As Gemma walked home from work late that afternoon, everything around her seemed to whisper “Three weeks. . . Three weeks. . . Three weeks.” The words rustled from the lawn grass beneath her feet and the leaves in the trees overhead and the green acorns that skittered along the walk when she kicked them. “Three weeks. . . Three weeks.”
When she got to the house, Mrs. Bartling’s car wasn’t in the driveway. She opened the door without knocking. During the past few weeks, she’d gotten used to doing that. “Hello? Is anybody home?” Nothing.
She walked the length of the hallway and found no one in any of the rooms. Of course Mrs. Bartling must have driven them somewhere. She went to the bottom of the stairs and called, “Mrs. Bartling?” And then, “Paisley?” Nothing.
Gemma found herself standing outside Nathan’s room. The door was closed. She opened it an inch. Two inches. “Hello? Anybody in there?”
She rested her fingers against the doorknob as lightly as an alighting butterfly. For one moment, she considered the possibility of going inside. She considered the possibility of handling all that was left of Nathan in this place, of touching his belongings, and nobody else would ever have to know. It was tempting. Cruelly tempting. She pushed the door open a little more.
Why shouldn’t Mrs. Bartling share this part of him with me? Why should she keep it to herself?
A car pulled into the driveway. A car door slammed. Guilt-ridden, Gemma flung Nathan’s door shut and yanked her hand away. She heard Paisley laughing and Mrs. Bartling’s quiet, gentle reply. She strode into the family room to meet them. “Hi,” she said, sounding breathless in her own ears, as if she’d just runaway from something.
“Hi,” Mrs. Bartling said back.
In their arms, the homecomers carried wrinkled shopping bags from Wal-Mart. Mrs. Bartling set a shoe-box on the floor before she began to rifle through their sacks. Sales tags littered the floor.
Gemma stood there and stared at it all. “What’s this?”
Mrs. Bartling shrugged as if these items had no significance whatsoever. “They were having a sale over in Oshkosh.”
“You took Paisley to Oshkosh?”
“Of course I did. I couldn’t very well go without her, could I? It’s a good thing she was there to try on, or else I would have bought her play clothes at least two sizes too big.”
“You bought things for Paisley?”
Gemma stared at the sacks and the little piles of clothing that were growing by the second. Shame and disparagement stirred in her. What had she been thinking at the Cramalot when she’d thought she could find out about Nathan and help Mrs. Bartling? While here came Mrs. Bartling, doling out benefaction? The last time anyone had bought a gift for Paisley had been when Nathan bought her a fourth-birthday present. A
Jewel Girl Barbie. The very same Barbie that Gemma had forgotten to fish out of the Corolla’s backseat when Mr. Sissel had driven her to chain up the Toyota and tow it in to the Texaco.
“I got things for both of you. Just look at these.” Mrs. Bartling stooped to the floor, her hand supporting her backside as she did, and wrestled a pair of strappy brown sandals from the tissue paper in the shoebox. These were small enough for Bea to lift in one hand. “This was the splurge. They were $12.99, but they were so cute. I couldn’t resist.”
Paisley must have sensed that something was wrong. “Don’t you like my new sandals, Mama?”
“Oh, sweetie. Oh, they’re very nice.” For as far back as Gemma could remember, with the exception of Nathan, no one had ever wanted them around. Not Grandma Hardeman. Not the aunts and uncles she’d lived with after her mother had left them and her father had been killed in a freak accident with a construction crane. She sat down hard on the old recliner, feeling dismal. “I’ll count up what I’ve made so far at the Cramalot, Mrs. Bartling. I can pay you for these things.”
“Oh, no, Gemma.” Mrs. Bartling wrapped the little shoes in tissue again and began to work her swollen feet out of her own cracked leather Naturalizers. “That isn’t what I had in mind. I just picked out a few necessities to help—”
Humiliation roiled in Gemma’s belly. She knew the reason behind this. Mrs. Bartling had watched her load their laundry into the washer yesterday. She had finally seen all that they didn’t have. “I don’t want you to give us things. You’ve already given us enough.”
