Tending Roses

by Wingate, Lisa

  Wiping my eyes impatiently, I turned around, but the flowers and Grandma were gone, as if she knew I was about to say something she didn’t want to hear.

  The thought was still with me later that evening as I curled up on the sofa to watch the news. The house was ready for Aunt Jeane and Uncle Robert to arrive in the morning, but I was not. Aunt Jeane’s arrival would be followed by Karen’s a few days later, and finally by Dad’s, assuming he decided to come. They would come with their agendas and their time constraints and their scars, and we would all start opening wounds. The farm would be dissected; the peace would vanish; Grandma Rose would be gone. My time home with Joshua would be over, and I would be back at work trying to dig up files to pacify my boss’s senseless bad moods. Joshua would spend his days with a baby-sitter. Ben would be away on some job. Life would be filled with all the familiar noise—like static turned so loud you couldn’t think.

  I wasn’t ready. Closing my eyes, I tried to make it go away.

  . . . The best times of my life, the times that passed by me the most quickly, were the times when the roses grew wild.

  There was so much that the rest of them didn’t know, that they didn’t understand.

  . . . time is a limited and precious gift. I wish I had not spent my hours worrying over another nickel for the carousel, but instead running through the fields of yellow bonnets.

  I wished I didn’t understand. Things would have been easier. . . .

  My mind drifted into the past, to a summer vacation filled with picnic lunches and daisy chains. I could see my mother’s fingers braiding necklaces and crowns, balancing them on our heads. I could see her young and laughing, her feet bare and her brown hair tumbling in curls around her shoulders. Her laughter was like music.

  I could see her singing above my bed as I lay in my room. The scent of fresh grass clung to the daisy chain around her neck. Beside me, Karen’s breaths were long and slow. Mother’s hand smoothed my hair, and I closed my eyes, floating . . .

  The blaring sign-off of the evening news awakened me, and I sat up, wondering if the scene in my mind was a memory or just something from my imagination. The sensation of my mother was so close and so real that I could almost smell her Chanel perfume, just faintly in the air. It made me feel warm and grounded, as if I had found an island amid a sea of mental conflicts.

  Switching off the television, I walked through the house turning off the lights until only the one in the kitchen was left. I didn’t want to think about anything. I just wanted to go to bed and forget that Christmas was only a few days away.

  As I turned out the light in the kitchen, I noticed that Grandma’s flowering plant had reappeared on the table. Beside it, the wildflower book waited for me. Running my fingers reverently over the pressed flowers on the cover, I looked around for Grandma. As usual, she was not to be found, and it was as if the book had appeared by itself.

  Lifting the cover, I settled in a chair and read the first words.

  Blooming, it said, the word written in a steadier hand than Grandma’s usual. The title made me stop to look at the flowers—tiny, bell-shaped blooms hanging in clusters like dresses waiting for fairies to slip into them and dance.

  I turned my eyes back to the words, whispering as I read, as if the flowers could hear.

  As a child, I could not understand the unfair nature of my world. As I grew, injustice seemed to grow with me. My father was called to war, and we children were left cold and hungry. In his absence, a baby boy was stillborn in our home, and my mother’s heart was broken. Ever after, she was fearful and sad, and taken with spells that made her unable to care for my young brothers and sister. My time, and what money I could earn, were taken from me to care for the younger ones. I was proud of my ability to help, yet bitter about my sacrifices. I was angry with my mother for not seeing that I, too, was still a child. I felt as if I were invisible to her. When my father returned, I felt as if I had disappeared from her eyes altogether.

  At the school fair the year my father came home, I ran in the girls’ footrace and won the prize of fifty cents. It was the greatest accomplishment I could remember in my life, and more money than I had ever been given for myself. Passing by the store, I was tempted by the things I could buy, but my desire to show my prize to my mother was greater. When I reached our farm, I bounded into the house like a spring lamb, anxious to show my prize and gain her admiration. Yet when I told her of my triumph, she had no joy for me. She took the coin from my hand and put it in the jar, saying winter was coming and the young ones would need shoes and coats. I do not know why she was so hard with me, but even so many years later the memory is like a stone in my heart.

