Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
CONVERSATION GUIDE
Teaser chapter
More Praise for Lisa Wingate’s
Tending Roses
“You can’t put it down without . . . taking a good look at your own life and how misplaced priorities might have led to missed opportunities. Tending Roses is an excellent read for any season, a celebration of the power of love.”
—El Paso Times
“This novel’s strength is its believable characters. . . . Many readers will see themselves in Kate, who is so wrapped up in her own problems that she fails to see the worries of others.”
—American Profiles Weekly Magazine
“Get your tissues or handkerchief ready. You’re going to need them when you read Lisa Wingate’s book Tending Roses. Your emotions will run the gamut from laughing loudly to shedding tears as you read the story.”
—McAlester News Capital & Democrat (Oklahoma)
Written by today’s freshest new talents and selected by New American Library, NAL Accent novels touch on subjects close to a woman’s heart, from friendship to family to finding our place in the world. The Conversation Guides included in each book are intended to enrich the individual reading experience, as well as encourage us to explore these topics together—because books, and life, are meant for sharing.
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Copyright © Wingate Media, LLC, 2001
Conversation Guide copyright © Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2001 All rights reserved
ISBN : 978-1-101-57591-8
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To my grandmothers,
for tilling the soil in which we grew
and for watering our roots
with stories of all the old things
Acknowledgments
When you sit caged in some lonely corner slowly tapping out the pages of a novel, one of the things you dream about is who you will acknowledge when the book is finally published—sort of the way actors dream of their Oscar speech. So here is my Oscar speech. I will try not to leave out anyone.
My heartfelt thanks go out to all of the friends who suffered through editing and reediting countless versions of the manuscript. You are the saving grace of a lousy typist. Thank you also, Amanda Carter, for your incredible proofreading, for your valuable input, and for the little jokes written in the margin. Yes, my spelling is laughable, but you’re the best.
Thank you, Mom, for suffering through each and every rewrite of this book, and all my others through the years. Thank you, Sam, for always having so much faith that I could do this and for making the children peanut butter and jelly sandwiches all of those times dinner was nowhere in sight. You are just what every writer needs: a supportive, patient spouse with a good eye for plot lines.
Gratitude beyond measure goes to my wonderful agent, Lisa Hagan, for showing this project such devotion, for always being positive and determined, and for giving me affirmations when I needed them. You are exactly what every writer dreams of in an agent and a friend.
Thank you to everyone at NAL, but especially to my incredible editor, Ellen Edwards, for knowing exactly what Tending Roses needed. You have an amazing sense of things, and you have been a dream to work with. Without you, the book would still be missing something.
Last, my thanks go to my grandmother, who, at eighty-five years old, came for a visit after my first son was born and sat with me in the long evening shadows, telling the stories that were the genesis of this book. Thank you, Grandma, for showing me how to rock a colicky baby, how to plant iris bulbs, and how to prune roses. Thank you for helping me to see the value of where I was and for telling me about the times when the roses grew wild. . . .
Chapter 1
INDIAN wisdom says our lives are rivers. We are born somewhere small and quiet and we move toward a place we cannot see, but only imagine. Along our journey, people and events flow into us, and we are created of everywhere and everyone we have passed. Each event, each person, changes us in some way. Even in times of drought we are still moving and growing, but it is during seasons of rain that we expand the most—when water flows from all directions, sweeping at terrifying speed, chasing against rocks, spilling over boundaries. These are painful times, but they enable us to carry burdens we could never have thought possible.
This I learned from my grandmother, when my life was rushing with torrential speed and hers was slowly ebbing into the sea. I think it was God’s plan that we came together at this time. To carry each other’s burden. To remind ourselves of what we had been and would someday become.
Floods are painful, but they are necessary
. They keep us clear and strong. They move our lives onto new paths.
A winter rain was falling the day we drove the potholed gravel drive to the Missouri farmhouse my great-grandparents had built on a bluff above Mulberry Creek. As straight as one of the grand porch pillars, and as much a part of the house, Grandma watched as we wound through the rivers of muddy water flowing down the hill. She frowned and wrung her hands as the car tires spun, throwing gravel against the ancient trees along the drive. No doubt she was worried that we would damage her prized silver maples.
