The Care and Handling of Roses with Thorns

by Margaret Dilloway

  Riley and Dad have gone to town on the project. There are cacti that rise in waves like kelp, the sea-star flowers, orange succulents that look so much like anemones I am forced to touch them, and rocks resembling coral at the bottom of the ocean. The floor is lava rock and sand.

  “It’s not done,” Riley says. “I’ll add to it over the summer.”

  “It’s fantastic.” I admire it.

  Dad comes out of the house, rubbing his hands together. “Ready to get down to business, Riley?”

  “Doing what?” She takes a sip of her sweating Diet Coke. Of course Mom bought the stuff while she’s in town.

  I nudge her. “The roses, remember?”

  Riley and Dad are to go through the seedling pots and pull out the remainders. I’ve gotten the ones I want to keep. If they are flowering, they may also cut them for bouquets.

  “Right.” My father pulls her up with a hand and they go out to the greenhouse.

  Mom comes out on the porch with a glass of iced tea, wearing an enormous purple and white flowered muumuu. “Not going with them?”

  I shake my head. “It’s depressing to pull out the seedlings. Like putting away Christmas ornaments.”

  Mom nods, the ice in her tea jangling. She glances toward Old Mrs. Allen’s house. “I bet I can win her over.” Mom takes a sip of tea.

  “Be my guest.” If anyone could do it, it would be my mother. “I guess I rub her the wrong way.”

  “Aunt Gal?” Riley comes around the side of the house at a run. “You better look at this. In the greenhouse.”

  I get up, panicked. “What is it?”

  “Just come on!” Riley returns to the greenhouse. I begin speed-walking, causing my mother to yell, “Slow down! You don’t want to fall.” I feel like a toddler running ahead of her mother.

  Riley leads me to the seedling tray. She points to a single seedling left.

  “What about it?” All I can see is the back of a purple flower. “It’s a plain old purple. I have a half dozen like it.”

  She turns the bloom over so I can see it. Not only is it purple, it’s a light purple with white spots, plus the red splotch. I make a noise. A delighted noise.

  “Smell it,” she commands.

  I sniff.

  Sweetness wells, singing up into my brain and eye sockets. I inhale again, greedily. This time I detect notes of spiciness, like it’s spiked with paprika. It smells delicious.

  I have to sit.

  An image comes into my head. My sister, Becky, and me, holding hands in our grandmother’s garden. Eating peaches dripping onto our dresses, making our faces sticky. My mother wiping us clean with a gentle scold. My grandfather presenting each of us with a small wooden car, whittled by his own hand.

  My eyes fill.

  Suddenly I miss my sister.

  I don’t think I have before.

  I always complain about her not being a good sister to me, but what have I done for her? What kind of sister have I been? I have no answer.

  “Aunt Gal? Don’t you like it?” Riley bends over me.

  “I thought it smelled pretty good myself,” Dad, who barely comments on any smell, good or bad, says. He wipes his hands off on his jeans.

  My mother finally arrives at the greenhouse door. All three of them stand and regard me, their collective breath held.

  I gulp the cooling early evening air. I examine the glossy green leaves, all perfectly formed, and the purple blossoms. “It’s perfect,” I manage. I push my bangs off my head. “It is perfect.”

  They shout and clap me on the back. My family, all there. One missing.

  She probably wouldn’t be happy for me anyway, I tell myself. She wouldn’t understand all the fuss.

  But maybe she would.

  34

  I HAVE TO WATCH THE HULTHEMIA. IT SHOULD REBLOOM with more roses. If I’m lucky.

  I think I am.

  I make a decision. The American Rose Society is holding its annual fall convention in Los Angeles this year. I’m going to enter it to be considered for their International Test Garden, a two-year process that puts the roses through different climate rigors.

  I haven’t decided on a name yet. Its cross number is G213, but it deserves a name.

  “Can you register it like Byron did his?” Riley asks. She sits at the desk, flipping through my growing journal.

