Ana Rainwater lives with her husband in Texas. She has a Ph.D. in literature, teaches university literature and writing courses, and has published a number of essays and scholarly articles. “Night Rose” is her first foray into fiction. Ana wishes to note that in real life her mother is a very nice woman, although she did in fact present Ana with a crowbar and super-size coffee can on the day she got her driver’s license.
On the August day I turned sixteen and got my driver’s license, my mother presented me with an empty Folger’s can and a crowbar, right there in the DPS parking lot.
“If the car breaks down, lock the doors and wait for me to come find you,” she said in the clear, carrying, Southern aristocrat voice she so carefully cultivated. “Don’t get out, no matter what. If you have to pee, use the coffee can.”
Teenage self-consciousness was as alien to my mother as any other form of self-doubt. I glanced around surreptitiously. Except for an elderly woman trying to negotiate the curb with her walker, we were alone with the flagpoles, cars, and warning signs reminding the public what not to do on government property.
Peremptory as always, my mother held out the coffee can. “It even has a lid,” she said.
“Aw, Mother—” I began, eyeing it with distaste as she forced it into my hands.
She cut me off with a flick of her wrist, the silk sleeve of her elegant blouse making the motion imperious instead of just bossy.
“No arguments,” she said. “Remember what happened to Sandy Bontke.”
Sandy Bontke got pregnant on the high school chorus trip to Wichita Falls, according to the school grapevine, or else maybe behind the gym during the last basketball game of the school year, but my mother pooh-poohed such mundane theories. As the Bontkes’ nearest neighbor, she felt she had a right to an opinion, never mind that her shadow never once had darkened the Bontkes’ door.
“It was the night she got that flat tire,” Mother insisted. “Some man stopped to help her, and he raped her in the dark.”
No one else, not even Sandy’s own mother, had ever put forth a rape theory, but my mother was adamant. “It had to be rape in the dark,” she said. “What man in his right mind would sleep with Sandy if he could see her?”
“That isn’t very nice, Mother,” I replied uncomfortably, again scanning the parking lot now that she’d moved from bodily functions to sex. Secretly, I liked Sandy Bontke and was sorry for her troubles, though certainly Sandy was a bit unfinished by my mother’s standards. Then again, wasn’t everyone?
My mother put her hand on her slender hip—the hand not holding the crowbar—and fixed me with her cool blue gaze.
“Nice has nothing to do with it,” she retorted calmly, then began to elaborate with her own particular brand of logic. “Sandy Bontke is young enough to know better. When a girl that age goes out of her way to look frumpy, she’s obviously a lesbian, or worse. Any man who got a good look at her would know immediately.”
Her eyes ran slowly down my own less-than-spectacular figure, and she nodded shortly. “You’ll do,” she said. “You look like you mean to be a woman one day. Sandy Bontke looks as if she means to be a mule. As I’m sure you know, mules are asexual, unable to reproduce. Biologically speaking, it’s amazing she got pregnant.”
My upbringing was rather short on the milk of human kindness.
“Stop thinking about Sandy Bontke,” my mother said then, impatiently, as if she weren’t the one who had introduced the subject. Her glance rested on the DPS sign set in the pavement near us, and she smiled as a pleasing thought occurred to her.
“Sandy Bontke is carrying the seed of a criminal,” she said. “It would be a blessing if she lost that baby.”
Horrified, I stared at my mother. She shifted her hips in their fashionably thin skirt and waved cheerfully to a trooper leaving the building, then turned her attention back to me.
“Perhaps I’ll take her some flowers,” she said brightly. “Now, pay attention. This is important highway safety.”
With a snakelike twist, my mother swung the crowbar, still in its protective blue plastic wrap, up between my legs. I shrieked and jumped back just in time, feeling the pointed teeth of the crowbar almost catch on the thick crotch seam of my faded jeans. For a moment, I was speechless with indignation.
“Mother,” I finally said, almost stuttering. “You could hurt somebody!”
This was a feeble response even for me, but actual physical assault was a novelty. Did this mean I could hit her back? The disgraceful thought flitted through my head and instantly was gone. This was, after all, my mother.
She tilted her head and regarded me as if I weren’t quite bright. “Exactly,” she replied, exaggerated patience dripping from every word. “Hurting someone is exactly the point. If you’d been a boy, I’d have got you. See, you’ve got to start low and swing upward, fast. Don’t hesitate, and don’t you ever raise that crowbar up above your head and swing it down—a newborn baby could block that move. Go ahead. Block it.”
