement. Rose sighed, pulled a bookmark off of one of the shelves beside the window, and inserted it in the book Bean had abandoned.

‘It’s not that there’s nothing to do,’ Rose corrected. ‘It just moves slower. You have to get used to the pace. If you’re going to stay.’

Bean scoffed as she moved towards the door, catching a look at herself in the heavy mirror over the hall table where we kept keys and mail and anything else that happened to need a home. She tossed her hair and it fell in sleek waves over her shoulders. Rose opened the door for her.

‘Do the Mannings still live there?’ Bean asked. They had passed a block in silence, listening to the faraway hum of lawn mowers and children shrieking in pleasure down by the lake. Rose looked up at the house, another of the many wide-clapboard Sears catalogue homes with their long, heavy windows and broad porches.

‘She’s on sabbatical, I think. Some exchange programme with a college in California. He’s still here, though.’ Bean looked at the empty house. A bicycle stood sentry on the sidewalk, and a watering can lay abandoned among the trampled pansies by the porch stairs.

‘Oh,’ Bean said, somewhat sadly. Professor Lila Manning – Mrs Dr Manning they had called her, to distinguish her from her equally academically inclined husband – had been one of her favourite professors: a small, somewhat elfin woman with a charmingly gruff attitude. She had become, at one point, a sort of mentor to Bean, who had spent evenings at their house, drinking red wine and watching the sun set in the backyard as the conversation drifted like clouds. They had been a young couple, though they had seemed worlds away at the time – married, two young children, a life of stability and normalcy she had hated as much as wanted. Her heart squeezed momentarily with nostalgia, but they had grown apart as Bean became immersed in city life and The Doctors Mannings’ world had filled with other students, china replicas of the ones who had come before.

The birds and insects kept up a low hum that pulsed in Bean’s ears as they walked along. She had lived in the city for so long that these sounds had become foreign to her, and she felt in a way assaulted by them, the way a tourist in New York would have felt at the sirens and screeching of taxi brakes. The thought of the city made her stomach flip, and she said the first thing she could think of, too loudly, the volume pushing aside the still of the summer morning. ‘So how’s the wedding planning going?’

Sweat stood out against Rose’s bare upper arms; Bean could see the way the drops arrayed along the pores from which they had emerged, like synchronized swimmers poised for a Busby Berkeley number. Rose shrugged. ‘Okay, I guess. I don’t know, I never really thought about weddings. I look at these bridal magazines, and they all say things like, “You’ve been dreaming of this day since you were a little girl,” and I haven’t. I never did.’

‘Me, either. Is that odd? Do little girls really dream about their weddings and dress up like brides?’

‘I have no idea. Certainly no one we know did. But then again, we’re hardly a representative sample. And neither Jonathan nor I would want the kind of wedding a little girl would dream of anyway. All that foof,’ Rose added dismissively.

‘Foof,’ Bean repeated, trying out the word, unconsciously letting it slip over the tip of her tongue. Rose shot her a doubtful glance, and they both laughed. ‘Sorry, it’s a funny word.’

There was a pause. Rose put her hand in her pocket, checking to make sure her wallet was still in there.

‘So where will you have it?’ Bean asked.

‘Oh, the chapel on campus, you know. And then the reception in Harris. The college doesn’t usually rent the space over holidays, but Dad got them to make an exception.’ Bean nodded, remembering vaguely a concert she had attended in the Harris ballroom, during her sophomore year, she thought. The band had been some hippie-folk experience, probably one of the ones Cordy had seen recently at some mud-flung venue, and Bean had spent most of it pressed up against the back wall, drunkenly permitting some boy to fondle her. She tried to remember his name for a moment, and then mentally waved her hand, dismissing it. O, is it all forgot? All school-days’ friendship, childhood innocence?

‘So how will it work, everything? With Jonathan being in England and all?’

Rose gritted her teeth and looked over at one of the houses across the street. ‘We haven’t worked that all out yet exactly. The wedding’s still scheduled for New Year’s Eve. I didn’t want to lose the deposit. So maybe I’ll go over there a bit for a honeymoon, and then when he’s done with his fellowship there, he’ll come back.’

Bean couldn’t honestly imagine anyone wanting to come back from Oxford to Barnwell, but she didn’t say anything. Just hummed a few bars of ‘How ’Ya Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm? (After They’ve Seen Paree)’.

‘Have you started looking for a dress yet?’

Rose laughed. How like Bean, to go directly for the clothes. ‘No. I fear it, actually.’ She tugged self-consciously at her shorts, which were threatening to ride up the insides of her pale thighs. ‘I can’t see myself in one of those big white monstrosities.’

‘No one says you have to wear a big white dress. Wear what you want. It’s not going to be a big formal wedding, right? Not black-tie or anything?’

Rose shook her head.

‘Then it doesn’t matter if it’s not traditional.’

‘I guess,’ Rose said, but looked slightly confused by the idea.

They had come to the head of Main Street, and Bean stopped. ‘I’ll look with you. We’ll go to Columbus; there won’t be anything here,’ Bean said. She turned to Rose for a moment and smiled, a sharp-toothed strangeness that was nonetheless kind. ‘You’ll be beautiful,’ she said, and squeezed our older sister’s sweaty palm.

Rose smiled back, a more genuine smile of surprise and pleasure, and came to a stop in front of the post office. ‘Thanks.’ She wanted to say more, but the moment had passed, and it wasn’t in our nature to prolong sentimentality. She felt, for a moment, that she could tell Bean about how betrayed and confused she felt about Jonathan’s departure, how torn she was about what she would do, that somehow Bean would understand, would be able to help. But then she pushed it aside. Bean couldn’t help her with something like that. A dress, Bean could do. A life, no. ‘I’ve got to go in and mail this.’

‘Okay. I’m gonna walk down the street and check things out. I’ll meet you in the Beanery in, like, a half hour?’

‘Sure,’ Rose shrugged and watched Bean walk away, her hair still bouncing back and forth, the creases in her clothes unbeaten by the heat. Rose shook her head and went inside to buy the stamp to mail a letter to Jonathan in Oxford.

The library drew Bean down the street, as it had drawn all of us over the years. Our parents had trained us to become readers, and the town’s library had been the one place, other than church, that we visited every week. When we were young, we had three little red wagons that we would pull into town like a parade each Saturday morning, our mother at the head like the high-stepping grand marshal. Rose liked to go last, to keep an eye on the rest of us, particularly Cordy, who was usually in desperate need of it. Cordy would be eating a Popsicle, letting it drip along her arm, stopping to lick the sticky sweet slug trails off her skin. Or she wouldn’t have stacked her books well and they would fall over the sides of the wagon, Rose picking them up like a flower girl in reverse. Or she would halt, squatting down to stare at an anthill in the cracks of a sidewalk, mesmerized by the to-ings and fro-ings until Rose poked her in the behind and made her waddle on. Bean, who liked to arrive first, would be following our mother, peppering her with questions that she answered when she found the time between social conversations along the way.

