The Rose Thieves (14 page)

“That's not funny, Steve,” Audie said.

“Well, you have to admit she's running your father around in circles.”

“He needs the exercise,” Audie snapped. She poked his belly. “So do you.”

“Don't push me, Audie. Look at your own waistline.”

*   *   *

The cobwebs continued to collect, and with the warm weather came ants. Audie had heard that cucumber would repel them. She cut one into spears and left one on each cupboard shelf. She read cookbooks at work, whole cookbooks of reheatable meals for Steve's late dinners, and cookbooks of baby food. She bought seeds for her garden—beans and sunflowers and peppers and dill. She could picture herself spraying water over the crops with her infant on her hip, but she could not think, yet, of tearing up the weeds.

At home, opening the cupboards, she found her cucumbers writhing with glistening ants. Her project had failed, or succeeded. By the time she had all the ingredients for Italian chicken stewing in the slow cooker, it was dark. She took a peanut butter sandwich into the living room and turned on the lamp. In Steve's absence the house was filled with vague sounds: from the basement, from the attic, on the front porch. The dog crawled into the closet and whined. Even when she realized what the sound was, she wouldn't venture into the dark to coax him out. When Steve came home, he found her asleep on the sofa. He turned the bedroom light on and carried her upstairs to bed, where she rolled onto her back like a weighted clown toy, still asleep. The phone rang.

Audie could hear Steve answer. “Well, she's not
fast
asleep,” he said. He held the receiver to her ear, and she wondered if it would be possible to sleep and listen at the same time.

“Can Steve go get the stoves for me?” Ma asked. “Your father will give me two hundred dollars to have them picked up, and then you can keep them. Will you ask him?”

“We don't need a stove, Ma,” Audie said. Her list of names was still downstairs.

“Just ask him, Audie. I'm not asking anything of you.”

“Okay, I'll ask.

“How is everything, honey? Did you get the baby's room all papered?”

Sleep slipped away. “We did,” Audie said, “and Steve fixed the window and I'm making a little quilt for the crib. I'll appliqué a big red heart on it.”

“Audie, you're going to be a wonderful mother,” Ma said.

“I'm putting the phone on my stomach. Listen to the baby's heart.” She pressed the receiver into her nightgown, and Ma swore she could hear.

Trying to sleep again, Audie planned the design for the quilt more intricately than before. She could picture the border of leaves and flowers carefully embroidered and the heart brilliantly red against the quilted ground.

*   *   *

In the morning their bedroom was reorganized by the light. The sheet lay over them like a landscape. Audie's belly was a sunny hill. Stretching, Steve broke the light and reached down to bring the dog up onto the bed.

“We'll go get the stoves, make two hundred dollars, and give them back to your father,” he said.

“You'll be taking them under false pretenses.”

“Not if I bring the stoves here before I give them back. If they're ours, we can give them to whoever we choose.”

“If you go get those stoves, Steve, we're keeping them.” Audie pulled a strand of her hair across her face and examined it in the light.

“Are you turning straw into gold, Rapunzel?”

“Don't mix your fairy tales. We have to get them straight before the baby comes.” She heaved herself across the bed and sat on him.

He gasped. The dog yapped, grabbing Audie's exposed foot in his teeth. As she struggled to free herself, Steve turned her over and trapped her under him.

“Did you ever see a camel upside down?” he asked.

Audie whispered to the frantic dog, “Get him, Bonzo!”

The dog leapt over her back at Steve.

“You'll pay for this insolence!” Audie bellowed, rolling over. She had Steve locked between her legs, but couldn't sit up over her stomach to pull his hair.

Steve reached back and pulled Audie's arm, yanking her down toward the bed. They rolled together, hip over head, across the mattress. Audie felt the dog under her, squealing. She laughed, and could hear Steve laughing as they rolled, gathering Bonzo in undertow. When they came to the edge, Steve landed on his feet and Audie slid to the floor laughing, gasping, still fighting the sheet that came with her and the dog as he tumbled down over her head. The baby kicked furiously.

“If I have a breech birth, it's your fault,” she said. “Poor Bonzo. Poor baby Bonzo.”