With that, she brought the crowbar down on my head.
The night wanderings began a few days later. They started because of the headaches, which led to nightmares, which led to insomnia. One night I stared for hours at the breeze-blown curtain, afraid to turn on the light or pace the floor lest I wake my mother and deprive her of her beauty sleep. From the open window, wafting on the night air, came the scent of my mother’s flowers, and claustrophobia overwhelmed me. As silently as a vapor, I pulled on clothes and sneakers and swung a leg out my second-story window.
The fact that we lived thirty miles from town and I bought my own gas took some of the initial thrill out of the escapade, and besides, I couldn’t figure out how to start the car without waking my brothers or my ever-vigilant mother. But hours of silence persuaded me that the night had value of its own, separate and apart from whatever I might do in it. I grew accustomed to the black-and-white world of moonlight, a world washed clean of the gaudy colors of day.
After that first night alone in the velvety darkness, I was hooked.
Soon I perfected my Indian walk, one foot placed soundlessly in front of the ocher, rolling smoothly heel to toe. Without disturbing a rabbit or silencing the crickets, I haunted the cowless cow pastures, looking for arrowheads in the moonlight.
We had only a handful of near neighbors, none of them kids my age except for Sandy Bontke, who was pregnant and gone by summer’s end, so for a long time I ignored the potential of other people’s houses. Shadows came and went with the rising and falling of the moon, and I was just another shadow, quieter and less noticeable than most.
Until the night I found a use for the coffee can.
It had been almost two years since my mother hit me with the crowbar, and my hair had grown back out to shoulder length, more than sufficiently hiding the scars from twelve stitches in my scalp. In the two-inch-long gash where the crowbar had hit, the hair came back a whitish blonde, startling against the dark brown of my natural hair. Mother assured me it looked very chic.
By that time, she and I weren’t speaking much. I was seventeen; she was menopausal. The Hormone Zone, my younger brother called our house, and I thought it was a credit to his ten-year-old intelligence that he noticed the unspoken tensions during the marginal hours before Mother went to work and after she came home. She divided the stress up nicely: the mornings were devoted to criticizing my appearance, the evenings to fixing it. My rebellion took less direct forms.
Some evenings Mother would insist on rolling my damp hair on those pink sponge rollers, standing behind me, staring balefully at my youthful reflection in the mirror, gripping the comb and brush like weapons. Later at night I’d unroll my hair, sometimes all of it, sometimes just part of it, pleased the next morning by the resulting vagaries.
“Your head looks like a rat’s nest,” she’d say as I hurried out the door for school.
“It came undone during the night,” I’d reply, the picture of teenage innocence.
Then it was June, full summer, the summer before my senior year. Somebody had to stay with my little brother during the summer break, so I couldn’t get a job in town where all my friends from school were minding counters, flipping burgers, or mowing yards. Instead, I worked at home tending our large garden, which meant weeding, fertilizing, thinning, staking, tying up, watering, harvesting, canning, and freezing. Benjy helped some, but he was easily distracted, and I didn’t begrudge him his free time. Besides, I felt a sort of affinity for the poor mundane vegetables and tended them with dedication, growing browner and browner in the Texas sun despite my care with hats and sunscreen.
One day the wind got up, and though it was windy, it was still hot, as if someone had turned a heater on during a hundred-degree day. It kept blowing all day long as I worked, antagonizing my restless blood, and in a moment of abandon I severed the neck of my mother’s prized cherry tomato plant with a single neat stroke of my hoe.
Standing there in the heat, I knew I’d pay for my recklessness later. Sure enough, upon her arrival home, Mother stared me down over the top of her designer sunglasses and remarked haughtily, “You treat my garden like a hired hand would, so I shouldn’t be surprised that you look like one.”
By evening when I went indoors, the wind’s whistling cadence seemed as taunting as a demon’s laughter, and my very blood felt hot from the long day in the sun. Hours before my mother and brother went to bed, I knew I’d be going out that night. I knew it was time.
At midnight, I slipped out my second-floor window, shimmied down the rose trellis, and carefully stepped over my mother’s beautifully manicured border of day lilies. The full moon seemed to give as much heat as the sun, and under my plain white men’s T-shirt I had already begun to sweat.