The building smelled the same – dusty and damp, and Bean stopped inside the door and inhaled. With all the money the town got from the college, she would have thought they would have changed the library, but it had remained the same. The carpet was dirty marigold, step-worn. To her right was the adult fiction, in the back, by the wall of windows looking out on a spreading willow tree and an ill-tended batch of hedges, the children’s section. A woman browsed in the new fiction shelves, and two children, presumably hers, sat contentedly at the yellow plastic table in the back, studiously examining books too big for their hands. A man sat at one of the battered wooden study carrels, his head bent forward so Bean could see only the curl of his red-touched blond hair over his collar.

Mrs Landrige, the librarian who had been here in the red-wagon days, had been white-haired and stooped even then, but Bean could see her at the desk, stamping library cards with a patient hand. Bean felt a rush of sweet nostalgia for the woman who had introduced us to E. Nesbit and Edward Eager and Laura Ingalls Wilder, and she found herself des perately wanting to give the old woman a hug, not that Mrs Landrige would have trucked with that. Mrs Landrige, as a point of fact, didn’t truck with much.

Bean strode over to the desk and leaned forward, her voice falling immediately to a whisper. We’d been well-trained. ‘Mrs Landrige.’

The old woman’s head popped up, her eyes sharp, watery blue. ‘Bianca!’ she said without a moment’s hesitation. Her recall amazed Bean. With the way professors and their families shifted in and out of this town, she wondered how many patrons this otherwise small-town place would have had, how many cards Mrs Landrige could associate with a face. ‘How lovely to see you!’

‘It’s good to see you, too,’ Bean said honestly. ‘I thought you might have retired.’

Mrs Landrige smiled. ‘I’m too old not to work. Keeps my mind off the inevitable.’ She gave a wheezy little chuckle, the red and black checked bow of her dress trembling against her chest.

Bean didn’t quite know what to say, so she smiled back and cast her eyes around the room again, taking in the desk with the stacks of paper, the eroded rubber stamps leaning drunkenly against one another on the desktop. The children in the back squabbled for a moment about a book in the centre of the table, and the man in the study carrel lifted his head for a moment, giving Bean a flash of his profile – strong cheekbones fading down into a goatee, his hairline crawling back genteelly from his forehead. Bean thought he could have been handsome. Pity about the goatee.

‘Back for a visit?’ Mrs Landrige asked. She had gone back to her careful work, leaving a date in the future stamped, slightly askew, in a column of its relations. ‘Or to stay?’

‘To stay,’ Bean said, and then stammered it back in. ‘I mean – I don’t know how long I’ll be here. I might go back to the city after . . .’ After what, exactly? After our mother dies? After no one wants to throw you in jail any more? When will it be safe, Bean? ‘After a while,’ she finished weakly.

Mrs Landrige stopped, mid-stamp, and rested her weapon on the desk. She peered up at Bean for a moment, considering, and then gave a little nod, as though she’d decided something for herself. ‘Then you’ll need a library card, won’t you?’ she said finally, as though that solved everything (which, in our family, it nearly did). She opened a drawer with one vein-knotted hand and flicked out a stack of cards. She wrote Bean’s name down on one of them in her precise, schoolroom script and handed it over with a flourish. ‘It’s nice to have you back, dear,’ she said, and smiled, and Bean suddenly felt like crying.

She blinked hard and turned her gaze away from Mrs Landrige, lest the urge to cry, or worse, to hug her, returned. The man in the study carrel gathered his things and strode towards the desk. He wore jeans and a Superman T-shirt, and his boots were battered and faded in spots. No wedding ring, about the right age. Worth a hair flip, at least.

‘All ready, Father?’ Mrs Landrige asked, taking the books from the man.

‘As I’ll ever be,’ he said.

‘Have you met Father Aidan?’ the librarian asked Bean, who was busy blushing a little at her idea of flirting with a priest.

‘No,’ Bean said, and thrust out her hand, a little too quickly. ‘I’m Bianca Andreas. My father’s a professor here. At Barnwell,’ she added, as though the town were an academic Gotham, teeming with institutions of higher learning.

He smiled, revealing teeth that were bright white, and slightly crooked, as though his mouth were off-balance in some way. ‘Charmed,’ he said. ‘I’m Aidan.’

‘Father Aidan is the new priest at Saint Mark’s,’ Mrs Landrige advised Bean, neatly closing the last book and pushing the stack across the desk to him.

Well, at least he wasn’t Catholic. St Mark’s was our church – Episcopalian, not so progressive that it would have let our Bean actually bed the man standing in front of her (at least not with any expediency), but she wasn’t going to go to hell just for thinking of it. Episcopalian priests could date, could fall in love, could marry. Maybe they could even engage in some heavy premarital petting. Bean had never really had the opportunity to consider this before.

‘That’s great!’ Bean answered, too cheerfully. She felt stymied by her inability to engage her powers of flirtation, Puck without his love spell flowers. It was great, actually, that the church had a new Father; the last one had passed his sell-by date years ago, but had hung stubbornly on, boring the populace with his creaky Christmas services long after Bean had departed for less green pastures. But she didn’t want to say that. ‘My parents go there. To Saint Mark’s.’

Aidan nodded. ‘You’re Dr Andreas’s daughter, right? Your father read for us a few Sundays ago. He’s an excellent speaker.’

This is true. Years of lecturing has created a monster of a presenter – his voice dips and swoops like a roller coaster, flashing forward at important moments like fireworks, and then retreating back, pulling his audience with him. His overgrown eyebrows wiggle, Marx-like, and he spreads his broad hands across the podium, as if he has to struggle to hold the papers down, lest his high-minded thoughts spirit them away.

‘Thanks,’ Bean said, though none of this is to her, or our, credit.

‘How’s your mother? She’s got chemotherapy in a few days, doesn’t she?’

Bean took a step back, surprised at the question. She’d forgotten how involved our parents were in the church – how they’d raised us to be involved in the church, too, not that it had stuck, particularly. She didn’t think about God a lot. None of us did. He was just there if we needed him. Kind of like an extra tube of toothpaste under the sink.

‘She’s okay. She says she’s tired. But that’s to be expected. And, you know, now I’m here to help.’ Bean was fairly pleased at putting forth this idea of herself as a latter-day (if better-dressed) Florence Nightingale to a clergyman.

‘So, I’ll see you for services, then?’ Aidan asked, bending over to hoist his books under his arm. His hand, broad and dusted with gold hair, spread easily over the span of the covers, and Bean stared at it while she concocted an answer. She hadn’t been to church in years, other than when she came home for Christmas, which hadn’t been often. Our parents had wanted us to believe, but they had also taught us, outside of church, to question nearly everything. It has never made a great deal of sense that our father, a man who spends his days analysing the most finite syllables contained in one book, should so easily accept the even less believable tenets of another. And this is part of the reason why the mystery of faith has escaped all of us, and why Bean – why none of us – had ever bothered to make even a pretence of making church a regular part of our adult lives.