Mrs. Bartling straightened with surprise and held up a tiny pink bathing suit with a fish on the front. “This isn’t charity, Gemma.” She spread the bathing suit out on the coffee table. “At least, not in the way you expect.” Her hands, gnarled and weathered after so many hours in the garden, began to smooth wrinkles from the little garment. “I wanted to make things better. I wanted to make the hurt better. That’s all.”
Paisley began to dig in the shoebox. She pulled out one new sandal and began to struggle with the leather buckle.
Three weeks. I don’t even have a suitcase large enough to carry these things away when we leave in three weeks. “Nothing’s going to make the hurt better. You know that. You’re his mother. Nathan’s gone.”
“Look, I bought you this,” Mrs. Bartling said, still making an effort. She pulled a gauzy teal skirt from the bag and laid it across her arm. “This one is very feminine. And it’s longer than the other one. I thought you’d—”
When Mrs. Bartling displayed the skirt, it confirmed every one of Gemma’s suspicions. “You’re embarrassed by us, aren’t you?” she asked. “You don’t like my clothes.” Gemma saw straight through these gifts to the meager, horrible truth. Gemma was mortified by the skirt that would reach below her knees, by the little package of underwear for Paisley she could see still in the bag. “You don’t like my life. I’m certainly not the kind of girl you would have wanted your son to marry.”
“Gemma, please—”
“Mama,” Paisley said. “Don’t get mad at Mrs. Bartling. It was fun. We got new toothbrushes and soap and she got you a different bra.”
“How do you know what size bra I wear?” Gemma asked.
“Well, I looked.”
“I did finish high school, you know,” Gemma told her. “I got pregnant and my grandma wouldn’t let me go through graduation but they mailed me my diploma anyway. She didn’t want me anymore because she didn’t want—” Gemma’s hands fluttered somewhere in the direction of Paisley so she wouldn’t have to say it aloud. “Nobody ever wanted us. Except for Nathan. But if he hadn’t wanted me, maybe he would have come home to you. I know you feel that way, Mrs. Bartling. I see it every time you look at me.”
Mrs. Bartling spread the pretty skirt across her lap and stared down at it. As she sat, it dangled all the way to her ankles. All Gemma could see was the cowlick shaped like a whirligig in the top of Mrs. Bartling’s gray hair.
“I want to be grateful, don’t you see? I ought to be grateful. But I can’t be. Don’t you see?”
At last, when Mrs. Bartling spoke, she spoke to the pretty skirt in her lap, to her swollen ankles, to the sales tags in a jumble on the carpet. “I see,” she said, her voice becoming soft with weary sorrow. “You’re right, you know. I think those things. Yes, Nathan might have come home if not for you. Or he might not have. But there isn’t anyway for either of us to know that, is there? We have to sort this out as best we know how.”
As Bea often did when she felt unduly troubled, she plodded out into her front yard the next morning, struggled with the faucet, turned on the hose and stood alone in the late morning heat. She squinted into the sun, taking sudden, surprising pleasure in the water splattering amidst the dirt and the moldering petals beside her feet.
No matter what else changes in my life, this never does.
The woman who had watered these roses a hundred years before hadn’t had the luxury of a garden hose. Instead, she would have lovingly tended these flowers with what was left of the dishwater or a few drops left over from someone’s weekly bath. Bea didn’t stop watering the old bushes until she made certain all the roots got a so
aking clear through.
She traipsed around to the potter’s cart in the side yard where she kept gardening scissors, pruning shears, bags of oak-leaf mulch, and tin buckets for carrying things. She came back with a little trowel and, on her hands and knees, began to turn dirt with the spade, digging and dumping, until she’d cultivated a new batch of bone meal and potash deep into the soil. Petals showered down around her ears, their fleeting fragrance impossible to capture or keep.
So many times during the past years, she’d found it easy to forget herself here, to cast away the outside world. To pretend she was a pioneer woman from an earlier time, coddling roses brought as a tiny cutting along the Oregon Trail—the only beautiful reminder of home that could be toted along among provisions on a wagon.
