Tending Roses (7 page)

I laughed with him. “That’s not all bad.” Strangely, I meant it. “We’re enjoying the quiet.”

Brother Baker nodded as if he understood. “It has its benefits.” He reached down and rubbed Josh’s fuzzy head, then sidestepped to open the door to the grocery store as Grandma hobbled out carrying a half-dozen loaves of bread and two boxes of doughnuts.

She tipped her chin up, looking triumphant. “The bread man was going to throw these away.” She peered over the stack and realized it was Brother Baker holding the door open, not me. “Well, hello, Brother Baker. How is young Benjamin getting along?”

“Just fine, Mrs. Vongortler.” Brother Baker stood at attention like a foot soldier addressing a cavalry captain. “He’s all settled in one of those offices off the fellowship hall.”

Grandma nodded approval. “Well, very good. I guess that’s a problem solved, then.” She squared her shoulders so that she could look at Brother Baker more directly. “Now, if any of the church elders have a question about him using the facility, you have them call me.”

“I’m sure things will be fine,” Brother Baker said, then told us good-bye and scooted into the grocery store, clearly relieved to be escaping the conversation with Grandma unscathed. “You ladies have a good day now.”

Grandma nodded after him, then proceeded to the car, and the three of us headed back to the farm with our loot.

By the time we arrived and carried the baskets to the kitchen, Grandma and Josh were both exhausted. Grandma padded off to the little house to rest, and I put Josh in his crib, then retrieved the paint from the car and started on the utility room.

An hour and a half later, the room was greatly improved, and I had touched up around the outside doorframe and ceiling too. It looked pretty good, except for the burn damage on the wall where the ironing board had been. Since I know nothing about replastering walls, there wasn’t much I could do about that, so I set the new stand-alone ironing board in front of the hole and went outside to clean the paintbrush and put the paint away. I heard Grandma coming in the front door as I went out the back, so I hurried to get out of sight. The less Grandma was reminded of the fire damage, the better.

When I came onto the porch again, she was in the front yard near the rose trellis, carefully pruning the winter-browned vines with the tenderness of a loving parent. A pair of squirrels, accustomed to her throwing out corn, dashed back and forth around her feet, looking for food. Every so often, she paused and reached into her pocket, tossing out a handful of seed to keep them busy.

Her hand reaching into the printed blue polyester brought a memory to me with startling clarity. I could see her in that very apron on some long-ago summer day, tossing bits of corn to the guinea hens that years ago roamed the farmyard. In my ears, I heard the sputter of the old red tractor and the rattle of the wagon puttering down the lane. I could see my grandfather motion to me, then stop the tractor and wait by the gate. I remembered running across the lawn with my hand in Grandma’s and laughing when she swung me into the wagon for a ride. As we left, I saw her squeeze Grandpa’s hand and give him a peck on the cheek.

Then the memory dashed away like one of Grandma’s squirrels.

I found myself standing with one hand pressed against the screen. The memory was one I never knew I had, from a summer visit when I was only three or four years old. It was the only recollection I had of my grandparents together—surprising in its tenderness, considering that no one in the family ever talked about how they were toward each other. I guess I’d never thought that they might have been in love, and never considered how truly sad it would be to go on for almost thirty years after the one you loved was gone. I wondered if that was the source of the melancholy that had been with Grandma ever since I had known her. I remembered her as solemn and rigid, fussy about things and critical of people, often difficult to be around. I just assumed she had always been that way. I could not remember a time when she would have burst into laughter and run across the lawn with me on her arm.

Leaving her there with her roses and her squirrels, I went inside to fix myself a cup of tea and air out the utility room. The kitchen was quiet and peaceful, no overflowing dishwater or lakes of coffee on the floor—just long rays of late-afternoon sunlight streaming through the tall west window, and the dishes still there from lunch, waiting to be washed, and several baskets of slightly unappealing fruits and vegetables waiting to be stored, or canned, or whatever Grandma had in mind. Choosing to ignore the mess a little longer, I poured the tea, then turned to sit at the table. There, as if it had appeared while my back was turned, was Grandma’s book. It reminded me that I’d never confessed snooping the day before, or told her how much the yellow bonnet story meant to me. I wasn’t sure why I hadn’t mentioned it—perhaps because I was embarrassed about snooping, or maybe afraid she’d be angry. One thing I had learned on my childhood visits to the farm was not to touch her things.

Still, if the book were private, she wouldn’t leave it lying around. . . .

I subdued my conscience in a flash and opened the book with curiosity and a sense of anticipation, hoping to read the story about the yellow bonnets again.

But the pages of the story had been removed from the book as if they had never existed.
Milk
,
bread
, and
oleo
had replaced the words that had shown me children running through yellow fields.