But it’s not like she had any other pressing engagements, right?

‘What the hell,’ she said. ‘I mean, yes.’ Aidan looked at her oddly for a moment while she blushed again – twice in only a few minutes, a record – and then he smiled and said goodbye, heading out the doors into the sunshine.

‘Would you like to check anything out today?’ Mrs Landrige asked, settling back down into the repetitive stamp, stamp, stamp of making due date cards.

‘No thank you,’ Bean said. ‘I have to meet my sister.’

At least we made good excuses for each other.

The next night, Rose was sitting on her bed, watching dust motes dance in the air while she dialled Jonathan’s number. ‘Right on time,’ Jonathan said, picking up the phone an ocean away.

Rose and Jonathan had a scheduled once-a-week phone call. Not very romantic, Cordy might say.

Practical, Rose would reply.

‘I miss you,’ she said, sighing at the sound of his voice. She walked over and closed the door to her room. These conversations always seemed both too much and too little – how could she be sure that he wasn’t doing something else while they talked? How could she be sure that he really was happy to talk to her? The distance was both amplified and removed over the wire.

‘I miss you, too, love. How are you?’

‘Okay. Bean’s home.’

‘The prodigal sister returns? It must be nice to have her around.’

Rose whuffed out a breath of annoyance. Jonathan didn’t understand us. His family was huge and boisterous and loving – six siblings, now multiplied exponentially by marriages and children. Visiting his parents’ house at Christmas had felt like being surrounded by a litter of overly enthusiastic puppies. ‘Not really. She doesn’t do much. Just lies around and reads. She’s no help with Mom.’

‘How long is she staying?’

‘That’s the funny thing. She quit her job. Moved all her stuff home. Like she’s staying forever.’

‘That is funny.’ Jonathan and Bean had met at Thanksgiving, and had, oddly, hit it off. Rose had felt a little sick at the prospect of introducing our most femme fatale sister to him, but Bean had been perfectly appropriate, entertaining him with spot-on New York accents and cursing an amusing blue streak through card games they played ’til the wee hours of the morning. ‘I’d always thought she’d be a city girl forever.’

‘Me, too,’ Rose said. ‘I think something’s wrong, actually, but she won’t say anything to me. I tried to bring it up and she bit my head off.’

‘Give her time. If something really is wrong, if it’s enough to send her away from there forever, it’s probably pretty bad.’

‘But I could help,’ Rose said plaintively.

Jonathan laughed. ‘That’s my little Miss Fix-It. Never met a problem she couldn’t lick.’

‘Don’t tease. I’d like to help, if she’d let me. She offered to go with me to buy a wedding dress.’

‘Take her up on it. You hate shopping, she loves it. Perfect.’

Rose looked out the window. Our father and Bean were sitting on the chairs on the back porch, reading side by side. ‘Am I going to need it?’

‘A wedding dress? Of course you are. Unless you’ve got something to tell me.’

‘No, it’s not me. I just thought . . . I don’t know, I don’t feel right about this whole thing. What if you meet someone there? What if you decide you don’t miss me at all? What if you don’t want to come back?’ Rose lay back on her bed, burying her face in the pillow, ashamed at having exposed so much of her fear, and too afraid not to ask.

‘Rose.’ Jonathan’s voice was soft, but firm. ‘You are the one I love. You. I’ve been waiting for you my whole life, and I’m not going to give you up now. I miss you so much, and there’s nothing I want more than to make you my wife. And that’s not going to change. Got it?’

‘But you could decide to stay there . . .’

‘Wherever I go, I’m going with you. That’s the deal. And I don’t get to make unilateral decisions any more. We made the decision for me to come here together, and wherever we go next, we’ll make that decision together. Right?’

That wasn’t an entirely fair characterization. They hadn’t made it together: Rose had simply grudgingly decided not to fight his desire to go abroad. Despite her misgivings, she knew this was important to his career, and though the thought of living without him for so long made her ache when she thought about it, she knew it wasn’t worth losing him over. But she hadn’t exactly been in favour of it. ‘Right,’ she said.

‘Buy the dress. Order personalized matchbooks and hire the Cleveland Symphony to play. Whatever makes you happy. But I will absolutely be there on New Year’s Eve, and you had better be there, too.’

‘I will,’ she said with a smile, picturing his hand in hers and pushing down the inevitable question of, if they couldn’t even decide where to live, what was going to happen to them after the wedding was over, when they actually had to start forging a marriage?

Rose would be lying if she said she actually liked her job. Since she had refused to take a job out of state, she had accepted a position at Columbus University, where she was a cog in the wheel. The mathematics building was cold concrete; hallways on the outside by the windows, classrooms inside, devoid of natural light. Her students stared at her, their beer-bloated, sleep-deprived faces gone sickly under the fluorescent lights glaring and sputtering above her, punctuating her lectures with an angry hum.

She shared a tiny office with two other professors, one of whom was perennially missing, the other who had an annoying propensity for leaving his coffee mug on her desk, a habit that left miniature Venn diagrams on any papers she had the ill fortune to leave exposed. His own desk was so swollen with the detritus of years of disorganization that on the one hand she sympathized with his plight, but on the other, well. You know Rose. In these conditions she graded papers, took meetings with students prone to tears at the sight of a coordinate plane, stared blankly at the walls when she was supposed to be writing, and doodled polytopes around the circles of coffee stains on her papers. The walls were cinder blocks, the white paint yellow in the light.

Rose felt as though she had been jailed, Kafkaesque, for an unspecified crime.

In a university so large, the staff interacted little, ships in the night; she felt unmoored, washing from classroom to office to faculty parking lot. Some days the only people she spoke to were her students, and you could hardly call that an actual interaction (or, Rose might say on a particularly bad day, you could hardly call them actual people). Occasionally she met a man, an alumnus at a university function, a textbook representative, a professor at another university who came to give a lecture. Her easy power drew them to her, to the challenge of making her smile, lighting her face in candlelight. But these dates were distractions, and poor ones at that, leaving her to drift the halls like Banquo’s ghost, seen and yet unseen, feared and misunderstood.

And then came Jonathan.

She walked into her office one bleak January day a year ago, and he was sitting at the desk of the Mystery Professor, his feet up casually, his lower lip stuck out as he stared at a book in his lap. Jonathan, had he been so inclined, could have been terribly handsome. But as it was, his hair was sloppily brushed, a tiny shock standing up in the back as though preparing a mutiny. The rims of his glasses were nearly as black as his hair, and the lenses wanted cleaning in a bad way. He wore a short-sleeved shirt and a tie, an ensemble that always reminds us of our father, but Jonathan’s shirt was burgundy, his tie a matching shade, showing evidence of some dandy tendencies. Then again, his pants were black, his shoes, brown, evidence of the same professorial fashion sense our father possessed.

