“Life is so wonderful,” she said. All the world’s insults were forgotten at the sight of Abe’s crooked gait, even if he was walking away.
“Imagine Grandma asking for a thimbleful of scotch,” Ma said. “When last week all she wanted was to die in peace. You were right, Kate, I would have been sad if she’d died. I suppose it’s always sad.”
Even this comforted her. “We lead a charmed life!” she went on. “Look at this…” She spread an arm across the sweep of our borrowed abundance: a golden twilit haze hung over the orchard, which seemed to be our own orchard, we loved it so. Vinnie came whistling up the path, arms full of gigantic zucchini.
“You don’t want to overfertilize,” he instructed. I smiled up into his eyes, holding out my arms as if these were holy vegetables, but the phone started ringing and I had to run inside.
“Kate?” Lawrence’s voice cracked. It might not have been used for days.
“How are you?” I spoke carefully, afraid my heart would fly out of my mouth. “What’s happening there?” Vinnie had followed me in with the zucchini but, hearing my tone, went back outside.
“Nothing.” There was a long pause while Lawrence tried to think of some news. “The Ottoman Centuries came in,” he said. He’d been waiting for this, on interlibrary loan. Then, as if he hoped I wouldn’t hear him: “I miss you.”
“I miss you too.” This was the incorrect answer, but his voice sounded like home to me. I’d have held the phone in silence all day if he was on the other end.
“How’s the weather?” I asked.
“Hot. When you come home, we’ll go for a swim, eh?”
“We will?” He knew I wasn’t coming home.
“If you like,” he said. I heard volumes of tender apology. Imagine Lawrence swimming! Tears pricked at my throat, my eyes. He was all talk now, bubbling over with relief, since I hadn’t said I wasn’t coming home. He told me how Byzantium crumbled, how the sultans charged the gates of Vienna …
“If they’d won, you’d be wearing a chador!” he said.
He knows so many perils! And he’s entrusted himself to me. I felt I had gifts to bring home to him, jewels of vanity and self-pity and overweening pride. I wanted to tell him how we had faced death with linked arms. On the cabinet, Ma’s indelible valentine shone.
In the garden she was screaming. I ran out to find her sprawled among the eggplants, gasping with laughter. Everyone was bent around her, inspecting the three drops of blood welling from her evenly punctured foot. She had stepped on Abe’s rake, and the handle had come up and broken her glasses in two.
“These things only happen to us!” she said, as if this were a blessing.
“I know,” I said. If it pleases us to imagine ourselves remarkable, why should we not? Even I felt exemplary all of a sudden, just to be standing on top of that hill.
“We’d better get you to a doctor,” Audie said, returned to herself and ready for a new saga. “A puncture wound’s the worst kind.” She turned to me with an enormous, apologetic sigh. “I’m sorry, Katie, it’s been crazy all year.”
“Did you say the doctor?” Lizzie stopped still, hands on tutu’d hips. “Is this an emergency?”
“No,” began judicious Vinnie, for whom I felt a sweet nostalgia already, but Ma interrupted.
“Of course it’s an emergency,” she said. “Don’t listen to him.”
Then she said, tartly, “See?”—because the sirens in the valley had begun to howl. I tried to resist it, but they filled me with a wild fear and joy.
“Emergency!” Lizzie cried, and she leapt, en pointe, through the squash vines, alive in the world of dangers, singing, “Emergency, emergency!” with her whole red heart.
Also by Heidi Jon Schmidt
The Bride of Catastrophe
Darling?
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Acknowledgments
Dedication
The Art of Conversation
The Honored Guest
In the Zoot Car
Katie Vanderwald
Packing Up
Shoe
Nonchalant
Audrey: Keeper of the Flame
Elysian View
We Face Death
Also by Heidi Jon Schmidt
Copyright
ROSE THIEVES. Copyright © 1990 by Heidi Jon Schmidt. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
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Lyrics from “Summertime” by DeBose Heyward and George Gershwin. Copyright © 1935 by Gershwin Publishing Corporation. Copyright renewed, assigned to Chappell & Co., Inc. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.
Lyrics from “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag” by Felix Powell and George Asaf. © 1915 WARNER BROS. INC. (Renewed) All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.
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First published in the United States by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers
First Picador Edition: October 2003
eISBN 9781466886117
First eBook edition: October 2014
The Rose Thieves Page 16