A sick feeling started in my throat and fell to my stomach like a swallowed ice cube. I looked at Ben in the driver’s seat and the baby asleep in the car seat behind us. This would probably be the longest December and the worst Christmas of our lives.
It would only be a matter of time before Grandma figured out why we had come and war broke out. Even now, she was looking at us with mild suspicion, no doubt calculating why we were arriving three weeks early for Christmas. She wouldn’t be fooled for long into thinking this was just a casual visit. That was the wishful thinking of a bunch of relatives hoping to postpone the problem of Grandma Rose until they were off work for the Christmas holiday.
In a perfect world, all of them would have been rushing to Grandma’s side, whether it was convenient or not. In a perfect world, I wouldn’t have been looking at my grandmother with a sense of dread, and I wouldn’t have been looking at my baby and wondering if the trip was too much for him and if it was wise to take him so far from his doctors. In a perfect world, babies are born healthy, and medical bills don’t snowball into the tens of thousands of dollars, and grandmothers don’t almost burn down their houses, and family members don’t go years without speaking to one another, and Christmas is a time to look forward to. . . .
But those of us who aren’t perfect do the best we can. With me on maternity leave and Ben able to do most of his work in structural design anywhere there was a computer and a phone line, we were the logical choice to stay at the farm the next few weeks and make sure Grandma Rose didn’t burn down the rest of the house before the family could figure out what to do about her.
But I never imagined how I would feel when we turned the corner to the house. I never thought the sight of my grandmother, ramrod straight on the porch, would turn me into that six-year-old girl who hated to enter that house. It wasn’t Grandma I hated. It was the house: the constant fuss about scuffing the floors, and scraping the walls, and tracking mud on the rugs—as if the house were more important than the children in it.
From the porch, Grandma flailed her arms and yelled something we couldn’t understand.
“She’s”—Ben squinted through the rain—“telling me how to park.”
“If it weren’t raining, she’d be climbing into the driver’s seat.” I was joking, of course—mostly. I wondered if Ben had any inkling of how difficult she could be. He hadn’t been around her much in the ten years we’d been married. He’d never seen her standing at the door inspecting people’s shoes for mud like a drill sergeant, or putting coasters under people’s drinks, or listening to the plumbing to make sure no one was flushing too much toilet paper. He didn’t know that food was forbidden in the living room and that you were not allowed to step from the bath until every ounce of water was drained from the tub and toweled from your body. And that the towels then had to be folded in triplicate and hung on the bar immediately so they would not mildew. . . .
He didn’t have a clue what I was thinking. He grinned as he put the car in park, stretched his neck, and combed his fingers through the dark curls of his hair. “We made it. I’m ready for a rest. Then I need to get the computer plugged in and see if there’s any more word on that Randolph stores job.”
The undercurrent of worry about money was unmistakable. Since Joshua’s birth, it was the unspoken nuance of every conversation we had. It was all Ben thought about. He didn’t have time to consider how we were going to get along with our new landlady. Besides, he always got along with everybody. It was one of the things I loved and hated about him.
Sun broke through the clouds as we covered Joshua and hurried to the porch. Grandma waited for us at the steps and pushed open the screen, holding around her shoulders a psychedelic afghan I had made in art class. The picture of her standing there in my awful crocheted creation with her hair flying in the wind made me smile.
Coming closer, I noticed how much she had aged, how her cheeks, once plump and naturally blushed, were now hollow and pale. Her shoulders, once straight, now bent forward as she moved. I realized how long it had been since I had come to the farm, and I felt an intense pang of guilt. Six years. Gone in the blink of an eye. The last time I came was for my mother’s funeral.
Grandma squinted as we drew nearer, as if she were looking at strangers. “Katie? Is that you?” She craned forward and took on a look of recognition. “Oh, yes, I’d know those Vongortler brown eyes anywhere. You’re just as pretty as ever . . . but you’ve let your hair grow long.”
The last part sounded like a complaint, and I wasn’t sure what to say. I found myself self-consciously smoothing the wisps of shoulder-length dark hair into my hair clip. I wondered how she had expected me to look.