  “Too expensive for me. My best hope is the American Rose Society trials. See how it does in colder areas.”

  “How do you think it will do in other places?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll have to make some more of them and find out.”

  “What if it doesn’t make it into the trials?”

  “I’ll do it myself.” I think about replicating freezing temperatures by putting them into the freezer.

  She stops her flipping. “Do you think Byron will pay to register it?”

  My heart stops. This is a possibility I haven’t considered. Byron, with his new company, could certainly back me if he chose. But whether I want him to is another question. “I don’t know, Riley.”

  A knock sounds. Brad enters. “Your mother said you were back here. Hi.”

  “Brad! Long time, no see.” I saw only a glimpse of him at graduation, long enough to shake his and his father’s hands. “I was hoping you’d get the valedictorian speech.” The school has several students with straight A’s, GPAs higher than 4.0 due to the heavily weighted advanced placement courses. The speaker had been a girl named Alicia, voted by the seniors.

  He sticks his hands into his khaki shorts pockets. “Ah. Alicia practically cried all year for it.”

  “That’s no reason to let her do it.”

  “I just didn’t care.” Brad looks me in the eye. His face is expressionless.

  “What can we do for you, Brad?” Riley has closed my journal and put it back into its desk drawer. She sounds like she’s conducting a business transaction. She sounds like me.

  She crosses her arms and legs and regards him. He barely glances at her. He hands me a cream-colored note. “I’m having a good-bye party. My dad thought you’d like to come.”

  Not him. I swallow my pride and examine the note. “At the country club?” I raise an eyebrow.

  He scratches at his nose. “My dad knows a guy.”

  “I see.” I smile at him, this kid whom I’ve mentored for the past four years. As a freshman he’d been small and skinny, more like a sixth-grader than a ninth. And here he was, nearly six feet tall, off to college.

  He points his thumb toward the door. “I have to go. I’ll see you.”

  “See you.” I pin the invitation on my bulletin board.

  Riley sighs.

  My fingers pause. “What exactly is your problem with Brad? You have disliked him from the instant you met him. Then you seemed to like him. Then you suddenly didn’t like him. What happened?” It’s the first time I’ve asked her so directly to tell me what happened.

  She gazes out the window. “I don’t know.”

  I spin her around to face me. “You do know.”

  Her mouth turns down. “Aunt Gal, I said I wouldn’t tell.”

  My entire body tenses. “Is anyone getting hurt?”

  She meets my gaze, unblinking. “Not physically.” She gets up and leaves.

  I consider whether I should follow and try to break her down. Maybe threaten to withhold hamburgers.

  I remember an incident when Becky and I were teenagers. She was sixteen, I fourteen. She’d sneaked in one night, absolutely wasted. I could smell the whiskey on her breath as soon as she tumbled through my bedroom window.

  “Shush.” She held her finger up to her lips. Outside, in the moonless night, I heard a car peel away. She looked around my rose-pink bedroom, l
it by the small night-light I still used in case of emergency. Her own room was dark purple. “Ah, shit. This isn’t my room.”

  “Mom is going to kill you,” I said, not unhappily.

  “You’d just love that.” She stumbled across to the door. “Please. Don’t say anything.”

  I looked into her pleading face. Generally my sister’s stance was to ignore me altogether. Finally I had something she cared about. I nodded.

  “What do you want? I have twenty bucks.” She tried to hand me a crumpled bill.

  “That won’t be necessary.” I waved it away magnanimously. “Dear sister.”

  “Jesus.” Becky leaned against the doorjamb, understanding that she would never be done paying me back. “I’d almost rather get punished.”

  And now, talking to Riley, I think perhaps I should have said something back then. Maybe Becky would have stayed off that path.

  “Riley!” I call to my sister’s daughter. “Come back.”

  But she is inside and cannot hear.

