Tending Roses (6 page)

“Grandma, potatoes only cost a dollar fifty-nine a bag. Why don’t we just buy some?” I was thinking of the insurance claims I needed to write out and the files I had brought along from the office, the phone calls I needed to make and about a dozen other things I could be doing—none of which included picking through rotten vegetables.

Grandma jerked back, looking at me with a white-rimmed blaze in her eye. She raised that craggy finger and shushed me. “And that would be a dollar fifty-nine we wouldn’t have in our pocketbooks tomorrow. That is the problem with you young people today. Everything is just a dollar here and five dollars there, and ten dollars that time, and then you don’t have any money when you need it and you have to borrow from the banker. My father used to say: ‘The man who buys what he does not need will often need what he cannot buy.’ ”

“O.K., Grandma, don’t get so upset.” She was turning red in the face. I knew better than to get her started on the subject of debt. That was a hellfire-and-brimstone sermon, and it could go on for hours.

So I packed Joshua’s diaper bag, and we climbed into the Buick, me in the front to chauffeur and Grandma keeping Joshua company in the backseat. Away we went to dig through rotten potatoes.

Grandma was in a foul mood about debt on the way there, and it didn’t take long before I was in a foul mood too. Grandma could have that effect on people when she wanted to. When she was finished preaching about debt, she started handing out unsolicited parenting tips.

“Time we took that pacifier away from this baby, Katie.” Josh, strapped beside her in his car seat, was peacefully unaware of the tempest brewing in the old Buick, and he cooed happily as Grandma tried to extract his sucker.

“Grandma, leave it be.” Too late. The pacifier flashed across the corner of my peripheral vision, gripped in Grandma’s hand. Josh whimpered, trying to decide if he really felt like crying.

“He’ll become spoiled on it.”

“He’s only four months old,” I reminded her, glancing over my shoulder and wishing I could reach the pacifier, now on the seat beside Grandma.

Josh waved a hand in the air as if to cheer me on, then started babbling at his own fingers.

“It’ll ruin his mouth.” Grandma looked out the side window and moved her lips like a cow chewing a cud.

Gripping the steering wheel tighter, I faced forward again, reminding myself of the doctor’s advice that she avoid stress. Too bad that didn’t stop her from dishing it out to other people. “It helps him sleep,” I said.

“The child doesn’t sleep because his little stomach isn’t satisfied. A tablespoon of rice cereal will take care of that.”

I resisted the urge to stop the car and make her hitch the rest of the way to town. Instead, I stared ahead, determined not to let her get to me. “He’s too young for cereal. Giving solid foods too young causes earaches.”

I should have known better than to reason with her. She spat out a puff of air as if she had a bad taste in her mouth. “Oh, nonsense. I never heard of such.”

“It’s been proven.”

“Fiddle. I gave cereal to every one of my children and you grandchildren, and not a one of you got earaches.”

Confronted with eighty years of child-rearing experience, I was helpless so I settled for, “He doesn’t need cereal.”

“We’ll purchase some at the store.” In the rearview mirror, I saw her cross her arms tighter and draw her chin back, pressing her lips into a stern line.

“We’re
not
getting any baby cereal.”

“
I’ll
buy it.” As if I were too cheap to buy my son what he so desperately needed.

“No, you won’t.” Beads of sweat squeezed from the skin under my collar and dripped down my back. No matter what, I wasn’t going to let her bait me onto her hook. . . .

“I can buy what I want.” Snatching her purse from the floorboard, she clutched it in her lap. “I have my money. I’ll take care of little Jackie.” Jackie was her son, my father.

The next thing I knew, I was half facing Grandma and making the most ridiculous statements. “Joshua! It’s Joshua! And you come near that baby with cereal, it’ll be the last time! No cereal, no cookies to chew on, no drops of brandy for colic! No . . .” The word ended in a gasp as something in the road caught my eye and I slammed on the brakes.

Grandma rocked forward, catching one hand on the seat back and the other on the baby carrier as we slid to a stop.

Heart rapping in my throat, I looked at her and Joshua, then glanced ahead at the road. Doe-eyed in our path were a big dog and a dark-haired girl crouched above an overturned bike. The car had stopped not more than ten feet short of them. We were all frozen, looking at each other agape with horror.

