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: