Tending Roses (4 page)

Instead of going out to talk to her, I took advantage of the few minutes of privacy to call the hospital in order to make payment arrangements for the new bill. Lately, it seemed as if I talked to the hospital billing department at least once a day. For the most part, they had been pretty understanding about the delay. Unfortunately, the woman on the phone today didn’t care that my son had endured emergency heart surgery shortly after birth, or that I’d had to take an extra month of unpaid leave to care for him, or that we were still grappling with the insurance company over deductibles and coverage limits, or that there were no guarantees Joshua wouldn’t need further heart surgery. All she cared about was whether we could send two hundred fifty dollars by the middle of December. Merry Christmas.

By the time I got off the phone, my hands were shaking and my nerves were stretched like fiddle strings. Upstairs, Josh had started to cry in his crib. After sticking the bill back in the envelope, I buried it under the stack of mail and went to rescue my son.

The phone rang as I was coming downstairs again, and I answered, bouncing Joshua on my shoulder to quiet him.

“Hello?” I said, wondering if the bill collector from the hospital was calling back to give me more bad news.

“Hi . . . Kate, is that you?”

“Liz?” There is nothing like hearing your best friend’s voice on the other end of the phone when you’re in a moment of crisis.

“Yes, is something wrong? I hear the baby crying.”

“No, he’s all right. He just woke up and he doesn’t think I got to the crib fast enough.”

I was only half joking, but Liz laughed on the other end of the line. Not having any children of her own, she thought all the trials of motherhood were pretty funny.

“I just called to see how the trip went and how your grandmother’s doing.”

“What . . . I . . . Just a second, Liz. The baby just spit up on my shoulder. Oh, yuck.”

“Sounds like you have your hands full.” Liz laughed again as I wiped away the mess, then repositioned Joshua so that he could look out the window. Finally, he quieted down and I could hear myself think.

“So, how was the trip and how is your grandmother?” Liz repeated.

“The trip was fine,” I said. “Josh slept most of the way in the car, so it was a nice drive. No snowstorms, so we made good time. My grandmother seems to be doing pretty well, but wow, is the utility room a mess. There’s smoke damage all around the window and the outside doorframe and a big burned-out hole where the ironing board used to be. She acts like it’s not there.”

“Hmmm. That doesn’t seem good,” Liz said, sounding as if she were analyzing one of her legal cases for the Harrison Foundation. “Well, have you tried confronting her about it?”

“No,” I admitted. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen her, I hated to come in here and get her upset. I think I’ll try to keep things calm until the rest of the family gets here for Christmas.”

“Oh, well. I don’t blame you. Sounds like kind of a mess.”

“It’ll work out all right.” I couldn’t imagine how, but I didn’t feel like talking about it anymore. “Anyway, how’s the town house?” Liz was between apartments, so she had agreed to house-sit for us while we were away.

“The house is great. I was lounging on your balcony just this morning, watching people play golf and feeling pretty suburban.”

That made me laugh. Liz had lived in an apartment downtown for the seven years I had known her. “So, you like it, then? I told you you would. It’s nice to be out where there’s a tree or two to look at. You know, the town house next to us is for sale.”

“You’re not sneakily trying to suggest that I become your next-door neighbor?” she quipped.

“We could commute together,” I said, thinking of how nice it would be to have company on the ride into the city. “Play golf on the weekends . . .”

“Neither of us plays golf, and besides, every weekend we’re in the city for some kind of fund-raiser or something.”

“Well, we could golf between fund-raisers.” A twinge of nervous adrenaline shot through me at the thought of the office. “So . . . I hate to ask, but what’s going on with the audit?”

Shortly after I had left for maternity leave, my boss found out that the foundation was going to be audited, which was no big deal until some important paperwork wasn’t where it was supposed to be, and word leaked out to a few influential people in Chicago. Sloppy accounting practices are a terrible black eye for an organization that depends on government grants and the endowments of noteworthy people.

Liz let out a long sigh, and I knew the news was not good. “It hit the papers this morning. We’re already getting calls, but we don’t know what the fallout will be.”

