Tending Roses (20 page)

I nodded, thinking that it would be nice to have Ben at home instead of hanging around town. “I could send Grandma by a little more often to liven things up.”

Brother Baker laughed, then blushed red. “No, ma’am, that’s all right. A little Grandma Vongortler each day is about all this old building can handle.”

The three of us laughed.

“I’ll tell her you said that,” I joked.

Brother Baker turned another shade of red and shook his head. “I guess I’d better get going on my rounds before she shows up and puts me on the path of the righteous.”

We told him good-bye, and he headed out the door, in an unusual hurry, I think, because he expected that Grandma Rose was right behind me.

Ben rolled his head from side to side, yawning. “Where’s Grandma?”

“At home.” I sat beside him on the bench, thinking that I should explain to him about the fight and why Grandma wasn’t riding to town with me today. I knew she would be telling her side of the story to whoever would listen as soon as she got to town. “I made her mad and she wouldn’t come to town with me.”

Ben looked as if he’d just bitten into a sour persimmon. “What happened?”

The accusatory tone of the question put me on the defensive. “I caught her mopping the floors, and I told her to quit.” I threw up my hands in frustration. “We got into a fight right in front of Aunt Jeane. If Grandma doesn’t stop acting like that, they’ll be shipping her off to the nursing home on the next boat. I’m telling you, she could outstubborn a mule!”

Ben thought that was funny. “You two should be a good match.”

“Ben Bowman, you’d better wipe off that smile. This is
not
funny.”

He cleared his throat and made a pathetic attempt to rid himself of the annoying grin. “Sorry. You’re right. It’s not.” Reaching behind himself, he pulled a folded-up newspaper from his back pocket and dropped it across my knees. “But you might want to read your grandma’s newspaper column before you lock her in the dungeon for being a crotchety old lady.”

Confused, I picked up the four-page
Hindsville Register
with one hand while balancing Josh with the other. The paper was neatly folded to the Baptist Buzz, by Bernice Vongortler.

I sat staring at the paper for a while, then swallowed hard and cleared the tremors from my throat. “Now I
really
feel bad for picking on her.”

Ben patted my knee sympathetically, chuckling under his breath. “You should. She’s a saint and you’re an ogre.”

“She could turn a saint
into
an ogre,” I joked, handing him the paper. “I don’t think I’ll ever figure her out. I guess I should smooth things over with her when she gets into town.”

Ben gave me an evil sideways grin. “Aw, let old Oliver chase her around for a while. It’ll put her in the mood to make up. Just get it all settled before the twenty-third so we can get in on some of that turkey dinner.”

“Ben, you’re awful,” I said, and shook my head at him, wondering if perhaps he understood Grandma Rose better than I did.

W
HEN I found out why Ben had stayed so long in town, I felt doubly like an ogre for complaining about him to Aunt Jeane. Ben had spent most of the morning helping Brother Baker clean out a storage shed behind the church and, in the process, had ferreted out several boxes of Christmas decorations, which Brother Baker said he was welcome to borrow. He sparkled like a child with a new toy when he showed them to me and described his plans to decorate the farm for the upcoming holiday. Apparently, Aunt Jeane wasn’t the only one who had noticed that the farm was lacking in Christmas cheer.

I caught a dose of Ben’s high spirits as he struggled to carry an enormous box into the house. “Ben, what in the world . . . ?”

“Surplus from Christmas pageants past.” He gleefully lowered the box to the kitchen floor. “Can you believe all this stuff was just sitting in the storage shed at church? Look. We’ve got lights.” He held up a tangled mass. “Garland, life-size gingerbread men.” Diving into the box again, he came up holding a felt tunic, and he fanned an eyebrow at me. “And an elf suit in case you want to dress up later.”

The image made me laugh and blush. I looked over my shoulder to make sure we were alone in the kitchen.

“Dad’s lost his mind,” I whispered to Josh, setting his carrier on the floor so he could investigate a strand of glittering tinsel. “Grandma said there was a trunk of old Christmas decorations in the attic. Maybe we can get the house decorated and put Grandma in a better mood when she gets home from town.”

Ben chuckled. “That would take some serious Christmas magic. She looked like she was about ready to slug old Oliver when they came out of the grocery store.” He gave me an evil, sideways wink. “I think maybe he was getting a little fresh.”

Aunt Jeane chuckled at Ben’s joke as she entered the kitchen. “That poor man. She’s always picking on him.” She took Joshua and made goo-goo eyes at him.

“I wouldn’t worry too much about old Oliver,” Ben said. “He looks happiest when he’s bothering Grandma V. I think it’s a love-hate relationship both ways.” Ben set aside the tangled lights and rubbed his hands together in anticipation. “So, let’s go get the trunk out of the attic and see what’s in the old Vongortler Christmas stash.”

“You guys go on,” Aunt Jeane said, holding Josh above her head like an airplane. “Josh and I will go sit in the living room with Uncle Robert for a while.”

So Ben and I left Josh in the capable hands of his auntie and proceeded to the third-story attic, up a short flight of stairs at the end of the upper-story hall. I opened the door cautiously, peering inside as the overhead light blinked, crackled, and finally came to life.