  • • •

  THAT NIGHT, after Riley goes to bed, I talk to my mother about the situation. “I’m afraid it’s Becky all over again.” I tell her my memory.

  Mom grimaces, shifting in position on the couch. Dad snoozes in the chair. “Becky is Becky.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I mean, Becky was going to do what she wanted to do. I had too much to do with you to worry about her. She knew better. She knew right from wrong. She was healthy.” Mom looks steadily at the wall, not at the television, which is playing her favorite PBS show, Mystery! The black-and-white cartoon people in the opening credits perform their gymnastics.

  I catch on. “Did you know what Becky did in high school?”

  She moves her head from side to side. “To an extent.”

  “You mean, you knew as much as you wanted to.”

  She is quiet. “Maybe. Maybe I could have done more. I don’t know.” She sighs, takes a handful of peanuts from the can on the table. “We did the best we could.”

  “You had a responsibility to her as a parent.” I sound fierce. My mother looks startled. I try to clamp down on myself. “You should have done something.”

  “I did the best I knew how, Gal.” She puts a peanut into her mouth with a hand that trembles. “Plenty of kids drink in high school, and they don’t grow up to be like her. Nothing like her.” She takes the remote and turns up the volume. I watch my mother watch her show, eating peanuts until her hand stops shaking.

  • • •

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, I try talking to Riley again, but am met with stony stares and silence.

  “When you’re ready to talk, tell me,” I say as she and my mother leave for Dara’s art class.

  “There’s nothing to tell.” Riley does not look back.

  There is nothing to do right now.

  I leave my father doing a few odds-and-ends projects, fixing a cupboard door that is falling off its hinges and telling him which small plots I would like redug, and I go to the hospital to play cards with Mr. Walters.

  But he’s at his own home, a large ranch in a nice part of town. Much nicer than where I live. He has left the front door open. I knock on the doorjamb.

  “Come on in,” he calls from the couch.

  “Don’t you have anyone staying with you?” It’s darker inside than out and my eyes won’t adjust. I enter, holding a plate of double-chocolate-chip cookies my mother has sent with me.

  “A nurse checks in on me. I got tired of being under my daughter-in-law’s foot all the time.” He waves me all the way in.

  Finally I can see. Everything is neat, traditionally furnished in jewel tones of wines and teals. I get the impression he hasn’t moved a thing since his wife passed away. Family photos of varying colors and eras jam the walls, almost covering every vertical surface.

  Walters is wearing a robe and pajamas in the same tone as his furnishings. His slippered feet are up on the coffee table in front of him. He is less swollen, but still bloated. “Set yourself down.” I put the cookies on the table and he leans forward to take two. “You make these?”

  “My mother.”

  “Fine woman.” He inhales one, then the other, fast, like he is starving. “You can’t imagine how good it is to have these now.”

  “I can.” I remember back in my pre-dialysis days, when my kidney worked and I could eat whatever I wanted.

  He looks chagrined. “Sorry, Gal. I shouldn’t eat these in front of you.”

  I wave him off. “Believe me. I’m used to it. I don’t care.” I speak the truth. I don’t care. I will be glad when I can do the same, but I wouldn’t want to feel guilty like he is.

  I break out the cards. “What do you want to play?”

  “Cribbage?”

  “Sure.” My father taught me to play when I was a kid.

  We set up the board with holes in it and the pegs stand ready for scoring.

  “So how are you holding up, Miss Garner?” He deals us each six cards.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Any closer to your kidney?”

  I laugh. “It’s not in my hands.”

  He taps his temple. “Think positive. Think, ‘I will have a new kidney by Christmas.’ That’s what I did. Only I said, ‘Fourth of July.’ And here I am.”

  “If that kind of thinking works, then how come more people haven’t won the lottery?” I look at my cards, then discard two.

  “They don’t do it enough. With their whole soul.” He discards only one.

  “Mr. Walters, I didn’t have you pegged as a New Age guru.”

