The Weird Sisters (39 page)

It was the most beautiful thing Rose had ever seen.

As though her body were no longer her own, she felt herself drawn toward the group, and when she stood in the back, at the end of their ranks, she dropped her backpack and slipped off her sandals and stepped into the motion flawlessly. Far away, the gentle hum of cars, of people. Here, only the wind and the sun on her bare arms and the quiet sound of her own breathing. They moved together, the movements of the students barely discernible from that of the teacher. Rose could feel the muscles in her legs stretching, the gentle quake of her shoulder muscles as she held out her arms, and she looked up into the wide expanse of sky and felt, for the first time in a long, long time, like she could fly.

TWENTY-ONE

I
n
All’s Well That Ends Well,
Helena, by curing the king with one of her deceased father’s potions, shows she is the heir to his talent. Or at least to his stock of potions. Did it bother our father that none of us was the heir to his? That after all those bedtime stories, plots thinly disguised, actual plays when we grew older, the amateur dramatics, the Pilgrimage, the notes left, the required recitations, the naming, for pity’s sake, none of us had fallen for the Bard as he had?

We are, in fact, grateful for it, not only because to follow in his footsteps, bearing his name, would have been both foolish and repeatedly painful, but because we do not want that kind of mania. And yet we have inherited it anyway, in tiny drops, his one obsession spread thin over the three of us. Rose’s passion for order. Bean’s for notice. Cordy’s for meaning. Are we not, in our own ways, just as tied to our quests as he to his? And are we not the fools in the situation, as at least his quest has the promise of some small remuneration?

Bean clicked up the pebbled stepping-stones toward Mrs. Landrige’s door. At the end of the day she could smell the must of the books on her clothes, and her hands had gone dry from touching paper, no matter how much lotion she used. At first the quiet had seemed claustrophobic. Upon her move to New York, she had been constantly aware of the sound. Even with the windows closed, the city hummed outside. Conversations, cars, sirens and crashes, horns, construction. She slept poorly for months until it became part of her, until she had to listen consciously to hear the cacophony. And now, back in the middle of nowhere, the stillness seemed alien.

The silence surrounding her forced her to confront things, to page through the history she had written for herself. It had changed nothing for her except to calm the rush of pain that followed when she remembered.

“Come in!” Mrs. Landrige called when she rang the bell. Bean smiled to herself. This was the safety of a small town; the open invitation to all, no locks, no barred windows, no alarm systems.

Bean entered. We had never visited her house when we were little. Like schoolchildren think of their teachers, we presumed that when we left the library, she winked out of existence, flickering back like an image on a television set when we saw her at church, or went back for more books.

Inside, it was dim and warm. Mrs. Landrige sat on an overstuffed sofa, plump and full as she was delicate and slender. Her feet were raised on a hassock, and a walker stood by the arm. A wicker bike basket festooned with plastic flowers hung over the front of the metal bars, and inside Bean could see a neatly folded newspaper.

“Bianca,” Mrs. Landrige said. “I’m so glad you could come. You’ll pardon me if I don’t get up.” She gave a small smile, her cheeks like withered apples.

“How are you?” Bean asked. Mrs. Landrige wore a dress, as always, but had forgone the panty hose for slippers. Her hair was done and she wore lipstick, creasing in the wrinkles on her lips.

The old woman waved a hand. “Old,” she said. “Go into the kitchen and get us some lemonade. There are some cookies in there, too. Dr. Crandall brought them by, so I don’t guarantee they’re not poisoned, but we’ll give them a try.”

Doing as directed, Bean walked back into the hallway and turned into the kitchen. The sink was empty of dishes, but clean glasses and plates and a few groceries lined the counter. Above the door, a cuckoo clock ticked anxiously, waiting for its big moment. Bean pulled a glass pitcher from the door of the refrigerator and poured two glasses, unwrapped the plate of cookies and carried everything back into the living room.

“Thank you. I’ll tell you one thing, this hip replacement is a pain in the ass,” Mrs. Landrige said.