Her mind a million miles away, his presence so un expected, Rose shrieked when she saw him, the papers in her hands jumping out of their orderly stack into a sloppy bouquet. He looked up, less startled than she, and, shockingly, laughed. He’d tell her later that the improbable sound she had made, like an asthma patient on helium, had caused his laughter, but at the moment Rose thought he was laughing at her, so she blushed sharply and stared down at her papers.

‘I guess I startled you,’ he said. He flipped his legs up and then down to the floor. He was tall, slender. One sideburn longer than the other. ‘I’m a visiting professor. I’ll be here through next year.’

Still staring at her papers, Rose said, ‘You must be the Mystery Professor,’ then blushed harder as she realized what she had said. She shuffled the pages back together, walked towards her desk. She had to turn to get between the desks, shoved together like connecting blocks to fit in the space that had really only been designed for one. This action embarrassed her, for some reason, the wide spread of her hips near him.

Jonathan barked a laugh, pure pleasure. ‘Is that what you call me?’ He stood, crossed the tiny distance between their desks, extended his hand. ‘I’m Jonathan Campbell. I teach chemistry, but there’s no office space over there so I’m exiled here. Which is why you never see me. I’ve been here since September.’

‘Pleased to meet you. Where are you from?’ she said, and took his hand. She raised her eyes to meet his, brown to nearly black, the shadow of stubble on his face like the shadow of the leaves in the Shakespearean forest of Arden.

‘I’m a bit of a wanderer. I was born in Michigan, but I’ve lived all over.’

‘So glamorous Columbus, Ohio, is just one stop on your world tour?’ Rose asked, her cheeks flushing. Was she flirting?

He chuckled. ‘You could say that. Last year I was in Paris.’

‘Coming here must have been a letdown.’ Her heart was beating quickly and she couldn’t stop smiling, stupidly, like a pre-teen. She wondered what Bean would do. Flip her hair, probably. Rose patted the conservative bun at the back of her neck awkwardly.

‘Not at all. Paris was overrated. So many French people. I didn’t catch your name?’ he asked, coaxing.

‘Rose Andreas,’ she said.

‘You teach in the math department?’ he asked. Rose stared at him, tongue-tied.

‘Yes,’ she said, finally. ‘This is my office.’

Jonathan nodded, looking thoughtfully at Rose. Oh, our Rose. Her hair up like a Gibson girl, her skin stained pretty pink from the blushing, face bare of makeup, one of those flowing outfits that hid her curves, beauty and honour in her are so mingled . . . but would he see it? Would he see, beneath her self-consciousness, the way she could clean that stain off his tie with only club soda and the edge of her shirt, catch spiders we would be too afraid to touch, marshal our forces to pack the car for a trip so everything fit and nothing was forgotten, pick the perfect fresh flowers to make the breakfast table seem like a celebration, hold us after a nightmare, put herself aside to make sure we were happy? Would he see why we loved her so? We held our breath.

‘Would you like to go to lunch?’ he asked.

He saw it.

Perhaps you never liked your name. Perhaps you took every opportunity to change it: a new school, for example, where you would test out life with some pale echo of your real name – Elizabeth to Bitsy, wouldn’t that be cute? A whole new you. You tried your middle name, provided it was suitable and not embarrassing, as middle names are wont to be. Or perhaps you were one of those poor souls whose well-meaning parents, in honour of some long-dead ancestor, gave you a name no contemporary soul should have to bear. Like Evelyn or Leslie or Laurie for a boy. Or Florence or Mildred or Doris for a girl – not bad names, you understood, just woefully dated, guaranteeing years of playground torture or a feeling you were destined for a rocking chair and an old folks’ home long before your time.

But what if it weren’t so much a matter of having a name with unfortunately predetermined gender identification, or one you felt just didn’t suit you? What if the name you were given had already been lived in, had been inhabited so well, as a matter of fact, that its very mention brings to mind its original owner, and leaves your existence little more than an afterthought?

At one of Cordy’s many temp jobs, she had worked in an office with a harried secretary by the name of Elizabeth Taylor. Huddled in her cubicle, desperately pretending to be worth the twenty-five dollars an hour the company was paying to her agency (without, of course, doing any actual work), Cordy watched and listened as Elizabeth Taylor answered the phone. At least a million times a day, Cordy thought, running her fingers back and forth across the office supplies she hoarded as props in her one-woman burlesque of industry, Elizabeth Taylor said, ‘Yes, really.’ And every time, she said it with a smile. Cordy supposed it was at least partially due to the fact that Elizabeth Taylor had married into her name, so had only had it for fifteen years or so. Given time, we were sure, she would tire of the National Velvet jokes, of the comments on her enthusiasm for matrimony, and one day, Elizabeth Taylor would snap, lashing out at her husband, wishing she had never married him.

With a father like ours, and with names like ours, we had reached that state years ago.

First came Rosalind, a fair choice; probably our mother’s intervention spared her from something weightier. But after that, it was all our father’s doing, we are sure. Because then came the second daughter, and what can you name a second daughter but Bianca? And then the third, and if it had been anything other than Cordelia, the heavens might have shaken. Bean and Rose were grateful, true, that the Lear comparisons could not have been made until the troika was complete, or they might have been dubbed to match the play’s older sisters, and they knew there was no way to survive being named Goneril and Regan. Not in this day and age.

We wear our names heavily. And though we have tried to escape their influence, they have seeped into us, and we find ourselves living their patterns again and again.

It’s unlikely that our parents ever looked up any of our names in one of those baby name books. The Riverside Shakespeare had obviously been the repository of choice. Once Rose had a summer camp counsellor who, as an icebreaker, looked up the meanings of all the children’s names, and Rosalind was horrified to learn her name meant, yes, ‘beautiful rose’, but also ‘horse serpent’. Horse serpent? If that won’t give a girl body image issues for life, we don’t know what will.

But mostly the thorn in our Rose’s side – Cordy again with the punny – was love. For really, the transformation of As You Like It comes through the love between Rosalind and Orlando. How can you live up to that? How can you possibly find a man in twenty-first-century America who would paper an entire forest with love poems to you?

Well, Rose will tell you, you can’t.

And if he did, he would probably also be rather creepy.

But she can tell you this only after sixteen years – sixteen years! – of searching through the forest, of weeding out unsuitable suitors in some sort of romantic scavenger hunt: Emotionally unavailable? Check! Oedipus complex? Check! Stalker? Check! Inability to commit? Check! Inability NOT to commit? Check! It wasn’t until long into her dating career, when a particularly callous date had taken her to a production of the offending play that Rose had realized the trap of her name. Because of course, being Rosalind meant she would always be searching for her true love, but would require such extraordinary lengths to prove it that she would never find him, at least not outside of fiction.

So she dumped the playdate and vowed to give up entirely, because it’s not as though her life was unsatisfying, she promised herself, and this is of course precisely when she met Jonathan, who was not the type of man to write poems and post them all over campus, but who was the type of man to agree to do that if that’s what she wanted, and she figured that wasn’t too shabby.

