The Weird Sisters (14 page)

“Amen,” our father said.

“Ay-men!” Cordy agreed, and then proceeded to serve herself fully half of the bread and cheese.

“Hello, greedy. Leave some for the rest of us,” Bean said.

“Leave her alone,” our mother said. “She needs to gain some weight.” Cordy choked on the hunk of bread she’d stuffed into her mouth. Oh, little did they know exactly how much weight she was going to gain. She grabbed her glass of milk and drained it without stopping, trying to cover the flush in her cheeks.

“I think she’s got a tapeworm,” Bean said.

“Shut up,” Cordy said, and headed out to get more milk. We watched her walk away, her pants hanging low on her hips, her elbows sharp exclamation points through her skin. Rose considered worrying about her and then decided not to bother.

“How did the appointment go today?” Bean asked. She’d been out all afternoon to points unknown, and had come back only in time for dinner.

“Good, good,” our mother said. “The tumor has shrunk quite a bit, so we’ve gone ahead and scheduled the surgery for week after next.”

Rose stopped, a spoonful of soup halfway to her mouth. “That’s so soon.”

“What, you want to wait until the tumor has time to grow again?” Cordy asked, returning from the kitchen, her glass refilled to the slopping point with milk. She plopped it down on the table, and liquid sloshed over the sides. Rose put down her spoon and mopped it up with her napkin, staring firmly at the table.

“Not funny, Cordy. We need to plan. We need to be ready.”

“Your mother is ready, and that’s what matters.
I am prepared and full resolved.
”

Was she ready? Can you ever really be ready to bid goodbye to a part of your body? Can you be ready to kneel down before the knife and surrender control in return for nothing more than a hope for the best?

Rose’s thoughts were rushing. She wasn’t sure what exactly they should be planning, but surely there was something someone should do. Maybe there was an Emily Post guide to caring for the newly mastectomied.

“I’d like to talk to you about something,” our father said. He put his spoon down, dabbed his napkin at his beard, which was looking grayer than Bean remembered. “In light of your mother’s diagnosis, I feel it necessary to address the issue of your own health.”

Cordy blew bubbles into her milk. Our father took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, typically a mid-lecture sign, but in this case he seemed to be struggling unusually hard to get the words out.

He coughed.

“Marry, sir, ’tis an ill cook that cannot lick his own fingers: therefore he that cannot lick his fingers goes not with me,”
he said finally.

“Um, what?” Bean asked.

“I think what your father means is that since breast cancer may be hereditary, it’s important that you do self-exams,” our mother said, patting his hand as he nodded uncomfortably.

Oh. Right. We’re sure that’s exactly what Shakespeare was trying to say.

Cordy nearly choked on her milk. “Awwwwwwkwaaaard,” she sang, wiping her mouth with the back of her arm.

“Gross,” Bean said.

“It’s not ‘gross,’ Bianca. It’s vital,” our father said.

Rose was nodding in agreement. Well, of course she was. She put fifteen percent of each paycheck in the bank and got her oil changed every three thousand miles. But who lives like that, really? Well, besides Rose.

We had a limited history of embarrassing conversations with our father. It had traditionally been our mother’s role to explain the birds and bees, menstruation and its attendant supplies, and anything else in the feminine arena. Breast self-exams definitely fell into that category, and we were a little sorry for him that he had to bring up the subject.

We ate silently for a moment and then Cordy spoke. “Fine. I solemnly swear to feel myself up in the shower once a month.”

“Cordy!” Rose said.

“I’ll perform it to the last article,”
Cordy continued. Bean was snorting laughter across the table. “Everyone happy? Can we talk about something less uncomfortable now?”

“It’s not funny,” Rose said, but everyone else seemed mollified. She sighed into her soup. Was she the only one who saw how serious this was, that we might lose our mother, and one day, each other?

