Tending Roses (17 page)

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 have 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.

A
UNT 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 them 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.”

Grandma looked at Aunt Jeane for a moment, then lifted her chin, stood up, and walked toward the door. “I need to finish my article,” she said, but I had a feeling she was hurt by Aunt Jeane’s rebuke.

Aunt Jeane shook her head at Grandma, then sighed. “I’m sorry, Kate. I didn’t mean to start up with her.” She turned to me with an expression of monumental sadness. “I swear, she is getting more addled every time I see her. Half of the time she can’t even carry on a conversation anymore. She gets halfway through a sentence and forgets what she was saying.”

It bothered me to hear her complaining about Grandma. “She’s just a little excited because you’re here,” I said, hoping to make her see that Grandma wasn’t ready for Oakhaven Village just yet. “She’s doing a lot better lately.”
She hasn’t flooded, burned down, or blown up anything in over a week.

Aunt Jeane clearly wasn’t ready for me to come to Grandma’s defense. “I guess I’m just expecting too much. It’s natural to be more impatient with your parents than with other people.” She laughed. “Of course, after all those psychology classes, you’d think I would know better.”

We laughed, and I considered telling her about Grandma’s book, but I quickly changed my mind. I found myself hoping Grandma wouldn’t tell her either. I wanted it to remain our secret.

“So, staying here hasn’t been too hard on you and Ben?” Aunt Jeane asked.

“No. It’s been a good chance to slow down and think about what’s important.” At least for me, it had been. “Ben was gone working most of the time. I’m hoping this break over Christmas will give him and Josh some time together.”

Aunt Jeane narrowed her eyes like a hawk zeroing in on a target. “Where is Ben, this noon? I thought he would be here.” The way she said it made her sound just like Grandma.

I pretended to be busy adding sugar to my coffee. The truth was, I was embarrassed and disappointed that Ben wasn’t home to greet the guests. After last night, I’d hoped things were going to improve, but one call from a client at 7 A.M., and he was up and gone to the office first thing despite the facts that there was company coming, there were a million things to do, and Grandma was in a nervous snit. We had made love until late in the night and talked about old times, and I thought that meant we were reconnecting. I thought he would spend the morning with Josh, but Ben had barely seen Josh since he’d come home. I guess that fact hadn’t even occurred to Ben.