“Oh, no,” I muttered, my mind reeling. “That’s bad.”

“I know. I wasn’t going to tell you with everything else you’ve got going on.”

“Ohhhh, I wish I were there. I wish I could get Larry Shaffer by the neck and strangle him. He knew he was leaving for that other job, and he just blew off keeping the foundation paperwork in order.” My hand tightened around the phone cord. “You know this means people will pull funding, and it’ll cut down the usual December revenue.”

“I know. We’re already making calls to try to do damage control. Don’t worry about it. Dianne’s doing her best to fill your shoes while you’re gone.”

“I know, but . . .” I wasn’t sure I liked the idea of my assistant filling my shoes.

“Just relax and take care of your family stuff. Now I’m sorry I even told you.”

“No. Don’t be. I can make some calls from here and try to spin things with some of my bigger givers.” Joshua wiggled on my shoulder and started to cry again.

“Sounds like somebody’s hungry,” Liz said. “I’ll let you go. Don’t worry about things at work and tell Ben not to worry about the town house. Tell him I’m busy sampling all his favorite wines and driving this cute little golf cart up and down the street. Tell him on Saturday I might go sail his boat around Lake Michigan.”

“I think it might be a little cold.” I laughed. “But feel free to use all of Ben’s toys. Someone should. We pay for all that stuff and then he never has time to use it anyway.” Which was so true, it was embarrassing. Ben had a bad habit of taking up expensive hobbies. “You should have seen the place before we got rid of his antique motorcycle collection to pay off a couple of hospital bills. You know, boys and their toys.”

“Yes, I know. That’s why I’m not married.”

Joshua let out a loud squall and kicked his feet, fed up with the supper delay.

“Oops!” Liz said. “I’m really letting you go this time. Tell Ben I said hi.”

“O.K. Thanks for calling, Liz. It was great talking to you.”

“ ’Bye, girl. Have a good Christmas. Miss ya’.”

“You, too. ’Bye.”

I hung up the phone, feeling homesick and nervous about the events at work and the fact that I couldn’t be there.

But Joshua had a more immediate problem, so I grabbed a bottle from the refrigerator and walked into the hall. Through the window, I could see Grandma sitting on the porch, enjoying the warm weather, so I wrapped a jacket around Josh and went outside to sit with her while he had his bottle.

Sinking into the quilted cushions of Grandma’s swing, I took in a deep breath of the warm air. It smelled of green winter wheat and freshly tilled earth, drying puddles of water and decaying leaves. Just a hint of winter. Compared to Chicago, Missouri felt like a heat wave and not like December at all.

It was quiet. I wasn’t used to such a deep silence—no cars, no voices, no commuter trains, no doors slamming, no cell phones ringing, no pagers beeping, no horns honking. At this time of the year, not even any insects buzzing. Just silence as the sun crept through the screen and settled over us, soothing my nerves like warm bathwater. I let out a long sigh, trying to forget my troubles. Grandma turned to me with her brows knitted, and I was afraid she could tell something was wrong. “Oh, I can just imagine what all this activity has done to the floors.” She gave me a look of deep grief.

I was relieved that she wasn’t questioning me again about our stack of bills. I was afraid this time I might spill. I needed to talk to somebody, but good sense told me Grandma was not the one.

I listened absently, running financial calculations in my head and deciding which of my clients I should call to do damage control, while Grandma proceeded to tell me a long story about paying a traveling salesman three hundred dollars to refinish the wood floors—not with just ordinary finish, mind you, which would have cost one hundred dollars, but with the best finish available, which was warrantied to last ten years, and, of course, people thought she was crazy to pay so much, but if you do things right the first time, it is always worthwhile. And she always took care of the floors just the way . . .

It was impossible to tell whether she was talking about two months or twenty years ago. I wasn’t sure she knew either, but the payment made had something to do with saving up milk and butter money, and there hadn’t been cows on the farm in ten years, so I assumed it had been that long. Strange how she could remember every detail of an event so long past, but couldn’t remember people’s names, or conversations from a day ago, or whether the iron and the coffeemaker were left on.