Grandma didn’t wait for my reply. “My word! I’ve been worried sick.” She looked as if she’d been walking the floors since before dawn. “I expected you this morning, and here it is two o’clock, and with this rain going on, I just thought the road was icy and you had slipped into the ditch.”
“Grandma, I told you we wouldn’t be here until afternoon.” I would have blamed her forgetfulness on the stroke, except that for as long as I could remember she’d been purposely forgetting things she didn’t want to hear. I took comfort in the fact that in this respect she hadn’t changed. “Besides, it’s fifty-five degrees. There is no ice.”
She gave me a blank smile that told me she wasn’t digesting a word. “I thought for sure you’d be here for lunch. Katie, you look like you could use a little farm cooking. You’re far too thin, just as you always were. Now, I’ve got biscuits, some green beans, green-pea salad, and a good roast, but it’s cold now. Oh, look at the baby!” Joshua was still sound asleep in his carrier. “I’ll put it in the oven and warm it up.”
I hoped she meant the roast.
Ben shot me a grin and crossed his eyes as she went through the side door into the kitchen. His crooked grin made me laugh, and I coughed to cover it up as Grandma looked suspiciously over her shoulder.
When she turned away, Ben pointed to the huge stain around the doorframe and his eyes widened.
I stopped, taken aback by the extent of the smoke damage. The sheriff hadn’t been exaggerating when he called Aunt Jeane in St. Louis to warn her that Grandma’s mental slips were getting dangerous—more dangerous than her occasionally puttering to town in the old car she refused to part with, even though the doctor had told her she shouldn’t drive anymore and she had promised Aunt Jeane she wouldn’t. She had also promised Aunt Jeane she would use a timer to make sure the iron and the coffeepot weren’t left on, but in truth, what she had tried to pass off as “the iron getting too hot” had been a potentially serious fire. The iron must have been left unattended for hours.
If I had been in denial before, I was now fully awakened to the fact that something had to be done about Grandma Rose.
Still talking, she walked past the soot, as if oblivious to it, ignoring the evidence that she’d almost burned down the utility room a few days before. “Well, come on in. It’s cold out there,” she snapped. “Now, I’ll take care of the baby and you two can just eat and rest. You can wait a while to bring in your things. Just make yourselves at home in here. I had that neighbor boy help me move some of my things to the little house out back. I’ll stay out there so as to ease the strain on that septic line here in the basement. All of us in the house might just be too much waste going down.”
She set the stoneware plates in the oven and lit the gas with a long match. “N
ow, I never leave this pilot running on the oven. It’s no problem to light it each time, and it saves on gas.” Closing the oven door, she paused to clean the fog from her eyeglasses, then let them hang from the chain around her neck and walked back to the table. “There now, you two just get what you need. I’ll look after the baby. He’ll surely be waking up.”
Joshua obliged with a squall the moment we turned our backs on Grandma and the baby carrier.
And so began our trip down the rapids.
It’s strange how it’s always easier to tolerate other people’s grandparents than your own. Ben, who had been so concerned about getting to work on his computer, didn’t even raise a protest when Grandma solicited him to drive her to town for her daily grocery run and visit to the church office. Grandma wrote the church news for the local paper, and it was very important, according to her, that she stop by so as not to miss a thing. Normally, a neighbor man took her, but she had canceled him today because we were coming. And by the way, she didn’t want us to think there was anything going on between her and Oliver Mason, despite what we might hear in town. He was too old for her, had a bad leg, talked too much, and smoked cigars. She had been on her own for thirty years and had no need for an old man eating her food or messing up her house, and besides, cigar smoke would stain the ceilings, which she had paid a great deal of money to have painted. . . .
Just in case we were wondering. Which we weren’t until she brought it up.
Leaning close to me, Ben fanned an eyebrow and grinned as he grabbed Joshua. Grandma insisted the baby should accompany them to town, even though I argued against it and Ben would have preferred to leave him home. It was Grandma’s firm opinion that I would be more successful in getting unpacked if Joshua went with them. Of course, the truth was she wanted to take her only great-grandchild to town and show him off to all her friends.
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