Steve pulled her to her feet and kissed her.

“Charley horse!” she yelled, pinching his leg. He fell back onto the bed, and she went downstairs to slice cucumber for the ants.

Pop called her before she could start breakfast.

“How are you two going to make out financially after the baby is born?” he asked.

“Terribly,” Audie said.

“We'll all be poor together,” Pop said. “The lawyer is charging me twenty-five hundred dollars for court appearances alone.”

“Oh, Pop, what are you going to do?” She didn't want to know. She lifted the flour canister carefully over a molested cucumber slice and started to mix batter for a coffee cake.

“Something always turns up,” he said. “Is Steve getting the stoves for your mother?”

“I guess so.”

“Well, he'll pick up a little extra money from that. And maybe I can help too.”

Audie smashed the lumps out of the batter.

“How would you like to sell the stoves when you get them?” her father asked.

She poured the cake carefully into the pan. “What do you mean?”

“I'll pay you two hundred dollars apiece for them.”

“Steve's probably not going to have time to go get them.” Audie shook much too much cinnamon over the cake. She tried to pick it up with a damp paper towel.

“Well,” Pop said, “will you consider it?”

“I've got something burning in the oven,” she said. “I'll call you back. I love you.”

“I love you too, sweetie,” he said.

*   *   *

The stoves rested side by side in Audie's living room, disconnected, like men too old for battle. Audie sat beside them, wearing her nightgown. Still, she was too hot. The fan just blew hot air in at her. Her list of names had spread to a second page, and on the sheet facing it she was working out a budget—wood versus oil. The installation and the first cord of wood would easily use up four hundred dollars. She went back to the names. Steve had suggested one, finally. Wilfred, his grandfather's name. It was printed in his thick script at the bottom of the boys' column. Audie drew a slow line through the rest of the list.…
Desire for peace,
she wrote beside the baby's name. On the other side the names of the girls she might someday bear continued down the page. The stoves stood at the boundary of her circle of lamplight. Even the dog didn't venture past them. He ran around, barked at her and at the stoves, and bit her feet, so she pulled them under her with great effort.

The phone rang. She let it go on until Bonzo went crazy with it. She knew it was Pop.

“Did I wake you up?”

“No,” she said. “I was in the shower. But I'm dry now.”

“How's my grandson? All ready to be born?”

“He's really quiet. I think he's resting for both of us.”

“How are the stoves?”

“They're here. Steve hasn't hooked them up yet.”

“How much do you want for them?”

“I can't.”

He laughed. “Even your mother would be pleased. She'll know she's soaked me twice.”

“We're going to name the baby Wilfred,” she said.

“Do you remember the day we bought the stoves?” he asked her.

“I do,” she said.

“You were just a little girl. We had such a nice time that day, do you remember?”

“I do,” she said. “But I was fourteen. And I'd like to give them back, but I can't.” She could imagine the phone calls.

“Audie, I only gave them up because I trusted you.”

Audie sat silent beside the stoves. Her foot was asleep. She couldn't seem to lift herself off it with the phone in her hand. The baby was still quiet. She pressed her hand into her stomach, willing it to move.

“Audie, are you there?”

“I'm here,” she said.

“Audie, you don't have to tell your mother. You keep them for a while and give them back to me when she's forgotten. Do you remember the way we ran the pipes around the living room to radiate heat? And the time your mother cooked a whole dinner on the stove top for your birthday?”

Ma would have said she'd cooked dinner there because her real stove didn't work. “I remember,” Audie said. “I remember everything. I remember you and me and Ma and everyone cooking on the stoves, warming our feet against the stoves, cutting the wood for the stoves, but I can't make a deal like that. You gave them to her in the settlement. It was your decision.”

“And she gave them to you. And they're mine,” he said.

Finally the baby moved, kicked fiercely. The pain ran the length of her nerves.

“Pop, I don't want the stoves. They're in the way. They take up the whole room. I think I
will
sell them. Maybe you can buy them from whoever I sell them to.”

“We built the road up to your house with the wood for those stoves,” he said.