Ben drove up in the middle of her story, and she fell silent as he came through the screen door. The look on his face made my heart sink like a lead weight.

“What’s wrong?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

He glanced at us as if he couldn’t decide what to say, then shook his head and walked past. “I lost the Randolph contract. I couldn’t get the computer logged on this morning.” The kitchen door slammed behind him.

Grandma jerked at the sound and Joshua spat out his bottle and started to cry. I buried him under my chin and closed my eyes as the disasters came crashing down on me.

Grandma stroked my hair the way I was stroking Joshua’s. “Be patient, Katie. Everything doesn’t have to work itself out today.”

I knew I should get up and leave before I made her any more upset. “I’m just disappointed, Grandma.” I tried to sound calm, but the words trembled. “Without that contract, things will be”—
impossible, hopeless, a financial disaster—
“tight.” Josh wailed louder, so I got up to walk him.

Grandma rocked back in her chair and looked at the long afternoon shadows on the lawn. “The Lord gives us what we need, but we have to do our part.”

I gritted my teeth. Lately, it felt as if we’d been doing our part and God hadn’t been doing His.

Joshua’s crying quieted to a whimper. “I’m sorry, Grandma. I’m probably just overreacting. I’d better go in and talk to Ben.”

Joshua erupted into a full-scale colicky fit when I went into the house, and Ben gave me an irritated look as he poured himself a glass of soda. “Feed him or something. I’m not in the mood for this right now.”

“And you think I am?” I tried to give Josh his pacifier, which only made him angrier and louder. “What’s wrong with the Randolph contract?”

“Nothing. They hired somebody else this morning while I was down at the phone company finding out this is some kind of private exchange and there’s no local server. If I can’t get plans in, I can’t—” He slammed his glass on the table and foam leapt out the top. “I can’t talk with him doing that!”

The noise made Joshua wail louder. “Oh, good job.” I wanted to pitch both of them out the window. Joshua’s holler echoed through the house like a siren, and my head swelled with every blast. Grabbing his stroller from the utility room, I headed for the door to keep from going out of my mind.

I caught my breath a few minutes later as I pushed Josh’s stroller along the lane that ran past the barn to the pasture gate. He quieted somewhere along the way and lay looking up with wide eyes at the spindly clouds floating overhead. Gazing down at him, I turned the stroller around and started back to the house. I wondered if all new parents started family life in such a mess, or if Joshua had been cheated by the luck of the draw—born with a heart that wasn’t right, into a family that was floundering.

As we pushed up the hill to the farmhouse, he twisted his head to look at me and gurgled a smile, as if to tell me he wasn’t worried at all. I smiled back and wondered how I could be so in love with something so tiny. He seemed so fragile a vessel to hold all my devotion.

Grandma was asleep on the swing when we came back to the porch. Our car wasn’t in the driveway, so I knew Ben had gone back to town, probably to hash things out with the phone company, which was probably for the best. Both of us needed some cooling-off time. I wasn’t ready to talk things out with Ben yet, and I figured he probably wasn’t ready to talk to me either. He wasn’t much for talking over problems anyway. He didn’t feel it helped anything.

I parked Joshua next to Grandma’s swing and watched as he drifted off. Next to Grandma on the swing, a book lay open, and I picked it up as I sat down in the rocking chair beside her. Absently, I turned it over in my hands and looked at the cover. Someone had made it by hand, laminating pressed wildflowers against pretty peach-colored parchment for the cover and binding it in the center with a sky-blue ribbon. The pages inside were blank except for the first few, which I guessed Grandma had just been writing in, because a pen was lying on the arm of her chair. It wasn’t my business to read it, but I looked at the first few words, anyway.

Yellow Bonnets,
it was titled.

I read on, though I knew I shouldn’t.

I paused and looked at Grandma, knowing I should put down her book. But I turned my eyes to the words anyway. It was hard to imagine her so young. I didn’t know much about her childhood. She never talked about it—almost as if she hadn’t existed before she married my grandfather.