Bean, shocked by her language, laughed in surprise. “Or a pain in the hip,” she said.

“That too. Here, put these down so I can reach them.” She leaned forward, wincing slightly, and took a cookie and the glass Bean handed her. “Thank you. Coaster, please,” she said as Bean put her glass down on the table, and Bean’s hand shot out instantly and rescued it before the beads of water could drip onto the wood. “Now,” Mrs. Landrige said when they were settled, Bean perched on the edge of an armchair that threatened to swallow her. “I suppose you’re wondering why I called you here today.” She said this without a trace of irony, as though she were the President, calling an audience with a member of her Cabinet.

“Okay,” Bean said. She took a bite of the cookie, and genteelly put it down. Poisoned it was not. Unfortunately, neither was it tasty.

“I’m not coming back to the library,” Mrs. Landrige said. She put up her hand, palm out, though Bean hadn’t objected. “I’ve decided it’s time for me to retire. Recovering from this surgery is going to take months, and I’m no longer interested in spending whatever diminishing time I have left behind a desk.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Bean said, unsure of the proper response. “Or I’m happy for you. I’m not entirely sure which I should be.”

“A little bit of both, probably. But that’s not why you’re here. You’re here because I want you to take over. You’re going to be Barnwell’s new permanent librarian.”

Bean nearly choked on her lemonade. This was a stopgap. A temporary thing. She wasn’t going to, forgive her for saying it, become Mrs. Landrige, whose only love did not seem to be her long-deceased husband but that aging little building and all the wonders inside it. After all, Bean was going to San Francisco. Or somewhere. Wasn’t she? “I can’t do that,” she said.

“Nonsense,” Mrs. Landrige said. She sipped at her lemonade, pinky up, leaving a faint lipstick mark on the glass. “You’ve been doing a wonderful job, everyone says so.”

Ah, the spies of Barnwell. Among the locals, at least, you never could keep anything secret for longer than it took the cashiers at the Barnwell Market to bag your groceries. “But I don’t have the right degree. They’ll never hire me.”

Leaning forward, Mrs. Landrige deposited her glass, still half full, neatly in the exact center of a coaster. “These cookies are dreadful,” she said evenly, taking another bite. “Don’t worry about the board. You’ll have to get your master’s eventually, of course, but they’ll hire who I tell them to hire. And it’s going to be you.”

“But I wasn’t going to stay,” Bean said weakly.

Mrs. Landrige narrowed her eyes, looked at Bean long and hard. Bean felt uncomfortable, shifted her eyes around the room. On the mantel, there was a picture of a couple emerging from St. Mark’s after their wedding. The picture was old and faded, the bride’s face going as white as her gown. Was it Mrs. Landrige and the mysterious Mr.? She wanted to get up and look, but Mrs. Landrige’s gaze held her in the chair, pinned like a bug on the cardboard display she had made for Coop’s science fair one year. “Back to New York?” Mrs. Landrige asked finally.

“Maybe. Maybe California. But not Barnwell—the plan wasn’t to stay in Barnwell.”

There was another long pause. “You’re not going back to New York,” Mrs. Landrige said finally. “You might have needed to go to begin with, but you’re not going back. I saw it the minute you came back into the library. You weren’t happy there, and something there bit you bad enough to make you need to come home. You want to go back and get bitten again?” Her voice had a hard edge we had never heard before, used to the quiet library voice of our youth. It slid across Bean’s skin, sharp and hard as a blade.

“I was happy there,” Bean said, and she felt herself wanting to cry. The truth stared her down, cruel and cold.

“If you had been happy there, you wouldn’t have come back,” Mrs. Landrige said. Bean looked back at her and saw, though her voice was still stony, her eyes were soft.

A tear slipped out and plopped, fat and translucent, onto Bean’s hand.

“So what’s it going to be, Bianca? Are you going to go back somewhere that hurt you? Or are you going to stay in the place that loves you and make a life for yourself?”