  “Hey, I’m older than you, Gal. I’m merely sharing my knowledge.”

  “I do pray,” I confess.

  “I figured. You do teach at a Catholic school.” He flips over the top card on the deck. “Two,” he says.

  “You don’t have to be Catholic, you know. My friend Dara isn’t.” I lay down a four. “Six.”

  “I myself am a proud heathen. Unbaptized, untamed. Even Mrs. Walters couldn’t do it.” He puts down a five. “Eleven.”

  “Good for you for being proud. But it doesn’t stop your magical thinking, does it?” I add a queen. “Twenty-one.”

  “Ha. Perfecto.” He slaps down a king. “Thirty-one.” He moves the counting peg back to zero and we start over. “Do you know where I’m going, soon as this thing heals?”

  I shake my head. “A nice warm beach someplace?”

  He waves me off. “Ah. I’ve had enough warm beaches in my life to last me ino the afterlife. Think cold.” He pantomimes a shiver.

  “Where? Alaska?”

  “Antarctica.” He grins triumphantly, having won by getting rid of all his cards first. He raises his hands in the air. “See, I knew I was going to win.”

  I roll my eyes. “You’re sort of impossible, you know that? One more round. How do you get to Antarctica?”

  “One of those boats that cuts clean through the ice, of course.” He wiggles his brows at me. “Maybe I’ll meet a nice lady friend on the trip.”

  Antarctica. Only Mark would think of such a trip. “I wouldn’t mind seeing that continent myself.” I put down another card.

  “So. Go.” He pops the last cookie in his mouth.

  “I’ll put it on my after-kidney bucket list.” We pause and our eyes meet. We both smile. “Mark! There were a dozen cookies and you ate all of them?”

  “Tell your mother she’s too good a baker.”

  I win this round. We keep playing until the sun disappears altogether.

  35

  MY PARENTS DEPART IN THE MORNING, LEAVING BEHIND Mom’s car and a big hug for Riley.

  “Remember. You can change your mind about Riley,” Mom whispered into my e
ar as she said farewell.

  I nodded wordlessly. If I’d paid attention, I would have known my mind had been made up for quite a while.

  I drive Riley to work, moving quickly through town. I peer up at the bright sky. “Going to be hot today.”

  “Better drink extra water.”

  I do not look in her direction. “We should go to Brad’s good-bye party,” I say. “I bet he’ll never come back.”

  “Why would you say that?” She glances at me. I can see it out of my peripheral vision.

  “Because there’s nothing for him here. This small town.”

  She gulps. “Okay, if I tell you, will you promise not to flip out?”

  “When do I ever flip out?”

  She ignores this. “Brad and Samantha were dating.”

  I stop at a sign and pound my fist into my palm. “I knew it!” My instincts were right. “And her mother wouldn’t let them?”

  Riley nods.

  I don’t much want to ask Riley what else was going on that night when Samantha dyed her hair. I mean, teenagers and hormones and no adults around. There’s not much to suspect. Except I really hope Riley wasn’t involved. “What else?” I say instead.

  Riley takes a sip from her metal water bottle.

  “They were together during Science Olympiad, weren’t they?”

  She is surprised.

  I smile. “I know. I’m kind of perceptive like that.”

  Riley sighs. “Samantha helps him a lot. He’s smart but lazy.” She fiddles with her seat belt. “She thinks it’s love so she has to help him.”

  I feel sick to my stomach. “Are they still seeing each other?”

  “I heard they aren’t.” She looks at her lap.

  “Do you have proof?” I ask softly.

  She shakes her head. “Only what she told me.”

  We are at the nursery. I park in the dirt lot, sending up clouds of dust. Zoe waves as she passes by and we both wave back.

  I inhale. I wish Riley had said something. But what did she know? After all these years of keeping secrets for her mother, why would she rat on Samantha, or even Brad? I put my hand on Riley’s shoulder, whose gaze is glued outside. “Thanks for telling me, Riley.”