But not today.
We don’t wear the right clothes. We don’t act the right way. We don’t say the right things.
If Nathan hadn’t wanted us, he might have come home to you. You think that. I see it in your eyes every time you look at us.
Bea had left her gardening gloves behind. She began digging anyway, finding gentle solace in the repetitive motion of the trowel, the fresh breeze that ruffled her hair, the dirt clods biting into her knees, the jumble of leaves and thorns, the rich carol of a lone fat robin, cheer-up cheerily, as it sang from its perch in the tall cedar beside the house.
“Oh, Lord,” she whispered aloud to the dirt. “I’m trying so hard to let it go. But no matter how hard I try, I’m blaming people. And they see it. They see it.”
For even as she had heard Gemma’s accusations against her and realized they were true, she had heard the echo of another time, another voice.
“You said you would be different if we came someplace different,” she said to Ray. “You said you’d try to be happy.” She didn’t know how to fight what was going on inside her husband. She didn’t know how to fight the discontent she saw in his life. In their front yard beside the roses, she stood on tiptoe, laid her head in the valley between his shoulder blades, wanting to heal him with her touch.
He backed away. “Don’t.”
Tears came to her eyes. “Is it me, Ray? Am I doing something wrong? Am I not being a good wife? A good mother?”
“A good wife? Sure you’re a good wife. The problem is I’m a lousy husband. That’s what you’re thinking every time you look at me. I see it in your eyes.”
“I’m not thinking that.”
Oh, I am. I am. But I don’t want to be.
“You’re thinking if I didn’t lose my jobs, our lives could be different. You’re thinking if I said the right things to the right people, I could get raises instead of bad reviews and lousy cost-of-living increases.”
“Ray, I just want to help.”
“There’s all sorts of helping that doesn’t help.”
“You weren’t watching what you were doing the other day, Ray. If you had been, that lumber never would have fallen. You were standing on the roof with your head thrown back, yearning for some distant place. Like that hobo on the train.”
“Maybe I’d like to be that hobo. Bea, you don’t realize it, but you do this.”
When had she silently begun to disapprove of her husband? She knew she mustn’t feel this way. It wasn’t fair to Ray. It seemed odd, how other people knew what you felt about them before you ever admitted it to yourself. She could be content. She was content. She loved puttering with the roses. She loved when Ray came in from the hardware store and set his little brown sacks of nails on the kitchen counter, each one creased and folded into a roll at the top. She didn’t mind scrimping on groceries when he’d lost another job. She loved listening to the boys giggle in the bedroom and then the soft rustlings of them giving in and drifting off to sleep. She loved creeping in and finding Jacob in Nathan’s room, blond hair on the pillow in the bed on the right, brown hair on the pillow in the bed on the left, both of their mouths wide open.
“I want you to try and see something, Ray,” she had said to Ray that day. “I want you to see that life is here. It’s where you are. It isn’t somewhere else that you have to go looking for it.”
I’m content. If I’m not, I can change that. I can.
But Bea hadn’t been able to change. Not in time to save her marriage.
That girl sees more of myself than I do. If I’m ashamed of her, I can change that. I can.
Bea disentangled herself from the rose limbs and rocked back onto her heels. She sighed deeply before she brandished the pruning shears and rummaged through the leaves in search of blossoms withered on the stems. She found one and snipped it off. It fell in the dirt beside her knees.
She stared at it.
Just then, George Sissel’s Ford Taurus pulled up in front of the house. It ran up over the curb and plunked down again in the street. “Hello, Bea.” Pastor George climbed out of the driver’s side, slammed the door with a satisfied thwack, and strode purposefully up the walk. “Up to your elbows in the rose patch. That’s a good sign, isn’t it?”
“Well, yes. I suppose it is.”
Bea set aside all her gardening paraphernalia and George stretched out a hand. “Need help up?”
“I’ve got dirt all over. You don’t want to touch me.” She managed to upright herself without assistance. She brushed loose grass and mulch and dirt from her behind. “You came to check on me?”
“Actually, I stopped over to bring this to Paisley.” He held out a small black Bible. “Is she inside?”