Chapter Four

Even if it hadn’t been summer, had been fall or spring or winter, if the campus had been alive with students and more than the skeleton crew of staff that kept the town on life support during the long, slow pull between graduation and orientation, there still wouldn’t have been anything to do at night. Maybe a concert by a visiting performer, or a misguided experimental piece in the black box theater would take you through to the anemic hour of nine or so, but then what? Bean had always been a night owl, had more than once been caught by Rose reading under her sheets with a flashlight when we were children and had fully embraced the ethos of the city that never slept.

And now here she was back in Barnwell. Our parents had drifted toward sleep in stages, like a series in tableau, here doing the dishes, then sitting on the sofa reading, then their voices talking softly upstairs, and now silence. Rose had taken a long walk, and when she’d gotten back Bean had been nearly desperate enough to suggest a game of Spite & Malice, a card game we had played as children that was terrible with only two players but would have at least whiled away some time, worked her into sleep. But Rose had been grouchy and silent, so Bean had thought better of it and curled up on the sofa with a book until Rose, too, had stomped up the stairs, taking her ill will with her like Pooh’s little black rain cloud.

‘This would never happen in New York,’ Bean told her book, a weepy novel she had discovered half-read in the pantry.

The book remained, unsurprisingly, quiet.

The whole drive home she had pictured her stay in Barnwell, imagining an ascetic, nun-like existence that would serve as spiritual penance for what she had done. She would wear drab colors and eat dry bread and her skin would take on the cinematic pallor of a glamorous invalid as she modestly turned down creature comforts. But the reality of that hair shirt was beginning to chafe already. It was Saturday night, for crying out loud. At this hour in the city, she would only just be getting ready to go out, and here she was seriously considering going to bed.

‘Ridiculous,’ she told the book, and shut it firmly. There was gas in the car, and she had a few tens folded in her wallet, not that she was going to be buying her own drinks. Some lonely yokel would be more than happy to take care of that for her. She slipped up the stairs and into her room, opening the closet and flipping through her clothes until she found something acceptable – not good enough for New York by half, but too good for any of the bars around here. Her makeup and hair took barely any time at all – that was one benefit of being someplace with such low standards – and then she was out the door into the night, lighting a cigarette as she eased the car out of the driveway in neutral, the lights off until she hit the street, just like old times. She was Bianca again, or nearly so, if only for the night.

Bean carried the burden of Bianca Minola’s name as heavily as Rose carried Rosalind’s. Rose might argue that Bianca’s hardly burdened her – to be the perpetual belle of the ball, argued over by multiple suitors, beloved by her father, described, after one meeting, ‘I saw her coral lips to move, And with her breath she did perfume the air; Sacred and sweet was all I saw in her . . .’ How difficult is that?

Truthfully, the three of us look almost exactly alike (we have been slightly suspicious of siblings who do not resemble one another; it seems to be, somehow, cheating), but Bean has always been the beautiful one. Okay, so she has spent far more time at the gym, beating the odd figure bestowed upon us by our parents – our mother, mostly – into submission: the Scarlett O’Hara waist and small, lifted breasts, the spread into muscular arms and broad shoulders, the ballooned hips and thighs. And Bean, too, has spent fortunes at hair salons, taking our thick but notoriously independent and undeniably dull brown hair to the best stylists. She is like a parent dragging a difficult child to stiff-necked, tweedy psychiatrists, desperate to find the one who will understand.

Even if you look at us together and see that our eyes are identical: large, cow-brown, slightly too close together; our noses the same straight, strong, broad-bridged lines; our mouths identically thin-lipped but wide, you might still say Bianca is the beautiful one. We are all our father’s daughters – Your father’s image is so hit in you – but it is Bianca who turns that face into beauty.

She pulled the car into the parking lot of a bar a few towns over, spritzing a sample bottle of perfume into her hair to blur the smoke. The door gave its aching groan when she opened it and she tilted across the gravel in her heels until she hit the sidewalk. She felt better already. A little male attention, a few shots, she’d be as good as new. She could be Mother Teresa tomorrow. As long as she wasn’t too hungover.

There were bars closer, but one had boasted that it was karaoke night (um, no) and the parking lots at the others had been sadly empty. She could hear the noise from outside, classic rock on the jukebox, the smell of beer seeping over the doorsill. Bean took a breath and stepped inside.

No one turned to watch her as she walked through the door. She did a quick survey of the layout and headed to a seat toward the side of the bar where she could accurately eye her prospects. The bartender eased toward her slowly, took the towel off his shoulder, and gave a cursory wipe to the sticky wood in front of Bean. ‘What can I get ya?’ he asked. Bean let her eyelashes flutter as she considered the meager selection.

‘A double shot of Jack and a bottle of whatever light you’ve got,’ Bean said. She looked up at him from under spider legs of mascara, but he had already turned back to the refrigerator. He wouldn’t even do in a pinch anyway, she decided, eyeing his back. A little old, his belly gone soft, his eyes rheumy and red from alcohol. She could do better.

‘Five-fifty,’ he said, sliding the bottle and the glass onto the counter in front of her.

She began to reach for the cash in her bag, then stopped herself and pulled out her cigarettes instead. ‘I’ll run a tab,’ she said. He shrugged and walked away.

The jukebox howled out a tinny guitar solo as Bean drained the shot, letting the alcohol burn down her throat until it became too much to bear, and she gulped at the watery beer to cool the fire. The room blurred pleasantly, and she smiled as she turned slightly on her stool, resting a bare elbow on the sticky bar.

A group of women huddled in a booth near the back; Bean could just see the tops of their heads bobbing as they shrieked with laughter. A post-work happy hour. She knew the feeling – the giddy relief of being furloughed from the office for the night, the flush of adolescent excitement as the talk turned to sex, the camaraderie forged in the trenches and celebrated over drinks, the feeling that, as a group, you have achieved something momentous simply by surviving the workday.

By the jukebox, a few couples had formed a makeshift dance floor in between some of the tables. Bean watched them sway for a moment, and then skipped her eyes over them.

The pool table looked promising. A group of men, early thirty- something, playing a (poor, by the looks of it) game of pool for beer money. One of them was in a suit, his tie loosened, sleeves rolled up, but the rest were in T-shirts and jeans. Thick-bodied ex-athletes with once-handsome faces, now gone swollen and sad from alcohol and disappointment. Trapped in these one-horse towns, their best days behind them, the way she’d sworn she’d never be. The way she now was.

Bean had always had a way with men. There were women prettier, and smarter, and thinner, and funnier, but Bean had something special. When she was only twelve or thirteen, she had gone to performances at Barney and had drawn the gazes of the college boys who might have been – hopefully would have been – appalled if they had known her age. And when she discovered how to sneak out of the house on Friday and Saturday nights and follow the sounds of hysteria and beer, she had learned to flirt through the haze of smoke and noise, how to kiss without making any promises, and how to reel a man across the room with only a look.