This was the night I’d been waiting for since the day I was too stupid, too distracted by whispers of evil, to duck my mother’s blow.
“Weren’t you listening?” was the first thing she said to me when I regained consciousness in the ambulance. Then she turned to the state trooper who was riding along with us, giving him the full benefit of her dark-lashed gaze. “I told her even a baby could protect herself from what I was going to do!”
But I had been listening too well.
In the shadowed darkness I gazed around the yard, noting every bank of flowers, each tended by my mother’s own manicured hands. Lavender, blue monkshood, foxglove, bleeding hearts, lupine, delphinium. So many to choose from, so many odd flowers belonging to milder climates, coaxed along like puny children, pampered and prompted to grow. But these held only a cursory, reminiscent interest for me tonight. My purpose lay behind me, whence I’d come.
The white of the house was blinding in the moonlight, and the scent of the roses was nauseatingly strong. Perhaps the excessive heat drew out their fragrance; perhaps they sweated it out like blood. I stared at their disgusting domesticity, at the way they clung to the house. Pretty little roses, the flower everybody loved. The world’s most popular flower, or so my mother claimed.
Standing there by the defenseless roses, I considered the demands of my plan. Any noise inside the house my mother would hear; the contents of the tiny garden shed held nothing of use. Then I remembered the survival supplies my mother had placed in my ancient Plymouth Duster, and I smiled.
Silently I crept around the house to my car and collected the coffee can. Returning to the rose trellis, I carefully stripped each and every sweet little blood-red bloom from the thorny, climbing branches. Climbing roses don’t have thick stems, so I could manage easily without the garden shears, but still, my fingers were bleeding from a score of small wounds before I’d finished.
The coffee can was giant-sized—either my mother severely overestimated the capacity of my bladder or else she planned to wait a good long time before coming to find me—but though I packed the roses down tight, crushing their petals against the silvery metal, I had to make three trips before the trellis housed only desolate, prickly canes.
Three quarter-mile trips up the asphalt road, walking in the windswept, sultry darkness. Three trips ready to climb down into the bar ditch and scurry under the barbed wire fence at the sight of headlights, which never came. Three trips keeping an eye out for cover in the fields, a cactus patch, a scraggly mesquite. But the trips were uneventful.
The Bontkes’ house was silent as a womb deprived of life, was perhaps as empty. I’d heard that Mr. Bontke’s drinking problem had worsened after Sandy’s trouble, that he drove out to Impact and sat in front of the liquor store until dawn. It’s tough being a drunk when the nearest town is dry.
Where Mrs. Bontke went in the evenings, nobody was saying. Maybe she visited Sandy. Or maybe she had a friend in town, someone to keep her company on long, hot nights like this one. Maybe they played cards, I thought as I strode down the deserted farm-to-market road, or maybe they shot pool. Maybe they made virgin daiquiris and danced on the back porch. Mrs. Bontke had frowsy blondish hair, just like Sandy’s, and eyes that accepted what they saw. She looked like she wouldn’t object to company, even less-than-perfect company, maybe somebody who smoked or chewed tobacco, or who forgot and took the Lord’s name in vain when he blackened a thumbnail.
Unlike my own mother.
I took each can of crushed roses, guiltily thankful that the Bontkes’ dog had got hit by a pickup last winter, and I spread the blooms around the house, lining the perimeter of Sandy’s home with blood-red blossoms.
Then I went home, climbed up the beautifully denuded rose trellis, and went to bed.
It wasn’t until late the next day that my mother noticed the vandalism.
“I declare!” she said, coming into the kitchen where I was fixing supper. “My roses are all gone!”
Busily stirring gravy on the stove, I kept my eyes down and remarked nonchalantly, “That’s odd. Maybe the heat got to them. It’s an awful hot summer.”
“No,” my mother said impatiently. “I mean gone, really gone. My roses have simply disappeared.”
My little brother walked into the kitchen as she spoke and began humming the theme to The Twilight Zone.
“Aliens abduct Texas roses,” he said in what he thought was a sinister voice. Poor kid wouldn’t sound more sinister than a mouse for a good three years, and even then I bet he’d have to go through all that squeaking first. Benjy, like me, wouldn’t be the son to coast through adolescence gracefully. At least I didn’t have a gorgeous older sister to live up to, whereas poor Benjy would always be in my older brother Mark’s shadow, at least if my mother had anything to say about it.