T
here is nothing that is not beautiful about bread. The way it grows, from tiny grains, from bowls on the counter, from yeast blooming in a measuring cup like swampy islands. The way it fills a room, a house, a building, with its inimitable smells at every stage of the process. The way it swells, submits to a firmly applied fist and contracts, swells again; the way it stretches and expands upon kneading, the warm, supple feel of it against skin. The sight of a warm roll on a table, the taste—sweet, sour, yeasty on the tongue.

At night, when she could not sleep, Cordy rose, paced the halls in her nightgown (
Nor heaven nor earth have been at peace to-night
) and slipped into the kitchen, sylph-like, where she drew out bowls, the flour sifter, ingredients, left the butter softening on the windowsill as she flitted around. She made the dough, kneading it in rhythm with the ticking clock, the only sound in the oppressive still of the night. Retreating into the living room, she read on the sofa until she fell asleep, waking in the dark, as if summoned by the bread itself, to punch it down and then doze again. We woke that summer, nearly every morning it seemed, to the smell of dough drifting through the house like visible smoke.

She made bread out of anything, any recipe, and the miracle of our mother’s kitchen, where cabinets opened and disgorged everything she needed—currants, almonds, wheat bran, brandy—kept her well supplied. After dinner, we would find her in the living room, poring over one of the cookbooks from the shelves in the pantry, their pages bearing stains like birthmarks, crusts of flour and splashes of sauce.

That morning, Cordy showed up at the Beanery with a basket of bread covered in kitchen towels. Still warm, so Continental. Three loaves: all braided. She had become more and more fascinated with the look of bread: learning the skill of painting on the egg wash to add color, experimenting with placement in the pan to allow for just the right shape, using cookie cutters to add patterns to the tops. But braided breads drew her the most; learning to make the strips even, to tie them together so they would merge as one and yet remain distinct when baked. That day she had made Santa Lucia, glazed and sticky in its crown; chocolate in long loaves, dark as pumpernickel; and Hawaiian, light and sweet, the secrets the potato flakes in the dough and crushed macadamia nuts coating each strand.

Inside, the Beanery already smelled of rich coffee, and when she peeled back the towel, she inhaled the combined scents, twisting into the air, twining together like the dough. “Damn, that smells good,” Dan said, emerging from the office.

Cordy started. “You scared me. I thought Ian was opening today.”

“Ian,” Dan said, waving his hand. “He’s not so reliable in the morning. Did you make those?”

“I did. Would you like some?”

“Are you kidding? Fire it up.” He brought out two mugs, wide as soup bowls, and poured coffee into his, set a tea bag to steep for her. “What are these?”

Cordy pulled out a cutting board, plates, a serrated knife, and gestured with the blade to each loaf, naming it. “I’ve been baking a lot lately,” she said. “Nesting, maybe.”

Dan nodded. They had spoken so little since that afternoon in the kitchen, their conversations heavy in their emptiness. She set a plate in front of him, three slender slices, and he broke a piece off of each in turn, letting the flavors settle on his tongue.

“These are incredible.” Dan patted his stomach. “This used to be a beer belly,” he said sadly. “Now it’s just a belly.”

“Dan?”

He looked up, and their eyes locked. He said nothing.

“I’m sorry if I was cruel to you—that day in the car. I was so . . .”

“Cordy,” he said, his voice soft, balmy. “It’s okay.”

“No. It’s not. I was just scared and I snapped at you, and I’m sorry. You were right. I have no plan. I was just trying to . . . Well, I knew what my father would say, and I guess I thought it would hurt less if I said it first.”

“So you’ve told him.”

Cordy nodded. “Reaction as expected. He’s coming around, I guess. Because of Mom, mostly. I think it’s kind of important to her in an odd way—because she’s sick, you know.”

“Yeah, I ran into Bean at the library the other day. We talked about it a little.” If Cordy saw this as a betrayal, she said nothing. “Bean, man. Did you ever think Bean would be a librarian?”