She lifted her beer to her mouth, the neck hanging between two fingers, and shook back her hair. The one in the suit. He’d do. She signaled for another shot and tossed it back before taking her beer and her cigarettes and moving to a high table nearer to the pool players.

‘Nice shot,’ she observed when one of the T-shirts overshot, sending the cue ball hopping over the edge, where it rolled under her chair.

‘Sorry,’ he said, kneeling to recover it.

‘Not at all. I like a man on his knees.’ His head snapped up and he looked at her, startled, then smiled.

‘That could be arranged.’

Bean didn’t reply, only smiled and took a sip of her beer, wrapping her lips around the opening just so. He tossed the ball in the air, nearly missed catching it, and backed toward the table.

‘As you were,’ she nodded, dismissing him. The others were looking now, running their eyes over her. She crossed her legs, flipped her high heel so it hung from her toes, and lit a cigarette with a sigh. Like shooting fish in a barrel. This is a gift that I have; simple, simple.

A game later, the man headed to the bar and brought back another beer and shot for her. ‘You up for a game?’ he asked.

‘Sure,’ she said. ‘As long as you don’t mind losing.’ He laughed as she hopped off the stool with a practiced toss of her hair and took the stick from him.

Bean was drunk enough that it was deliciously easy to play her part without thinking – to brush up against the guy in the suit, to lean just right against the table, to get one of them to settle that pesky tab and keep her supplied with drinks.

But then there was a rush of heat coming in the door, and a gaggle of girls piled in. Maybe they were over twenty-one, but they were definitely girls. Their hair dyed too brassy, sprayed too high, their shorts too short, their makeup too thick. But they, unlike Bean, were on the right side of thirty. And they, unlike Bean, were willing to play dumb, and giggle their helpless way from the bar to the pool tables, preening and posing. The air in the room seemed thinner and the lights dimmer as Bean watched the men’s heads swivel, one by one, turning away from her, showing her that they’d only been using her to pass the time until something better came along. Exactly what she’d been doing to them. A lump formed in her throat and she swallowed hard. Was she going to have to fight for this? She’d never had to fight for attention before, and now she was going to have to do it for these men who hardly seemed worth having in the first place?

‘Ladies,’ the man who had first approached Bean said, and his voice was a throaty purr. ‘Join us?’ The men around the table had gone slack-jawed and simian, beer bottles held limply in their hands, pool cues leaning against the wall and the tables as they admired the display of raw young flesh in front of them. Bean felt as though she were folding in on herself like an origami crane.

The girls looked at one another, consulting, in the way that girls of that age do, as though they are constantly arriving at a telepathic agreement before making even the slightest move. ‘We don’t even know how to play!’ one of them squealed, and the rest burst into giggles again.

‘Give me a break,’ Bean said. She walked to the wall and chalked her cue, running her hand with firm, practiced strokes along the wood, and then blowing gently, her lips puckered just so. The men ignored her. One of the girls gave her a pitying glance, and Bean caught her breath as she recognized the look – she’d been cocky enough to give it herself once or twice – of a woman so confident in the unearned beauty of youth that she could afford to feel sorry for someone like Bean. And instead of feeling superior, Bean felt as though she were in the wrong, as though she had tried too hard, was overdressed and overage and just plain over. Any fight that had been brewing in her burst into steam, like water thrown on a fire.

‘We’ll teach you,’ one of the men said, and Bean watched the way their chests puffed out, peacock-proud, at the thought that they could rescue these helpless women from the dangers of the vicious pool table.

There was a rustle of activity as the girls shimmied their way around, pretending that they didn’t know which end of the pool cue to use, and the men sidled into place beside them, swapping partners like they were all in some complicated square dance with an absent caller until everything settled down. One of the girls bumped into Bean, pushing her up against the edge of the table. ‘Should we just start over?’ one of the guys asked.

Bean, who had been winning the last round with her partner, restrained the urge to whack him over the head with her pool cue. She looked to her partner to support her objection, but he looked like he was about ready to dive headfirst into the prodigious cleavage of one of the gigglers. Bean twisted her body, placed a hand on her toned hip. Nothing. She flipped her hair. No response. One of the men leaned over and whispered something in his partner’s ear. She shrieked with laughter and he tilted back, draining his beer bottle, looking pleased with himself. ‘Fine,’ Bean said, and moved back from the table again. One of the men stepped forward and racked the balls.

She stepped back into the shadows, fumbling for her glass with one hand while she watched the show unfolding in front of her. She drained the shot, not even tasting the bitter liquid, but the buzz of the bar receded and her vision tunneled out. In the darkness by the wall, she felt as though she’d stepped off the stage straight into the audience. Because there was no doubt about it – this was really happening. She wasn’t waiting in the wings for her chance to come back onstage. She’d been replaced by a group of far inferior understudies – women who were louder and dumber and uglier and tackier, but who were inarguably younger.

The alcohol had turned sour in her stomach, and she realized she had to get herself home somehow now, since clearly she wasn’t going to get even the runt of that litter of men. Not tonight. And while Bean wasn’t usually one to walk away from a challenge, she could see the way this would play out, and she didn’t like the image of herself fighting with these silly girls over these worthless men. There was so little dignity left in her life, she didn’t want to waste it on them.

Since the men had paid her tab, Bean asked the bartender to call her a cab and went and waited in the parking lot, sitting on the hood of her car and smoking cigarette after cigarette, watching people drift out of the bar as the night grew old and the hope drained slowly out of it.

What did this mean for her? What do you do when you are no longer the one worth watching? When there are women less beautiful, less intelligent, less versed in the art of the game who nonetheless can beat you at it simply because of their birth date?

The cab pulled up and Bean flicked her cigarette into the gravel. She leaned her head against the window, cool from the air-conditioning against the heat of the night. What would she do now? Who could she possibly be if she was no longer Bianca? Who would want Bean? She felt cruelly sober, probably could have even driven home, and regretted that the last of her cash was going to go to pay for this ride, and that she’d have to ask someone to drive her back to the scene of this humiliation in the morning so she could get her car. A waste. Her whole night, her whole life. Wasted.

‘Get up,’ Rose ordered Bean. She kicked the foot of the bed for good measure. ‘Fie, you slug-a-bed.’

‘Jesus, Rose,’ Bean moaned. ‘It’s not even seven. Shut the hell up.’ A lock of hair caught on her dry lips and she shoved it out of the way before rolling over and burrowing back into her pillow.

‘Mom has an appointment in Columbus at eight. We’re leaving in fifteen minutes.’

‘Goody. Shove off.’

Rose’s nostrils flared and she put her fists on her hips, glaring down at the covers piled on top of Bean. She was clearly the one who’d turned the air-conditioning down so low last night, buried as she was under a feather duvet. In June. Out of pure meanness, Rose reached out and yanked the covers off of Bean, who howled in protest and yanked them back.