She wasn’t, in fact, the only one. That night in bed, Bean lay under her sheets, a strip of moonlight falling across her feet, and she lifted one arm above her head and probed the skin gingerly. Just in case.

Cordy, whose breasts were tender for entirely different reasons, and had taken to wandering around holding them up just to relieve the tension under her skin, gave herself a desultory grope and fell sound asleep.

Rose didn’t sleep at all.

I
’m going for a run,” Bean told us. “Anyone want to come?” She hadn’t been running outside in years, but without daily visits to the gym, her body was starting to itch for activity. Or maybe it was being trapped in the house with us. Either way, after her brief period of hibernation, she was grateful to feel like herself again. When we turned her down, Rose with a brief shake of the head, Cordy with a horrified shudder, she headed out the back gate and along the trails that looped through the woods, curving in and over themselves until she came out on the end toward town behind the church.

“Bianca,” someone shouted from behind her, and she gasped, tripping slightly over a root. She’d been running numbers in her head, calculating to the sound of her feet slapping against the dirt, figuring out how she was going to juggle all the money she owed with the kind of job she would be likely to get in Barnwell, and when she heard her name, she was ridiculously sure it was some creditor chasing her down. She regained her balance and turned around to see Father Aidan.

He was kneeling by the back gate of the vicarage, a word that made it sound like it should have been a small, crumbling stone cottage with a thatched roof, but was really a perfectly ordinary clapboard house whose only distinguishing feature was its proximity to the church itself (which was also not crumbling stone, as it well should have been, but brick, and not crumbling at all). Father Cooke had always encouraged the vines—honeysuckle, blackberry, clematis—to crawl their way up and around, covering the wooden fence until it was only white apostrophes among thick greenery. The sunlight shafted through Aidan’s hair, catching gold and red.

“Hey, Bianca!” he called again, waving at her with one arm and shielding his eyes from the sunlight with the other.

She approached him slowly, like a wary cat, pulling her ponytail tight and wiping the sweat from her face. Bean does not like to be caught unprepared for any meeting with a man, pastor or no.

“How are you?” he asked as she came to the fence. He placed his hands on his thighs and pushed himself up with the slight, slow edge Rose knew well—the caution born of newly awakening cracks in one’s joints.

“Good, good. Just out for a run.” Thanks for that, Señorita Obvious.

He pulled off his gloves and ran his hand through his hair. His hairline curved back in two swoops at his temples. Bean had always shunned, on principle, men who were losing their hair, but she caught herself admiring him. Maybe she’d been too hasty at the library. He wasn’t bad-looking at all. She cleared her throat and adjusted her ponytail again. “How’s the garden?”

“I’m beginning to wish that they had taught gardening in seminary, it’s true. I’m not exactly qualified for this. But being a country mouse isn’t so bad.”

She put her hands on the fence and leaned forward flirtatiously. Old habits die hard. “I’m a little surprised you’d have accepted the offer to come to Barnwell to begin with. It’s not like this is a hip and happening assignment.”

Aidan shrugged, slapping his gloves lightly against his thigh, and leaned up against the fence himself. “Man proposes, God disposes,” he said. “I go where I am sent.”

“That’s an awfully Zen way to look at it.”

“What about you? Missing the big city already?”

Bean suppressed a grimace. “Not exactly. It was time to get out of there for a while.”

“So you’ll be sticking around? Good. I do like it here, but we really could use some younger blood at Saint Mark’s. You haven’t forgotten that you promised to come to services?”

Bean flushed. “No. It’s just been . . . well, you know.”

“I promise it’s more fun than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick,” he said with a smile. Man, he really was cute. Bean’s mind wandered for a moment. She could be Mrs. Moore, couldn’t she? Virtuous wife of a virtuous pastor? Live in the vicarage? Bake cookies or whatever it was the vicar’s wife did?

“I’ll be there this Sunday,” she said. “With bells on.”

“We’ve got our own bells,” he said. “But it would definitely be nice to see you.”