  I fled the house that day in anger and hid beneath the lilacs by the garden wall. My father came to me there, and together we sat surrounded by the heady scent. Cradled in his arms, I cried out my anger at my mother and my sadness with my life. I wanted him to change our lot, to change my mother’s heart, and to make her well again. I wanted him to give me a life in which I could have hope and joy.

  There was great torment in his face as he rested his head against the garden wall and stared at the branches stretching skyward above us, crowned with fragrant blooms.

  “This lilac tree is too beautiful for this old garden,” he said sadly. “It should be growing in front of a fine home where people would water and prune it, and cut the flowers to put on a long dinner table.”

  I did not speak. I only looked at the strong branches above us and watched the flowers sway in the breeze like purple lace. I imagined how they would look on a fine dinner table. I felt my father take my small hand in both of his and kiss my fingers, then hold them near his heart. Looking at him, I saw tears in his eyes.

  “But God planted this tree here,” he whispered. “It would do no good for it to wither because this soil is too hard and this place too common. God gave it the ability to be fine and full and beautiful, but not the ability to go somewhere else.” Laying my hand in my lap, he dried the tears from my face. “We are like this lilac tree. We cannot change where God has put us. If we are to bloom at all, we must bloom where we have been planted.”

  Closing the book, I set it beneath the flowers, then just sat there with my head in my hands. Finally, I wrapped my coat around my shoulders and walked onto the porch, looking at the farm below, bright in the glow of the rising winter moon.

  This was the soil into which we had been planted. We had made it bitter, filled it with anger and resentment so that nothing could grow here. But it wasn’t the farm we were destroying—it was ourselves. We were rooted here like Grandma’s lilac bush, tied to this place, this family, one past. The soil was not going to change. If we were to bloom, we would have to change.

  Yet, I didn’t know how to begin. The anger and the resentment were as natural to me as breathing. Without them, I didn’t know who I would be.

  The door opened behind me, and I glanced over my shoulder as Ben came onto the porch with a blanket around his shoulders. A sense of comfort floated through me at not being alone anymore.

  “It’s getting cold,” he said, slipping behind me and wrapping his arms and the blanket around me. The warmth felt good against the winter chill.

  Leaning against the solidness of his chest, I closed my eyes. “Christmas will be here before we know it.” And all the questions that needed to be answered. I couldn’t keep them inside me any longer. “Ben, Grandma is never going to agree to go to some nursing home with Aunt Jeane.”

  He rested his chin on the top of my head. “Calm down, Kate. No one has even talked to her about it yet.”

  “She’s been talking to me about it ever since we got here,” I told him. “Not in so many words, but she’s been letting me know how she feels—what is important to her. She won’t leave. She shouldn’t have to. It isn’t right.”

  He sighed, his breath tickling the stray strands of hair on my cheek. “It’s never right when people get old and can’t take care of themselves. Hard decisions hav
e to be made.”

  “But not yet,” I pleaded, searching desperately for some solution. “We could stay a while longer. I can take up to six months’ unpaid family leave. By then maybe she’ll be feeling better, or Aunt Jeane will be off school for the summer, and she could stay a while. And by then Joshua will be through his six-month checkup, and we’ll know more about his heart, and . . .”

  “Slow down a minute.” Ben’s voice was calm, slightly patronizing, as if I were engaging in hysterics. “The last thing I heard, you and Grandma were one step short of a fistfight and you couldn’t wait to get Christmas over with and get back home. I go away for a little while, and you’ve done a complete U-turn. You want to explain to me where all this is coming from?”