My mind ran over the preceding moments with lightning speed. Where had she come from? How could we have come so close to hitting her? How long were my eyes off the road? What would have happened if I’d seen her a moment later?

The clatter of something against the pavement shook me into action. Hitting the hazard lights, I put the car in park and got out just in time to catch a can of pork and beans as it rolled toward the side of the road. On my way to the overturned bike, I gathered what could be salvaged of the groceries that had spilled from the basket.

“Are you all right?” I asked, stopping a few feet away when the dog started to growl.

The girl nodded as she stood up and righted the bike, reaching across the dog to regain her groceries, her chin tucked and her face hidden. “Rowdy, hush,” she told the dog. Her voice sounded so young, it shocked me, and I realized that though she was tall, she was probably only about nine or ten years old. Too young to be biking down the highway three miles from town all alone.

“I’m sorry. I just didn’t see you,” I apologized, wanting to touch her to make sure she was all in one piece.

Stepping back as if she’d read my thoughts, she crossed her arms nervously over her stomach. “I shouldn’t’ve been in the road.”

Bracing my palms on my knees, I bent over and tried to make contact with the face hidden beneath a mass of too-long bangs and tangled hair. “It was my fault. I’ll be glad to replace your groceries or just give you the money.”

I caught a glimpse of wide dark eyes as she looked around at the spilled milk, squashed chips, and broken jelly jar.

“I’m really sorry,” I tried again as I started picking up the remaining groceries. “Can I give you a ride home and explain it to your mom?”

“No, ma’am.” She ran three steps and hopped on the bike before I could react. The dog followed quickly after her, and they disappeared around a bend in the road as I retrieved the last of the crumpled groceries and stood there with no one to give them to. Finally, I just carried the ripped bag back to the car and set it in the trunk, leaking jelly and all.

“Well, let’s get on to town.” Grandma was clearly put out by the delay as I climbed into the driver’s seat. “The vegetables will be in the trash before we get there, and now we have spoiled groceries leaking all over my trunk.” I glanced after the girl, and Grandma leaned forward to follow my line of vision, adding matter-of-factly, “That little Jordan girl. It will be a miracle if something terrible doesn’t happen to her before she’s grown.”

“What was she doing on the road?” I asked, ignoring the ire in her tone.

Grandma tipped her chin up and righted herself in her seat like a judge at a hanging trial. “Well, probably going after cigarettes for her granny. She’s a big fat woman and too lazy to get out of the house. Has emphysema so bad she can’t walk to the mailbox, but it doesn’t stop her from buying cigarettes.” She pointed a finger into the air and then at me. “And I’ll tell you what else. They take welfare. Spend it on cigarettes and potato chips. Just white trash—that’s all. That little girl’s been sent home from school for lice probably a half-dozen times.”

The thought made my skin crawl. “Where is her mother?”

Grandma huffed out a long sigh as if even telling the story were a waste of time. “Ran away to St. Louis and got herself pregnant by some Mexican or Indian or maybe even a Negro man. No one knows, and she didn’t either. Then she died on drugs and left that baby for her gran to raise. They’re just no better than white trash. Hurry up, Katie. I have to get to the grocery.”

“Where does she live?” I asked, keeping the car at a moderate speed. One near miss was enough.

Grandma craned forward to glance at the speedometer, huffed, then gave me a blank look in the rearview mirror. “Where does who live?”

“That little girl on the bike.”

“Oh,” she muttered absently, her mind obviously drifting. “Down Mulberry Road in an awful little hovel that ought to be condemned. Larry Leddy rents it to them, and he ought to be ashamed. Needs to be torn down. You can see it across the river bottom from our place. Katie, Land sakes, slow down. Do you know you went forty-five around that curve? No need to rush us into an accident.”

And so it went the rest of the way to town.
Speed up, Katie. Slow down. Land sakes. Curve ahead. Joshua needs cereal, but no pacifier.
And an occasional,
The Jordans are white trash. Welfare ought to haul them away. Land sakes, what’s wrong with the world?