“Shut your mouth, Benjamin,” my mother said, irritated.
I felt sorry for Benjy, so I laughed at him and continued his game. “Scientists yesterday were stunned to note the deflowering of every red climber in the state—” I paused. “What are your roses called? Blaze?”
“Don Juan,” she said absently. “As you well know. Stop being silly, you two. Come see what I mean.”
“Can’t, unless you want to stand here and stir the gravy.”
She took the slotted spoon from me. “Go on,” she said, turning up the heat. That would make lumps in the gravy, but I supposed it was the price I’d have to pay for my fun last night. Benjy and I shoved open the screen door and went out back.
“Wow!” he said, gazing at the white trellis with awe. “They really are gone. What do you suppose happened?”
“Hmm. I don’t know. Do rabbits eat roses?”
“Dumbbell,” he said, shoving me affectionately. “Rabbits sure don’t climb trellises. Even the roses up top are gone.”
“You’re right, “I replied. “What do you think happened?”
He shrugged, already losing interest. “Mom probably went whacko and deadheaded them all without noticing,” he said. “You know how she gets when she’s on a tear.”
Then his eyes lit up. “But if they weren’t dead when she did it, it wasn’t deadheading. It was liveheading.”
“Beheading,” I offered.
For the rest of the summer, every time that rose produced so much as a bud, I’d pinch it off and carry it up the road to the Bontkes’. Once I let the bush produce a good crop of blossoms, and Mom was thrilled. She’d decided some mysterious pest was to blame, perhaps grasshoppers or birds, and never seemed to notice that the flowers always disappeared during the night. Then I cropped the blooms again, carried them petal-light up the road in my coffee can, and poured them across the hood of the Bontkes’ station wagon.
All the night walking firmed up my figure some, and Mom started making approving noises.
“You keep this up, maybe Mark will bring some of his friends home from college to meet you,” she said one Saturday evening, back from her work at the Dillards’ cosmetic counter.
“I don’t think I’d like any of Mark’s friends,” I replied, though really I had nothing against my brother save for his genetic inability to stand up to my mother. I would save Benjy from that disintegration of personality, that gradual paralysis in the face of my mother’s gale-force will.
My mother snorted. “That’s what girls always say when they think they don’t stand a chance,” she said. “Here, I bought some extra eggs. Every morning I want you to separate one and use the yolk on your face. It’ll clear up your complexion. Egg yolks are high in vitamin A. Leave it on ten minutes and rinse with warm water, and don’t scrub dry with the towel. Just pat gently, and then put on some light moisturizer. Don’t use regular hand lotion. I’ll get you some Oil of Olay with my employee discount.”
She was proud of that discount, of that job, of the fact that the other “enhancement consultants” were twenty years younger than her. It gave her a kick to try her beauty treatments on poor little me, hoping aloud that I’d improve enough to appeal to some rising young man, someone like my brother, who had been shipped off to college despite all obstacles. Nothing would prevent her son from attaining an education, she said to all and sundry—nothing and no one, not even Mark himself. She and she alone was the mother, and she knew best.
That night, for good measure, I stripped her irises and carried them to Sandy’s house.
The summer got longer, and hotter, and the more my mother tried to prepare me for what she was pleased to call “a woman’s life,” the more I walked the sweltering night. During the day I was too tired to do anything but manual labor; if I sat down, I directly fell asleep.
So I worked slowly, half in a stupor, unable to take long naps for fear that Benjy would say something about my lethargy in front of Mother. In a daze I worked, and sweated, and thought about my perfectionist mother and her influence on my brothers, my father, myself, those of us who weren’t perfect and could never hope to be.
Finally, my birthday drew near, and with pleasure I planned the present I would give myself to celebrate my freedom from minority status. At long last, it was time to use the crowbar.
The very moment when the fifth day of August became the sixth, when I was eighteen years of age and legally able to be guardian rather than guarded, I crept out of bed and out the window. Another hot night, and I welcomed the heat, let it strengthen the blood in my veins. I glided silently across the grass to the garden plot, picked up my heavy gardening gloves from the shelf in the tiny shed. Opening my car door, I bent low and removed the crowbar from where my mother had stowed it two years before, deep beneath the driver’s seat. It was the first time I’d touched the thing.