“A shopping list,” I muttered, feeling strangely let down and even more guilty. My theory that Grandma had written the story for me to read was a wash. If it were for me, she wouldn’t have taken it out of the book and put it away.

The next page was blank except for dots of ink that had bled through from the page after. Turning the page, I found writing that quivered like Grandma’s hands.

“Time For Tending Roses,”
I whispered and thought of the beautiful rose garden that bloomed on the lawn in summertime. It had been there for as long as I could remember, carefully manicured, every bloom perfect—just as perfect and neat as everything else in Grandma’s household.

I read the title again, then dove into the story with a strange hunger for the words.

The sense of sadness in those last words was overwhelming. For a moment, I glimpsed my own future, considered a day when I would sit alone in a quiet house trying to fill my time, at the end of things rather than at the beginning. The beginning of a journey is always uncertain, but with uncertainty comes hope. Never had I appreciated the value of that. Through all of my adult life, I had wanted to know exactly where I was going and what path to take to get there. I had never considered the beauty of where I was. Sitting there in Grandma’s kitchen, holding her book, I thought of her as a young woman not able to see that something wonderful was passing. Not appreciating the noise until she was surrounded by silence.

For the first time in my life, I was very glad just to be where I was.

Joshua stirred upstairs, and I left the kitchen, setting Grandma’s book on the table, just as I had found it. When I reached the upstairs bedroom, Joshua was lying in the crib, stretching his hands into the air and watching faded plastic horses dance on an old crib toy Grandma had hung above the bed. Gazing at him from the doorway, I wondered if my grandmother had once stood in that very spot watching my father in that old wooden crib, and if my mother had once stood there watching me.

The feeling of missing my mother was suddenly overwhelming. The six years since her death seemed to have passed in the blink of an eye. Here at the farm my grief felt fresh. This was the place where I remembered her most, where she was never busy with patient consultations and college courses. This was where I
loved
her most, where we picked blackberries and baked cobblers and roasted hotdogs on the stone grill out back, where we really spent time together. I wondered if she had felt that way about it too, or if she even found time to think.

Josh grew restless, and I picked him up and sat in the rocking chair by the window, feeling the weight of him on my chest and gazing at the waning day—thinking of Grandma’s story about the roses and about the fact that time is so invisible, you never see it passing.

I was drifting somewhere among the crimson-rimmed clouds when Joshua grew impatient and made it clear he was ready for a bottle. Leaving my thoughts behind, I went downstairs to feed him and fix supper. The book was gone from the table, and Grandma was sitting there drinking a cup of coffee, looking slightly chilled. She reached for Josh and fed him while I worked on creating a casserole from leftover breakfast sausage and some of our salvaged vegetables. The kitchen was heavy with the odor of paint from the utility room, but Grandma didn’t mention it.

Ben walked in the door just as I was putting the plates on the table. Hanging his coat on the hook, he looked over his shoulder with a frown. “Why does it smell like paint in here?”

I gave him a warning glance as I finished setting the table and started serving the food. “Must be the casserole.”

He knitted his brows in confusion, but just nodded, afraid to say anything else. “O.K.” And he sat down, wisely keeping silent until he could survey the lay of the land.

We sat there quietly for a while, at peace until Grandma heard a sound somewhere in the house and decided to start up about the plumbing. “That septic drain is going to back up in the cellar, I can tell by the way it sounds.” She paused in the middle of a bite of casserole, listening. “Oh, if it backs up, it will be expensive to fix. It is too much paper, that’s all. Too much paper down it with so many people in the house. We will all have to be more careful, and no . . .” A semi roared by on the county road, and she paused in midsentence, then seemed to lose her train of thought. “Oh, those awful trucks. The way they come racing through. That little Jordan girl might be on the road.”

“Grandma,” I scolded. “Stop worrying.”

She gave no indication that she’d heard me, but turned to Ben instead and reported, “We nearly ran right over the little Jordan girl today.”

“Grandma!” I squealed.

Ben gave me a quizzical look.

Rubbing the growing ache in my head, I rolled my eyes. “It was nothing,” I said to Ben. And to Grandma, “Eat your casserole.”

Ben smirked at me, trying not to laugh, then bent over his plate shaking his head. Grandma huffed and ate some casserole, then decided to fill Ben in on the day’s successful salvage operation. That cheered her up, and by the time we finished eating, she had a gleam in her eye and a plan for how the three of us could get the potatoes stored in the cellar and the apples peeled, boiled, and made into apple butter and preserves. To my complete amazement, Ben complied, and we spent a couple of hours storing up food for the next century. After he had carried the potatoes to the cellar, he even helped to mash and strain the apples. The extra helpfulness and the overly cheerful tone of his voice told me that he was up to something, but I didn’t dare ask about it in front of Grandma. Whatever it was, he knew I wasn’t going to like it, and he was trying to butter me up.