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