  “I can’t explain it.” I watched the rising moon, large and amber on the horizon, creeping up as if it were too heavy for the sky. “I know it’s not logical, Ben. I do. But it’s the way I feel. I think it’s wrong to drag Grandma away from the farm when everything she loves is here. I don’t think she’ll survive it. And I don’t feel right about leaving Joshua while he’s still so little and he hasn’t even made it through his six-month checkup with the heart specialist. I just want to wait a little longer.”

  “Well, Kate,” he began, and I could tell by the tone of his voice that he was going to give me a reality check. “You don’t know if the family is going to agree to this. Your dad and Aunt Jeane pretty well have their minds made up about the nursing home. Even if they go for your idea, I don’t see how we can get by financially for three or four more months. We’re about to go under now.”

  I rushed on, feeling suddenly desperate to make him see. “We could make it work, Ben. We could sell the boat and get rid of the golf membership, cut off most of the utilities at our house while we’re gone, or maybe Liz would stay there and rent it from us. If we had to, we could take a loan against the retirement fund. One thing about being here, we don’t spend any money on eating out and entertainment.”

  Ben gave a quiet, rueful laugh. “Because there’s nothing to do here.”

  I laughed, too, relieved he wasn’t rejecting the idea completely. “Well, you know, the best times in our life together were when we didn’t have the money for all this . . . stuff. Remember when we first came to Chicago, and we lived in that old apartment building? We used to sit up on the roof with the couple from across the hall and play records and dance?” I sighed, wondering how we had come so far up in income and so far down in the things that really mattered. “Those were good times, Ben. We weren’t always in such a rush. It would be nice to take a break and just have some”—I couldn’t think of a word for it, so I finished with—“time.”

  He was quiet for a minute; then he took a deep breath and said, “Do you realize you’re talking about trying to scrape by on half of what we’re used to?”

  “I know.” I tried not to sound as shaky as I felt. “But we’d be getting rid of the payments on some stuff.”

  “Mostly my stuff,” he reminded me, but he didn’t sound angry about it. I wondered if he was taking the discussion as seriously as I was. He almost seemed to be joking now.

  “Who knows?” I said, not willing for the discussion to end so frivolously. “We might learn to like the simple life. At least think about it.”

  “I will,” he said quietly, and we fell silent. I gazed overhead at the Milky Way, never visible in the neon-bright city sky. Here on the farm, it was as clear and white as the dust of crushed pearls. The sky was filled, every inch, with stars and constellations that once guided sailors as they traveled to new worlds. I wished it were that simple for Ben and me—just read a map and suddenly we would know where we were meant to end up and how to get there. But growing up is never that easy, no matter what age you are.

  I wondered if Ben was thinking about it also. I wondered if he was considering what our life might be like, what things we could change, what our options were. I wondered if he was realizing that there was something better out there, if we could only find our way through the maze of everyday problems. . . .

  The touch of his lips on the back of my neck told me otherwise. As usual, we were thinking in two completely different directions. The featherlight sensation of his fingers running over my thighs brought me into his.

  His voice was throaty and passionate in my ear. “How’d you like to make love to a poor boy?” It was an old line he hadn’t used on me in years—the same one he’d used the day he came home from physics class and asked me to marry him—right then. How’d you like to marry a poor boy? My mind rushed back in time. . . .

  I felt my body quicken in response. “I don’t know. Is he good-looking?”

  “Very,” he whispered against my shoulder, his fingers loosening the buttons on my shirt. “And smart.”

  “Is he tall?” The words trembled from me in a gasp as the chill of the night air and the warmth of his hands touched my skin.

  “Really tall.”

  I turned slowly in his arms and slid my hands into the silky darkness of his hair. “What’s his name?”

  His blue eyes twinkled brightly in the amber moonlight, and I remembered all the things I loved so much about him. “Zorro.”

  “Mmmmm, mi querido,” I whispered, the only words of Spanish I knew: my beloved. “Take me away, Zorro.”

