Read Online The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Eleanor Brown
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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 it 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 anymore. 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 favor 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?
R ose 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
“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 it 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 anymore. 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 favor 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?
R ose 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
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