“She’s playing with a neighbor down the street.”
“Some special things have happened to her lately, Bea. Did she tell you? She’s invited the Lord into her life.”
The little spade lay on the ground beside where she’d been sitting. For lack of nothing better to do, Bea touched it with her toe, sending the wooden handle up and down again. She watched it seesaw up and down. From a great distance somewhere out across the plains came the piercing call of a sandhill crane, garooo-a, garooo-a. “I see.” This news, coupled with the events of yesterday, left Bea staring at her pastor with a millstone of heaviness in her chest. “That’s impossible, isn’t it? She’s much too young.”
For a moment, Bea felt almost envious of Paisley. How she longed for the freshness, the joy. How she longed for the beginning, those times when her body and her heart and her very life vibrated with the possibility of the Lord.
Why on earth would I begrudge a child her budding faith?
“I don’t think it’s impossible at all, Bea. That isn’t what the Bible says.”
Because my own old faith has been battered and tarnished, that’s why. Because I don’t think God listened to me or loved me, not even when it all began.
“Bea.” He stared down for a moment, his eyes riveted on the scuffed toes of his wingtip shoes. When he lifted his gaze, he spoke the words to her with new, firm determination. “I don’t know what you’re feeling right now. I cannot comprehend it. But the emptiness in your eyes frightens me.”
“What of it?” she asked. “I’m trying to make that emptiness go away. It will some day. That’s what every one says. In three to five years, I’ll be better. Every time I go through one more birthday, one more Christmas, one more Thanksgiving, I’ll be getting closer.”
“There’s something I want you to think of, Bea, whenever your spirits are low.”
“I’ll be thinking about it often, then, I suppose.”
He reached over and touched her arm. “There’s one thing I’ve learned about human nature over the years. It’s simple, and important. You often never know about the people whose lives you change.”
“What are you talking about, George?”
“In this world, it’s easy to recognize the mistakes you see in someone’s life and to blame yourself for them. But you never see the mistakes someone might have made if not for your touch. You never realize that people are still going on because of what you may have said to them or because of what you may have shown them. Just by being who you are.”
“I’m an old woman. My chance for changing people’s lives was over a long time ago.”
“I hear the conversations at funerals, Bea. They all say the same thing. ‘I could have phoned him, but I didn’t.’ ‘I could have visited her, but I didn’t.’ ‘I could have told this child I cared about him, but I didn’t.’ Missed chances.”
“Is that what I’m doing?” she asked him. “Seeing only the missed chances?”
Pastor George closed his eyes and nodded. “I think so.”
“The chance I missed, though,” she said, “was with my own son.”
He nodded again.
She seemed to have forgotten the dirt embedded in her nails, the state of her grimy hands. She ran her fingers through her hair. “Do you know who they are, George? That girl was married to Nathan.”
“Yes. I know who they are. Paisley let me in on the secret.”
“They were with him a little over a month ago. They were with Nathan.”
“Yes.”
“And when she came here, she recognized things because Nathan told her so much about his home.”
“I imagine that’s been difficult.”
Bea bit her bottom lip and nodded. Yes. Yes. This had been difficult.
The sun had risen higher, bathing Bea’s bare arms with golden, warm light. From where she stood, she could see heat shimmering against the prairie grass along the far hills and the long fronds of the golden willow that Ray had planted ten or more years ago drooping toward the ground.
George reached out to take Bea’s hand and, when he did, his smile held great sadness, great gentleness. “Don’t underestimate the way God works, Bea. You may think you’ve brought them in to teach you something about Nathan. When, perhaps, the Father has brought them in to teach you something about yourself.”
Chapter Seventeen
Alva T.’s meat loaf special brought more notoriety to Ash Hollow than anyone could have ever imagined. A reporter from The Denver Post stopped in one afternoon for a piece of coconut crème pie and ended up interviewing Alva about her meat loaf instead. Two days later, a photographer appeared with his padded camera case and plastic bags filled with film canisters and a Rolleiflex camera with a detachable flash.
A Rose by the Door Page 17