The walk to the Bontkes’ house was the most enjoyable of the entire summer. The asphalt breathed out waves of heat scored up during the day, and the stars above twinkled merrily, bright eyes that had seen everything that wasn’t seen under the sun. The stars knew, and the moon knew, and I knew. We knew who sneaked out of my mother’s house, how long ago, how often, and why. We had seen the shadow, every time.
They say that sweltering summer brings crime waves, but I was a one-woman wave of honor. My birthday present was justice.
The Bontkes’ house was, as usual, dark and silent. Both cars were gone tonight. I hoped Mrs. Bontke was at the cemetery that backed onto the Quick-Stop gas station, visiting her only child, and the beginnings of her only grandchild. It would be fitting if she were there tonight with Sandy.
Just to be safe, I rang the doorbell. It echoed in the lonely house, and I pounded on the door. When I was certain the place was deserted, I pulled a shower cap from my pocket and fitted it snugly over my hair, tucking in every single wayward strand. Then I walked around to Sandy’s window and, raising the crowbar high, brought it down with a crash through the glass. Reaching in carefully with my gloved fingers, I undid the latch and shoved the window up.
I climbed in, ever so carefully.
Then I trashed the place. I smashed mirrors, overturned furniture, dumped dresser drawers across the floor. In less than ten minutes, you’d have thought a tornado had hit.
Back in Sandy’s room, I gently laid the crowbar in the middle of the bed, along with one red rose. Its petals spilled across the coverlet like drops of blood. I reached in my pocket and pulled out the hairs I’d removed from my mother’s brush, dropping one, two, three of them randomly across the floor.
Task completed, I climbed out the window, brushed my clothes off carefully to make sure no shards of glass clung to them, and stepped deliberately in the broken glass, embedding tiny pieces in the soles of my mother’s tennis shoes.
The sheriff took longer than I’d expected, but in the end he came after supper on my eighteenth birthday. Mother was dyeing her hair when he arrived, a bit of serendipity I’ve always enjoyed. He took her fingerprints and as an afterthought mine, and asked where we’d been the night before.
“Your neighbor says you’ve been trespassing on her property all summer now,” he said to my mother, when she demanded to know what was happening. Uneasy, he shifted his tan cowboy hat from one hand to the other, glancing at me from beneath grizzled brows. He’d heard about us.
Mother stared at him, pointedly waiting for him to explain. He opened his mouth to speak, then stopped and cleared his throat. Still Mother waited, and eventually, as all men did, he gave in.
“Miz Bontke thinks you resented her daughter,” he said, setting his hat on the table and crossing his arms across his chest. It was a defensive posture, but I saw that his gaze was fixed on Mother like a hawk watching its prey. He wasn’t quite the harmless old country gent he pretended to be.
“She says that during the course of this summer you seem to have developed some sort of unhealthy fixation—she used the word obsession—with the family in general. Even claims you had something to do with Sandy’s death, though I don’t see how that could be. Even a child could tell that was suicide.”
My mother snorted.
“How dare she attempt to psychoanalyze me. Tell Mrs. Bontke she should have psychoanalyzed her daughter,” she retorted, then cast a dark glance at me. “Sounds to me like she’s the one who’s obsessed.”
“Be that as it may, ma’am, we’ll need to ask you some more questions,” the sheriff said, getting up to leave. “Especially if these prints match, and Mrs. Bontke seems sure they will. And you’d best be prepared for them newspaper reporters to be knocking on your door.”
Mother smiled grimly. “I’m prepared for anything. Come back tomorrow morning, Sheriff, and you’ll get all the answers you need, tied up neatly with a bow on top. I have no intention of living with this scandal hanging over me.”
Even I couldn’t have planned such a perfect little speech.
The sheriff shot a swift look at my mother, then put his hat on his head and turned toward me and the door. His eyes lingered on my oddly streaked hair, and I felt him hesitate, so I smiled brightly at him, willing him to believe I wasn’t afraid of my mother. For the first time in my recollection, I wasn’t.
The sheriff nodded, opened the door, and walked down the caliche path toward his car, winding his way through my mother’s flowerbeds. Tactful man, the sheriff. Only his glance at my skunk-striped hair had revealed that he remembered the crowbar incident, and not even a glance to the left or the right as he walked to his car suggested that he remembered anything else. But of course he did. I certainly did.