He seemed about to say something else, when a caterwaul came from the front of the house.

“Father!” a woman’s voice called sharply. “Father Aidan!”

“Duty calls,” Aidan said, but he didn’t seem put off by the interruption, which made Bean feel slightly put off.

“Dr. Crandall,” Bean said. “I’d recognize that voice anywhere. She used to yell at us all the time for trampling through her garden when we were playing hide-and-seek.”

“You really shouldn’t trample people’s gardens,” Aidan said, mock stern. His eyebrows were light, drawn together over his piercing eyes. “Ten Hail Marys for that one.”

Bean rolled her eyes. “I’m not Catholic,” she said. “And, just in case this slipped your attention, neither are you.”

“Excellent point,” he said. “I’ll have to look it up in my Catholic to Episcopalian penance converter.”

“Father Aidan!” Dr. Crandall howled again.

“I’m in the back,” Aidan called, and then turned back to Bean. “So I’ll see you later,” he said. “My apologies.”

“No need to apologize. You’re allowed to do your job. There are middle-aged ladies in the town that need a little spiritual tending.”

“We all need a little spiritual tending,” Aidan said. “It was nice to see you, Bianca.”

“Likewise, Aidan,” she said, and his name on her tongue was chocolate-warm. She turned and began to jog gently back up the path she had come from, hoping the days away from the gym had not left her with more jiggle than was feminine. She allowed herself one quick glance over her shoulder as the path faded into the woods, but he had disappeared. She turned back, her ponytail whipping her cheek lightly, bitter.

She ran a little harder now that it didn’t matter who saw her. Men in bars moved closer as they were drawn in, touched her as often as possible. How do you rate a conversation with a priest on a sunny weekday morning over a fence? Not the same game.

And what was she doing evaluating this conversation anyway, as though he were target practice? He hadn’t really been flirting with her, had he? Except why else would he take the time to talk to her?

Maybe he could tell. Maybe priests had some kind of sin radar that beeped to tell them when someone had been naughty and needed spanking. Metaphorically, of course.

Did that mean he could see through her? She clenched her teeth and ran harder, as though the dirt turning up behind her heels could obscure everything she wanted to hide.

W
hen Bean returned, sweat-laden and exhausted, we were in the living room, reading. Cordy had her slightly less grubby feet resting on our father’s knee, the rest of her sprawled over the couch as she pillaged some postmodern tome she had discovered beside the refrigerator. Rose lounged in the window seat, her legs brought up under her, a novel pressed awkwardly up against the window glass, turning the pages with one hand as the other busily twined a loose strand of hair.

“Be quiet,” Rose said, looking up, though Bean had made hardly a sound. “Mom’s resting.”

Bean made exaggerated tippy-toe motions, placing her finger over her lips. Cordy giggled. Rose huffed and went back to her book.

“Hello, Bianca,” our father said, intoning, as he often does, like a preacher in a pulpit. “Did you have a pleasant run?”

Bean shrugged, sat down in an ancient wing chair and stretched her legs, wide and muscular underneath her brief shorts. “It was okay. I’m getting out of shape. No health club.”

“They stumble that run fast,”
our father said, peering over his bifocals. He held his book in one hand, the other resting on his belly, pushing agreeably at the buttons on his shirt. Cordy dropped her book down so it rested on her nose, and spoke.

“What about the gym at Barney, Dad?” Her words were dulled by the pages of the book. “Couldn’t Bean go there?”

“Well are you welcome to the open air,”
he said cryptically, and returned to his book.

Cordy shoved him with her foot. “Dad-
dy,
” she whined.

“All right, Cordelia, I will look into it. Okay?” He replaced her foot on his knee, turned back to his book, and, in an instant, had disappeared back into the pages. Ever like this, a moment here, a moment gone into the land of print and text, and woe to her who tried to pull him back out. You could be calling for a half hour and he’d never notice.