‘Your mother is sick, you selfish brat. I told you last night we were going up for her next round of chemo, and you said you’d come.’

‘I did?’ Bean asked curiously, peering up at Rose’s glowering silhouette against the sunlight. It seemed remarkably unlike her to have agreed to something like that. And frankly, she didn’t remember it. Ever since the night at the bar, she’d been putting herself to sleep by drinking, and last night had gotten a little fuzzy after she’d polished off the bottle of wine she’d found in the refrigerator. Maybe she’d been in one of those happy drunk moods. Or more likely she’d agreed with whatever she assumed would make Rose shut up fastest.

‘Yes, you did. Now if your highness would kindly get dressed, we can leave. It’s not bad enough I’ve got to get them ready, now I’ve got to worry about you, too?’

‘I’m up,’ Bean said, tossing aside the covers and sitting up. ‘I’m up.’ The ‘bitch’ at the end of the sentence was understood.

Our parents listened to the radio the entire drive, while Rose sat in the back and seethed, and Bean marinated in the fumes of alcohol seeping out of her skin and tried not to vomit. The toothpaste had helped with her breath, but not at all with the dehydrated headache of white wine the morning after, and the minty taste on her thick tongue made her throat feel clogged.

Inside the hospital, Rose led the parade. Bean veered off toward a coffee cart, Rose yanked her back in line. Bean watched our parents walking together, the stroll of the long-partnered. Our father is an inch shorter than our mother, his hair shot through with gray, his neatly clipped beard gone respectably salt and pepper. They always walk with her arm in his, his free hand darting up a thousand times an hour to adjust his glasses, their steps matched perfectly, knowing each other’s gait. But at the doors to the outpatient clinic, Rose halted and sent our parents through alone. As the doors slid open, our father turned and kissed our mother lightly below the line of the silk scarf on her forehead. She accepted the tenderness like a benediction.

‘We’re not going in?’ Bean asked. She’d found the end of a roll of mints in her purse and popped one, only slightly linty, into her mouth. She snapped it with a firm crunch and grinned at Rose’s frown.

‘Only one visitor allowed. There’s not enough room. We’ll wait outside.’

‘We can’t go in? Then what the hell did we come up here for?’

‘Moral support.’ Rose hoisted her bag onto her shoulder and about-faced toward the seating area.

‘I could have been moral support at home,’ Bean grumbled quietly, but she followed along, procuring coffee on the way. ‘How long does this take?’ she asked, settling into the seat beside Rose.

Rose glanced at her watch. ‘We’ll be out of here by noon, I’d say. They have to check her blood first, and then the pharmacy has to put together the treatment, and then the chemo itself takes a few hours.’ She produced a book from her bag and opened it pointedly.

‘What are they going to do?’

‘He reads to her, usually. You did bring a book, didn’t you?’

Bean reached into her purse and pulled out a thick paperback, the covers hanging by the barest edges. Rose nodded and turned to read her own book. Inside, our mother would sit in one of the forgivingly vinyl hospital recliners while a tube dripped benevolent poison into her veins, and our father perched his reading glasses on his nose and read to her.

How can we explain what books and reading mean to our family, the gift of libraries, of pages? Even at Coop, the tiny professor-run cooperative school we’d attended, a refuge of overly intellectual families, we were different. ‘What do you mean you don’t watch television?’ one girl had asked Bean. She was new, her parents visiting professors who passed in and out in one calendar year, their sojourn so brief Bean cannot even remember the girl’s name. She remembers only the strange furrow to her brow, signifying the complete and utter incomprehension at the idea of a life without.

Except to us, it wasn’t a life without. It was a life with. For Rose, a life where, after our weekly trip to the library, she cleared the top of her dresser and set out her week’s reading, stood them on their ends, pages fanned out, sending little puffs of text into the air. One of her friends, a little girl with sunken blue eyes and parchment skin, laid her costume jewelry out in the same way, and even then, Rose had recognized the metaphor, standing in her friend’s white wicker bedroom, looking at the sparkle of paste, to her, dull by comparison. For Bean, a life where the glamour and individuality she sought was only the gentle flick of a page away. For Cordy, always slightly detached no matter how many people surrounded her, clucking for her attention, a life where she could retreat and be alone and yet transported.

In college, when it became clear people might think there were more interesting things to do than read, when it was apparent the only books appropriate for decorating one’s room were textbooks, weighty and costly, worth only their end-of-the-semester resale value, we were faced with a choice. Rose, who had never paid attention to the requirements of cool, carried on reading, her one concession choosing a single room after her first year, though this was probably more due to her penchant for cleanliness than for fear of being unmasked as a reader. Bean spent afternoons in the library, having discovered the classics room, filled with huge leather armchairs and ottomans, and walls lined with books into which she could escape. Cordy, as mindless of convention as Rose, but never bearing its stigma in the same way, read everywhere: walking to class, during class, on the quad while Frisbees spun above her head, in bed at night while her roommate and her friends played cards on the floor, and once by a basement window at a keg party, where just enough light from the streetlamps spilled in to allow her to turn the pages. The difference between Rose and Cordy in this respect was that Rose, upon interruption, would fix the interrupter with a baleful glare, keep the book open, and reply curtly until a break in conversation allowed her reentry into the world in which she had been basking. Cordy would close the book, or slapjack it down on its open pages, and join the fun.

In New York, Bean chose the subway because of the reading time it afforded, free of questions but not of distractions – the frotteurs, the over-the-shoulder-readers, the panhandlers, the nosy parkers with opinions going spare – though Bean rapidly learned to dispatch each one of these with ease while keeping one eye moving down the page. She remembered one of her boyfriends asking, offhandedly, how many books she read in a year. ‘A few hundred,’ she said.

‘How do you have time?’ he asked, gobsmacked.

She narrowed her eyes and considered the array of potential answers in front of her. Because I don’t spend hours flipping through cable complaining there’s nothing on? Because my entire Sunday is not eaten up with pre-game, in-game, and post-game talking heads? Because I do not spend every night drinking overpriced beer and engaging in dick-swinging contests with the other financirati? Because when I am waiting in line, at the gym, on the train, eating lunch, I am not complaining about the wait/staring into space/admiring myself in available reflective surfaces? I am reading!

‘I don’t know,’ she said, shrugging.

This conversation, you will not be surprised to know, was the impetus for their breakup, given that it caused her to realize the emotion she had thought was her not liking him very much was, in fact, her not liking him at all. Because despite his money and his looks and all the good-on-paper attributes he possessed, he was not a reader, and, well, let’s just say that is the sort of nonsense up with which we will not put.