She stood up. “My house. My house? Where is my house? Give me back the road to my house and I'll give you back the stoves! Okay? They're your stoves, they're Ma's stoves, they're my stoves now! They'll probably burn the house down. But I can't give them back to you. Ma would hate me!” She crumpled her list of names and threw it at one of the stoves. Bonzo went yapping after it.

“Pop,” she said, “no one's going to cook on them now.”

“I'll cook for Wilfred,” he said.

Wilfred caused her another deep cramp.

“I love you, Pop.”

“I'll come get them next weekend,” Pop said. “Steve can help me.”

“Okay,” Audie said. “I'll call you tomorrow.”

“I'll call you,” he said.

She pressed the button and dialed her mother.

“Ma,” she said, “I just blasted Pop and it's not fair unless I yell at you too. I'm sick of it. I'm selling the stoves back to him. I know you'll hate me but I don't care. Everyone will hate me anyway. You're telling me what to do, he's telling me what to do, and I don't know what to do. And don't tell me I'm taking Pop's side. I just want to be home with Steve and Wilfred and bake bread and try to live. I don't have room for the stoves!”

“Who's Wilfred?” Ma asked.

Audie could feel it again. The pain was exactly what they had described in the classes. “What does it feel like to be in labor?” she asked.

“If you have to ask, you'd better call Steve,” Ma said. “I'll meet you at the hospital. And don't worry, Audie,” her voice was perfectly, powerfully calm. “You have plenty of time.”

Bonzo leapt up from sleep and attacked Audie's leg.

“Lie down,” she told him.

She dialed. “Steve, Ma thinks I'm in labor. Will you come get me?”

“I'm on my way,” he said.

“Don't worry, we have plenty of time.”

She rose, squeezed between the stoves. Bonzo followed her up the stairs. Each footfall echoed upward, but the house was full of the first summer air, and she heard none of the usual unsettling sounds. She turned on the light in the baby's room. She had swept and dusted that morning, so everything was in order. The quilt with the heart appliqué rested smoothly over the crib mattress. In the rocking chair Pop's old teddy bear sat forlorn. A ladybug crawled along one of the stripes in the wallpaper, and Audie let it continue along her hand. She opened the window. Across the street houses were still lighted and a woman stood on her front steps, calling a dog. Audie reached out and shook the ladybug into the cooler air.

Elysian View

If only we could know the future, we wouldn't so much mind death, but as it is, we are waiting for the morning mail. Every lady at The Elysian View Home died with a lottery ticket in her purse. The living stayed on in hope of victory at the next bridge game, or an extra piece of cake for dessert. Lila Vanderwald was Director of Recreation at Elysian, responsible for arts, crafts, and cocktails, wheelchair aerobics and the annual Mother-Son Ball. It was the only job she could find after the divorce. If she hadn't poured the first half of her life down the drain of her marriage, she could have been an international banker by now, or a federal judge; a citizen of marble hallways, wealthy, important, in charge. Instead, skirt hitched, she was kneeling on her office rug to cut paper palm trees for the upcoming “Evening at the Folies Bergère,” a clump of silver glitter glued by mistake in her silver hair. She was fifty-two. Possibility seemed to be closing against her. She saw she was going to die wishing, for the same things she had wanted all her life.

These bitter thoughts twisted again at the sight of Jean Brenehan, former Sister of Mercy, now Chief Administrator. Lila sat back on her haunches and blinked. Jean B. remained sanctimonious even beneath false eyelashes and décolletage: her much-uplifted bosom quivered with disapproval now, for no reason Lila could guess. Her face, Lila thought, revealed how few and how small were the thoughts that passed behind it, all of them suitable to be jotted on the clipboard she held at her side.

“Frank Gunn is dying,” Jean B. said, smartly. Room 115 would be free.

“I'll go up,” Lila said, meaning to show that some people cared more for the man dying than for his empty bed. She groaned as she stood, not so much from exertion as dramatic habit: she gave a little extra emphasis to each act until her life seemed as large as it should have been, with many tragedies and comedies each day. When it came time for Lila's raise, though, Jean B. would remember the groan and say she wasn't agile enough, or was too loud.