The room looked as though a tornado had blown through, depositing empty wooden crates, old toys with wheels missing, a couple of bald baby dolls, chairs with broken parts, trunks with old clothes and quilts spilling out, lamps with torn shades, a dress dummy lying on its side like a headless Rip Van Winkle, and an old-fashioned shopping cart tilted on three wheels. A layer of fine dust covered everything, giving it the appearance of a faded still-life painting.

Ben looked curiously around the room. “What’s all this?”

“Grandma’s treasures,” I said, moving aside a couple of hideous framed paintings of Spanish knights and unearthing the trunk marked CHRISTMAS. I remembered the old red steamer trunk from my childhood. “She never goes to the county dump without scavenging something. Karen and I used to think she was a little nuts.”

Ben skewed a brow as if he agreed. “But all this stuff is . . . broken. It’s junk.”

“Not to Grandma.” I dragged the trunk out of the corner. “Karen called it junk once, and both of us got a thirty-minute lecture on wastefulness and how people shouldn’t throw away useful things just because they need a little extra care.” The last statement made me think of Grandma’s situation, and I felt a painful twinge inside me.

Ben met my gaze for just a moment, and I wondered if he was thinking the same thing.

He cleared his throat and grabbed the other handle of the trunk. “Well, let’s get this thing downstairs and see what’s inside.” Closing the door as we left the attic, he took one more look at the mess and shook his head. “Hope the trunk’s not full of bald angels and three-legged reindeer.”

I chuckled as we lugged the trunk downstairs. “No telling what’s in here,” I said, suddenly fascinated by the possibilities. “I’ll bet no one has opened this thing since the last Christmas we came to the farm. I think I was about twelve. There used to be some real family heirlooms in the Christmas trunk.”

Ben and I set the trunk at the bottom of the stairs and spent the next hour poring through the old Christmas decorations. The trunk was a time capsule of my family’s history—ancient carved wooden ornaments initialed by my grandfather, a dangling Roy Rogers and Trigger that must have been ordered off a cereal box or soap flakes, an official Red Rider BB gun ornament that had probably been my father’s, a tiny cloth angel with Aunt Jeane’s initials stitched on the back, a glittered hickory nut made by my mother, a skinny Santa Claus my parents sent to Grandma from a trip to Germany, several homely macaroni angels crafted by Karen and me in Girl Scouts, and a handmade manger scene that Grandma once told me her father had made for her. All of us were there in that old trunk, frozen in time.

Ben and I strung artificial pine garlands in the dogtrot and along the stair banister, then hung the ornaments carefully on the garlands, where they could be removed and later put on the tree. As Aunt Jeane and Uncle Robert prepared supper in the kitchen, Ben and I stood in our bedroom doorway and surveyed our handiwork.

“These bring back a lot of memories,” I whispered, looking at the ornaments again. I was sad and happy and tired all at once. “Christmas was always my favorite time of the year when I was little.”

“It is for most kids.” Ben flipped the light switch, and we stood in the twinkling blue glow of Christmas lights. “New bikes, new skateboards . . . new laptop computer with a ten-gig drive, high-res screen, and turbo processor . . .” He paused hopefully.

I chuckled at his joke, knowing there would be no new laptop computer under our tree this year. Then I went on reminiscing. “You know, for me the best thing about Christmas was that we were going to have a few days when no one was rushing off to be somewhere, and there were no baby-sitters coming to stay with us. Mom loved Christmas. She always made Dad take time off, and we’d decorate the tree and drive downtown to look at the lights. She got so excited looking at the decorations. I think she liked it as much as Karen and I did.”

Ben slipped his arms around me from behind and rested his chin on my head. “That’s the first time you’ve mentioned your mom in years,” he said quietly.

I realized suddenly that he was right. “I guess I just sort of pushed her out of my mind. Maybe I’ve been pretending she’s gone away to one of her symposiums, and she’s coming back.”

He held me closer, his arms like a warm blanket around me. “She isn’t coming back, Kate.”

“I know.” It was hard to face that my mother and I had spent so little time together, even harder to face that my father was still alive, and I didn’t even have the desire to see him. I wondered if I had ever felt love for him, or he for me. He was little more than a wax statue in my memory—a figurine present at birthdays, holiday dinners, graduations, and not much else. He had spent his life studying cells under a microscope, yet he was blind to the events going on around him. He was a paradox I could not understand.

His mistakes were mistakes I did not want to repeat.

“Ben, I don’t want our family to end up like this,” I said quietly. Stepping away from him, I walked into our room and sat on the edge of the bed.

He followed me and leaned against the dresser, looking confused. “Where is that coming from? I thought we were hanging Christmas decorations and having a good time.”

“That’s just it.” I wished I could find the words to explain the sense of lost opportunity that gripped me. “Twenty years from now, I don’t want Josh to be hanging Christmas decorations somewhere with his mind full of bitter memories and disappointments. I want him to remember good times—to remember us together as a family, to know how to build a family of his own someday.” I sighed, looking at Ben, who was looking at me with an expression as blank as the summer sky. “You don’t build family memories by being at work all the time. We deserve more than the back of your head in front of a computer screen.”