I would always remember watching my mother walk the caliche path among the flowers, touching gently those blossoms whose beauty, like all beauty, hides only death. From my bedroom window, I saw her gather certain blooms with her own hands, and I crept down the stairs and peered out from behind the kitchen curtains. Feeling eerily like a mouse watching the cat pursue other prey, I sneaked behind her as she walked the road to our nearest neighbors’ house, a house she had never once deigned to enter.
Sandy, not yet half through her pregnancy, was home alone.
From the shadows I watched, helpless and frightened, my stubbly hair hiding a still-aching scalp, as my mother pretended friendship. I heard her bright, joking warnings as she stood on the porch and presented her goodwill offering.
“I know you’ve been having a hard time, darling, and you’ve got far more troubles ahead, believe you me. Single parenting, no more dates or dances, and all for the baby of a man who despises you, who only wanted to see you hurt, who impregnated you in darkness and then disappeared forever. That’s what you’re carrying in your womb, sweetheart, the seeds of hatred and darkness.
“So I picked these especially for you, Sandra dear, especially and only for you. They’re pretty enough to eat, don’t you think? But you mustn’t. Are you a gardener? No? But you have heard that sometimes pregnant women get odd cravings, for tree bark or soap or whatnot. You must be sure to remember that these flowers must not be eaten. They would be very, very bad for your baby.”
Then she winked slowly and deliberately at Sandy.
That’s how close I was, close enough to see Sandy’s eyes widen, her mouth open in understanding.
“Mother Nature has answers to all a girl’s problems,” Mother said as she turned away. “There’s no reason to suffer through female trouble.”
I heard, and I understood, and I should have warned Sandy, but God help me, I was afraid of my mother and I didn’t. And only I had heard, no one else was near, no one else could tell why Sandy locked herself in the bathroom that night and ate death. Everyone knew, or pretended to know, that of course foxglove was fatal, and not just for fetuses. Sandy must have known it, too. So they assumed.
Poor Sandy, so depressed, humiliated, taking her own life. She was raped, you know.
Raped by the shadow who repeatedly stole down the road through the night, raped without a scream or a cry or a struggle, raped in pleasure and with pleasure and not raped, not raped, not raped at all, sowing the seeds of life with love and hope and pleasure. Not raped. All that long summer, not raped.
Until the second shadow came and tricked her into eating the seeds of death.
To my surprise, my mother said nothing after the sheriff left. Silently she went to bed, and after some thought, I followed suit. There could be no wandering tonight.
In the morning, we sat opposite each other at the sundrenched kitchen table, eating toast and marmalade and drinking tea—mine plain, my mother’s strongly honeyed as usual. Benjy, only moments away from freedom, was still asleep.
“I don’t understand how they knew the crowbar came from this house,” my mother said quietly, leaning back in her chair and tightening the belt of her floral silk bathrobe. “Why did they think to come fingerprint me, of all people?”
I shrugged.
But I knew, and so did Mrs. Bontke, who once had loved my mother’s flowers. And now, staring out the window at her flowerbeds, my mother knew as well. She eyed me, stretched out one perfectly manicured finger, and stroked the silken petals of the freshly picked bouquet on the table. Then she opened her mouth to speak, but stopped at the crunching sound of tires on the drive.
“My, the sheriff is prompt,” she said, pushing back her chair and standing up. “And me not even dressed yet. Well, it won’t take us long to straighten this mess out.”
Her breakfast was all but finished. She picked up her cup of tea, glanced into it, and drained the last few drops. “I don’t know what you were thinking, missy, but you know better than to cross me,” she said. Then her hand went to her breast. Startled, she tried to set her cup down on the edge of the table but missed, and it fell to the floor with a crash.
There was a knock at the door. For an instant, I shut my eyes, readying myself to face the sheriff with the terrible news. It shouldn’t be too difficult, given her fortuitously phrased speech of the previous night. He wouldn’t be surprised that an unstable woman had chosen not to face the consequences of her increasingly irrational actions.
When I looked back at my mother, her face had paled, leaving her makeup as garish as a clown’s. She pressed one arm tightly against her stomach, held the other hand against her chest. She staggered slightly, only slightly. Then she raised her head and looked at me with a gleam in her eye. In any other woman it would have been a tear, but in my mother it was a glint of satisfaction. She would have the last word, and say it as sweetly as if she were conferring a blessing rather than a curse.
“You’re stronger than your brothers, child of my heart,” she said. “Good-bye, Rose.”