F
EW things smell worse than rotten vegetables. When we began our salvage operation in the back room of the grocery store, my mood matched the stench—completely foul. I set Josh’s carrier as far away from the smell as I could and reluctantly started sorting through some apples with one finger.

But as we went along, I started to see the humor in Grandma and me digging through bins of spoiled fruit and bags of rotten potatoes like a couple of vagrants. No one at work would ever believe this was how I had spent my vacation.

When Grandma found something good, she would cry out as if she’d discovered a gold nugget: “Ah-hah! Here is a perfectly good orange. Not a mark on it. Can you believe anyone would throw such a thing in the trash?” or “Um-hum, um-hum, look at how many good potatoes are left in these bags. I thought so. We can store these in the cellar and have them all winter. Terrible how much people will waste these days. In my day . . .”

Meanwhile, I sorted through bags of apples, trying not to laugh and not to breathe at the same time. When we were done, we had netted about a half-dozen oranges, slightly bruised; two bushels of apples, rotten only in places; some yellow stalks of celery; four cucumbers, shriveled on one end; and enough potatoes to feed an army.

Grandma was giddy. We would not starve over the long winter ahead, or go into debt to buy potatoes. She went into the store to thank Shorty, the grocer, while I loaded down the trunk of the old Buick, then picked up Josh and drove around front to wait for her. She was still inside talking, so Josh and I sneaked over to the hardware store to buy a can of paint and a brush for the utility room. I tucked it in the trunk under the baskets, then sat with Josh on the bench by the curb, enjoying another unseasonably warm day.

Taking a deep breath of the clean Ozark air, I gazed at the town, sleepy at midafternoon on a Saturday. It looked like a picture postcard, an ancient native-stone town nestled amid oak trees on the banks of the Gasconade River. Hindsville probably hadn’t changed much since its founding over a hundred years before. The storefronts, brownstone with neatly painted porches and trim, were built around a picturesque central square with stone walkways and a gazebo where folks still came on Saturday nights to pick guitars, fiddle, and sing.

I had vague memories of going there a few times as a child—twirling in a floral-print dress on the grass in front of the bandstand. The memory made me feel warm and grounded. There is something special about a place that smells and sounds and feels like your childhood. Hindsville was the place where I bought ice cream cones at the drugstore and sat on the curb to eat them. The place where Mom and I bought new school shoes from the dry goods store at the end of every summer visit. It was the center of nearly every tradition I remembered about my family—the only place where the four of us were together with no one in a hurry to go somewhere.

I’d never realized I missed it. Throughout my adult years, I’d never felt a need to return. Too slow. Too boring. No skyscrapers. No shopping mall.

My last memory of Hindsville was of coming for my mother’s funeral at the family cemetery next to the farm. Ben and I had stayed only three days. Three quiet, solemn days in which all of us looked for someone to blame for Mom’s car accident. Three days in which we fell apart instead of coming together . . .

So why did I now feel an overwhelming sadness that I would probably never return to Hindsville? This Christmas would be the end of it. The end of the farm. The end of that nagging guilt that Grandma was here alone and no one ever visited her. After Christmas, Grandma would be settled in a nursing home near Aunt Jeane . . .

My mind couldn’t frame the picture.

The chimes rang three o’clock on the Baptist church next door, and I stopped to listen, looking at the glittering stained-glass image of a dove landing in God’s hands. Brother Baker stood on the front steps and waved at me, then walked across the alley to Shorty’s. I stood up, hoping Grandma would come out before Brother Baker got around to loading on the Christian guilt about Ben and me not being churchgoers.

“Well, your husband is all settled in with his computer,” he announced as he stepped onto the walk.

“That’s wonderful,” I said, thinking how much Brother Baker seemed to have aged. My mind conjured a fleeting image of him in a much younger state, red hair instead of gray, dunking me in the baptismal pool behind the pulpit. “We sure appreciate this. Grandma’s farm doesn’t seem to be Internet-friendly.”

Brother Baker chuckled, then gave me a round-cheeked smile that made the essence of my childhood stronger. “Well, you know, we haven’t quite joined the modern era around here.”