  Just as he had on the day we got married at a little chapel down the block from our college apartment, Zorro swept me into his arms and carried me to our bedroom. Only this time Zorro paused just beyond the bedroom door. Instead of kicking it shut, he closed it quietly, so as not to wake the baby.

  Chapter 9

  AUNT Jeane and Uncle Robert didn’t arrive until almost noon the next day. Grandma had been pacing the floor for hours, describing all sorts of scenarios as to what might have happened to them on the road. When they finally drove in, both of us were overjoyed.

  Aunt Jeane was the closest thing our family had to a rock. She was solid and steady—the same for as many years as I could remember. She’d never been able to have children, but had been a devoted fifth-grade teacher for thirty years. She had been a perfect aunt to my sister and me, sending us special presents on our birthdays, sewing Halloween costumes and ballet dresses. She lived about a half-day’s drive from the farm, but always made the trip to see us when we were in Hindsville.

  After we exchanged the initial greetings, Uncle Robert wandered off to the living room to read the paper while Grandma, Aunt Jeane, and I sat at the kitchen table over coffee. Aunt Jeane put Joshua on her lap and cooed at him until he started to laugh.

  We talked for a while about the unusually mild weather, and the details of Aunt Jeane’s trip up, and how pretty the Christmas decorations looked in the park in Hindsville.

  “We need to get to work around here. This place could use a little Christmas spirit,” Aunt Jeane remarked, lowering a critical brow and looking around the house. “We should buy a tree and put it up. Mother, where are all the old Christmas decorations?”

  Grandma pursed her lips and wrinkled her nose as if she had caught a whiff of something unpleasant. “The Christmas decorations are in that old trunk in the third-floor attic. But I don’t want any store-bought tree, and it’s too soon for a Christmas tree, anyway. We’ll cut a cedar from the pasture on Christmas Eve, like we used to. A Christmas tree shouldn’t come from town—it should come from the land.”

  Aunt Jeane nodded patiently. “All right, Mother. But how about if we get the other decorations out, so the house will look nice when everyone else gets here? It’s been years since this place has been decorated for Christmas. It would be good to see all those old things again.”

  Grandma nodded. “Yes, now that I think about it, it would. Maybe some neighbors will see the lights and stop in. Back in my day, that’s what folks did. Every night of the week before Christmas, folks kept a pot of cider or hot cocoa on the stove, and neighbors would just stop in and visit and bring Christmas cookies or loaves of bread. Then we would wrap up something for t
hem to take home. Some nights we would go around and visit other folks’ houses—maybe five or six in a night—and we would come home with good things to eat, or sometimes a little present for us children. We would ride the babies on our sled if there was snow . . .” She sighed, looking out the window, seeming to drift into the past. “It doesn’t seem right that there isn’t any . . .”

  Aunt Jeane and I sat waiting for her to finish the thought; then we just looked at each other and shrugged.

  “Well, how is teaching this year?” I asked finally. Aunt Jeane always had some funny story to tell about her fifth graders.

  This time, she only looked down at her hands and shook her head. “One of my kids was removed from her parents by social services. I’ll tell you, it’s awful the kinds of families some of these children come from these days.”

  Grandma huffed, obviously put out at being left out of the conversation. She never liked having to share Aunt Jeane’s attention. “Things are no different than they ever were. Only back in my day, there was no welfare agency to take care of people’s problems for them, and we didn’t air all our dirty laundry on television.” She raised her lecture finger into the air. “When I was in the fourth grade, I had to miss most of the school year taking care of my mother.” She lowered her finger as if she had forgotten why she was telling the story. “That was a hard time. Father was away fighting in the war, and mother lost a baby boy. She sat rocking hour after hour, crying for that baby and saying her heart was broken. It seemed like the world was coming to an end all around us. Oh, it was a bad time.”

  “Mother!” Aunt Jeane scolded in a tone so sharp it made me jump. “You’re drifting off again. We all know that story, and there isn’t any reason to tell it again now. It just makes everybody sad.”