Tending Roses (2 page)

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. “Now, 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.

It’s hard for a mother to argue with logic like that, and as was often the case, Ben took Grandma’s insistence in stride.

He laughed about her pointed denial of a romantic relationship with Oliver Mason. “Hear that?” he told Joshua. “We’re going to town with a hot babe. Hope old Oliver doesn’t decide to knock me in the head with his cane.”

The picture made me laugh even as they piled into Grandma’s old Buick and disappeared down the driveway. Watching them go, I engaged in a quick moment of mother-panic about whether Ben knew how to properly buckle Joshua’s baby carrier into the car seat. I suddenly realized that, in Joshua’s four months on earth, this was the first time he had gone somewhere without me. We’d been at the farm for only a few hours, and Grandma Rose had already kidnapped my husband and my infant son.

I shook my head, chuckling at myself as I started unloading our suitcases and tried to figure out the rocket science of setting up Joshua’s portable baby equipment.

The house was completely still after they left except for the faint hum of the furnace. I wandered down the dogtrot, looking up the wide oak stairway where pictures of my aunts and uncles on birthdays, graduations, and wedding days had always hung. After the fire, someone had taken the pictures off the wall. The outlines of the frames were yellowed into the paint, so even though they were gone, they were still there, like ghosts.

Standing on the first step, I touched the shadows, wondering where the pictures were, and if Grandma had even noticed they were gone. But I knew she must have. Nothing out of order in the house escaped her notice.

Every inch of the place whispered of the relentless pursuit of perfection that was Grandma Rose. The house was Grandma, and Grandma was the house, married since she had come as a bachelor farmer’s bride sixty years before. I wondered how we were going to convince her to give it up, and if she could, and what would happen if she wouldn’t. I wondered what she was going to say when the family confronted her, and whether I should try to prepare her ahead of time. I wondered what would happen when all of us saw one another for the first time since my mother’s death. Six years of drifting apart puts you at opposite ends of the ocean, and it takes something cataclysmic to push you into the same port.

Looking at the ghosts on the wall, I had the vague sense of an oncoming storm.

The uneasy feeling stayed with me through the rest of the afternoon, though I wasn’t sure why. The rain had stopped and the day turned bright and unusually warm for December. Joshua returned from town in a fine humor, and Ben was more relaxed than I had seen him in months. Only Grandma seemed to be in a foul state. Ben chuckled as he quietly told me that Oliver Mason had shown up in town and, much to Grandma’s disgust, tagged along on their rounds of the grocery store and the church—as Ben put it, like an old stray dog trailing a T-bone steak. Ben said he figured poor Oliver had nothing better to do.

It was so good to see Ben loosened up, I decided not to tell him that another enormous hospital bill was in our stack of forwarded mail. They just kept arriving. Maybe that was where my uneasy feeling came from. Even here at the farm, in the middle of nowhere, there was no escape from the hospital bills and the house payments, car payments, credit cards—all just a little behind, getting worse. Ben was right. I shouldn’t have taken this last month of unpaid family leave to be with Joshua. We couldn’t afford it. . . .

Grandma came by and patted me on the arm, and I jumped like a nervous cat.

She stopped and looked at me for a moment, frowning as if she were seeing right through me. “Well, Katie, you look worn-out,” she said finally. “Why don’t you put on a sweater and come sit on the porch with me? It’s seldom we get such nice weather this time of year.”

“All right,” I muttered, glad for the distraction.

“Benjamin, you can come sit out with us, too,” she said to Ben, who was headed up the stairs with his arms full of computer equipment and cables.

“No, thanks,” he said without turning around. “Probably too late to talk to anyone in Chicago, anyway, but I’d better get this thing plugged in and give it a try. I need to download some plans so I can get a bid in on a job tomorrow. It’s a design for four big new Randolph stores like the one in Springfield. Can’t miss the chance at a contract like that.”

He gave Grandma one of his most charming smiles, but beneath that was the undercurrent—the one that said if he didn’t get the contract to do the structural design for the new Randolph stores, disaster was imminent.

Grandma watched him go with a narrow-eyed look, moving her lips as if she were chewing on a thought, or as if she were reading the undercurrent, too. She had that look of being just about to sink her teeth into a new worry, and Grandpa had always said that she could jump on a worry like a bulldog on a fresh bone.

Hoping to distract her with a change of scenery, I grabbed my jacket and Josh’s carrier and headed for the porch. “We’d better hurry up before the sun starts to go down and it gets cold.” The last thing she needed to be doing was worrying about us.

She followed me onto the porch, and we sat on the swing, enjoying the warmth of the Indian summer afternoon. For a moment, neither of us said anything. Grandma’s eyelids drifted downward and her head sagged, as if she were falling asleep. I had never seen her let herself drift off like that before. It was one of the habits she had always disdained in other old people. Watching her filled me with a sense of sadness and regret for having stayed away so long from the farm, and from her. I couldn’t explain it now. After my mother’s funeral, I just went back to Chicago, buried myself in my work at the Harrison Foundation, kept busy, kept moving up the ladder, kept raising more money for worthy environmental causes, and kept my mother’s unexpected death out of my mind.

Suddenly, six years were gone and Grandma had burned down the utility room. It shouldn’t have taken that to bring me back.

Grandma’s head jerked up as Ben came through on his way back to the car for more equipment. She glanced at me with an addled look, and I pretended I hadn’t noticed her falling asleep. I stared at a pair of deer moving in a field of winter wheat in the valley below.

She cleared her throat, patting her cheeks as Ben carried a computer monitor into the house. “My goodness, that boy is a hard worker.” It almost sounded like a complaint. “But I thought the two of you were coming here for a vacation.”

My mind was on the deer. “We can’t afford a vacation,” I heard myself say, and I instantly realized my mistake. Glancing at Grandma, I saw that narrow, calculating look, and I realized she was trying to dissect our situation. “I mean, Ben has to take his contracts when they come. Randolph stores is a big chain. If he can get the structural design contract, it’ll pay really well.”

Grandma gave me a very earnest look. “Now, you know, if there is a problem about money, you can come to me. I don’t have much, but my children are welcome to all that I have.”

I just nodded, smiling at her because I knew better. Grandma loved to play the martyr about helping other people. The truth was that she managed her nest egg of farm-rental income and railroad stock with an iron grip. Ben and I would never have dreamed of accepting any of it, and if we did, everyone in the family would forever hear about how she’d gone without groceries for a month and sold her favorite knitting needles at auction, but was happy to do it because her children were welcome to all that she had. The truth was, she had refused to sell or deed over even an acre of the farm to anyone in the family, even after my grandfather died. The truth was, she hung on to what was hers, and she didn’t share, and she wasn’t going to give any of it up without a fight.

“We’re all right on money, Gram,” I assured her, hoping to nip any rumors she might start about us arriving destitute.

Her lips moved again, as if she had a piece of gristle between her teeth. “Well, I only ask because I saw all those bills and notices coming in your mail . . .”

I turned to her, openmouthed, flame rising into my cheeks. I wondered if she had been steaming open our envelopes. She didn’t look at me, but out at the deer, her chin tilted stubbornly, her arms crossed over her chest, fingers drumming impatiently.