It hadn’t really sunk in to Bean what our mother’s illness meant until the third day after the chemotherapy treatment. Everything hurt our mother. She was cold, but the blankets felt heavy and hard against her skin. The barest sliver of light coming through the curtains made her turn her head away, slicing through the delicate skin of her eyelids with scalpel-like precision. She was bored, but our reading to her made her head ache until she begged us to stop. Lonely, she would call to us to be with her, and then beg us to leave, as if our presence made it harder to breathe. She vomited and then asked for food, and then vomited again. Bean hovered uncertainly in the hallway outside our parents’ room, stepping in and then out again with each changing request.

‘Is it always like this?’ she asked Rose, who was standing at the sink doing dishes, handing them to Bean, who dried them ineffectively with a wet cloth and then put them vaguely where they belonged.

Rose shook her head, put her lips in a thin line. A soap bubble floated up from the sink and she jabbed it with a finger, watching it pop in the sunlight. ‘This is bad. I read that it gets worse throughout the treatment, but I didn’t expect this.’

‘I hate not being able to do anything for her. How long will it last?’

‘Usually it’s only a couple of days – maybe longer this time, since it’s so bad. I’ll have to call the doctor and ask. And then she’ll be tired for a few days longer than that. She’s got an appointment to get the size of the tumor rechecked, and then they’ll schedule the surgery.’

We washed and dried in uneasy silence for a few minutes. Outside, the sounds of summer continued – the buzz of bees, shouts of children free from school, a sprinkler whisking in circles. It seemed wrong and harsh for there to be such happiness in the world at that moment.

‘Is she going to die?’ Bean asked uncertainly. Her voice shook a little, and she stared hard at the plate in her hand, watching the streaks of damp disappear into the air.

Rose snapped off the faucet. ‘Don’t say that. Don’t even say it. She’s going to be fine.’

‘But . . .’

‘Don’t.’ Rose held up her hand, her fingers wrinkled and white from the water. She wouldn’t meet Bean’s eyes. ‘We can’t even think about it. It’s bad luck.’

Bean said nothing. She finished drying and put the last dishes away and then disappeared into the living room.

Rose went upstairs and peeked in the door to our parents’ room, looking at the dim shape of our mother lying on the bed. She was sleeping; Rose could hear the steady whisper of breath. When we were little and had nightmares, we would slip into our parents’ room and beg to sleep in their bed. Our mother rarely agreed to this, usually walking us back to our own beds and giving us a kiss as protection against the darkness. Now she only shifted slightly, her mouth falling open as she slept. Rose felt the urge to crawl into bed beside her. Instead she tiptoed back down the hall and down the stairs. Bean had assumed her position on the sofa, a book held loosely between her fingers. On the floor beside her was a glass of water she’d tipped over.

An impotent fury caught in Rose’s throat. ‘Bean, look at what you’ve done.’

Bean bent her head slightly so she could see over the edge of the sofa. She lifted a hand enough to right the glass and then went back to her book.

Rose stomped into the kitchen and returned with a towel. Kneeling, she dabbed at the water on the floor and then, less successfully, the rivulets of liquid already soaking into the edges of the rug.

‘It’s just water, Rose. Relax.’ Bean tugged at one of her nails with her front teeth. Having the acrylics removed had exposed the weakness of the nails beneath, and they constantly folded in on themselves, tearing down to the nail bed so the edges of her fingers were always bloody and sore.

‘Water causes damage, Bean.’ Rose finished mopping up and pushed herself to her feet. She restrained herself from throwing the wet towel onto Bean’s perfectly made-up face in order to prove her point.

Bean looked up at Rose and then waved her hand dismissively. ‘Move along,’ she said. She hooked one leg over the top of the sofa and went back to her book.

‘You are impossible. Do you have any idea what life would be like without me here?’

‘It’d be a hell of a lot quieter, that’s for damn sure,’ Bean said. She bit another nail, tearing the white off, and spat it into the air.

‘I do everything around here. Everything.’

Bean sighed and rested her book on her chest. ‘Which is precisely the way you like it. Now, do you want to talk about what’s really bothering you, or would you prefer to shut the hell up and let me read?’

‘What’s really bothering me is the way you just come back here and take everything for granted, like we’re here to serve you. You get to go out all night and no one says a word. And I’m sick of running around like Cinderella, cleaning up your messes.’

‘No one’s stopping you from going out, Rose. Go wherever you want. You’re free and twenty-one.’

‘Right. So I’ll just go off to England and live with Jonathan. How’s that?’

‘Fine with me,’ Bean shrugged. She lifted up her hair so it spread out over the arm of the sofa, like Ophelia drowned in the brook.

Rose sat down, the wet towel still clutched in her hand. ‘Don’t be silly. I have to be here to take care of Mom.’

‘They have people for that, you know. I like to call them doctors.’

‘That’s not what I meant.’

‘Okay. Then how’s this?’ Bean sat up, putting her book down beside her. Rose winced at the broken spine, the leaves of the book spread out like a bird’s wings. ‘How’s about you stay here until Mom is through her treatment, and then you go to England and wherever else Jonathan wants to go?’

‘I have a job. I can’t just leave it.’

‘Does Jonathan get a salary?’

‘Of course.’

‘Do they put him up in housing?’

‘In Oxford they are, but in the next position, who knows?’

‘Then you don’t need to work.’

‘This may shock you, Bean, but not everyone works exclusively for the money.’

‘Of course they do. That’s why they call it work. If we got paid just to sit around and look cute, they’d call it something else entirely.’

‘I don’t want to be the kind of person who doesn’t work. I don’t want to be a housewife. I don’t want to be like . . .’ Rose censored herself, but the sentence was hanging in the air and Bean pounced.

‘You don’t want to be like Mom? This may shock you, Rose, but I’m fairly certain Mom could have worked if she wanted to. It’s not like Dad was keeping her in some kind of pre-suffrage dungeon. Besides, I’m not suggesting that you never work again. I’m just saying that you don’t have to worry about a job right this very second. Lots of people would love to be in that position. Me, for one.’

‘I don’t exactly see you running right out to get a job.’

‘I’m gearing up for it.’

Rose huffed and looked out the window. The afternoon was gathering into gray clouds. There was a storm coming. She pressed her hands together and then pulled at each finger, stretching the muscles, while her mind played over the future. Planning to leave after our mother was better would make it look like she didn’t care, like she saw our mother’s brush with death as an inconvenient delay to her own plans. What kind of daughter – what kind of person – thought like that? And what if she planned to leave and then our mother didn’t get better? What if it turned out that she was sitting around, plane ticket in hand, waiting for our mother to die?

‘What if she doesn’t make it?’

‘You just said it was bad luck to say it.’

‘I know. But now I can’t stop thinking about it.’

‘Don’t get so dramatic, Rosie. I was just saying. It’s not going to happen.’ Bean turned back to her book.

Rose fidgeted with her fingers nervously for another minute, until Bean put down her book and looked at her, long and hard. It wasn’t like Rose to look ill at ease, and it made her a little nervous.

‘What will I do? What will I do if she dies?’ Rose asked, and she spoke so quietly the words seemed to disappear in midair.

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