Tending Roses

INDIAN wisdom says our lives are rivers. We are born somewhere small and quiet and we move toward a place we cannot see, but only imagine. Along our journey, people and events flow into us, and we are created of everywhere and everyone we have passed. Each event, each person, changes us in some way. Even in times of drought we are still moving and growing, but it is during seasons of rain that we expand the most—when water flows from all directions, sweeping at terrifying speed, chasing against rocks, spilling over boundaries. These are painful times, but they enable us to carry burdens we could never have thought possible.

This I learned from my grandmother, when my life was rushing with torrential speed and hers was slowly ebbing into the sea. I think it was God’s plan that we came together at this time. To carry each other’s burden. To remind ourselves of what we had been and would someday become.

A winter rain was falling the day we drove the potholed gravel drive to the Missouri farmhouse my great-grandparents had built on a bluff above Mulberry Creek. As straight as one of the grand porch pillars, and as much a part of the house, Grandma watched as we wound through the rivers of muddy water flowing down the hill. She frowned and wrung her hands as the car tires spun, throwing gravel against the ancient trees along the drive. No doubt she was worried that we would damage her prized silver maples.

A sick feeling started in my throat and fell to my stomach like a swallowed ice cube. I looked at Ben in the driver’s seat and the baby asleep in the car seat behind us. This would probably be the longest December and the worst Christmas of our lives.

It would only be a matter of time before Grandma figured out why we had come and war broke out. Even now, she was looking at us with mild suspicion, no doubt calculating why we were arriving three weeks early for Christmas. She wouldn’t be fooled for long into thinking this was just a casual visit. That was the wishful thinking of a bunch of relatives hoping to postpone the problem of Grandma Rose until they were off work for the Christmas holiday.

In a perfect world, all of them would have been rushing to Grandma’s side, whether it was convenient or not. In a perfect world, I wouldn’t have been looking at my grandmother with a sense of dread, and I wouldn’t have been looking at my baby and wondering if the trip was too much for him and if it was wise to take him so far from his doctors. In a perfect world, babies are born healthy, and medical bills don’t snowball into the tens of thousands of dollars, and grandmothers don’t almost burn down their houses, and family members don’t go years without speaking to one another, and Christmas is a time to look forward to. . . .

But those of us who aren’t perfect do the best we can. With me on maternity leave and Ben able to do most of his work in structural design anywhere there was a computer and a phone line, we were the logical choice to stay at the farm the next few weeks and make sure Grandma Rose didn’t burn down the rest of the house before the family could figure out what to do about her.

But I never imagined how I would feel when we turned the corner to the house. I never thought the sight of my grandmother, ramrod straight on the porch, would turn me into that six-year-old girl who hated to enter that house. It wasn’t Grandma I hated. It was the house: the constant fuss about scuffing the floors, and scraping the walls, and tracking mud on the rugs—as if the house were more important than the children in it.

“If it weren’t raining, she’d be climbing into the driver’s seat.” I was joking, of course—mostly. I wondered if Ben had any inkling of how difficult she could be. He hadn’t been around her much in the ten years we’d been married. He’d never seen her standing at the door inspecting people’s shoes for mud like a drill sergeant, or putting coasters under people’s drinks, or listening to the plumbing to make sure no one was flushing too much toilet paper. He didn’t know that food was forbidden in the living room and that you were not allowed to step from the bath until every ounce of water was drained from the tub and toweled from your body. And that the towels then had to be folded in triplicate and hung on the bar immediately so they would not mildew. . . .

He didn’t have a clue what I was thinking. He grinned as he put the car in park, stretched his neck, and combed his fingers through the dark curls of his hair. “We made it. I’m ready for a rest. Then I need to get the computer plugged in and see if there’s any more word on that Randolph stores job.”

The undercurrent of worry about money was unmistakable. Since Joshua’s birth, it was the unspoken nuance of every conversation we had. It was all Ben thought about. He didn’t have time to consider how we were going to get along with our new landlady. Besides, he always got along with everybody. It was one of the things I loved and hated about him.

Sun broke through the clouds as we covered Joshua and hurried to the porch. Grandma waited for us at the steps and pushed open the screen, holding around her shoulders a psychedelic afghan I had made in art class. The picture of her standing there in my awful crocheted creation with her hair flying in the wind made me smile.

Coming closer, I noticed how much she had aged, how her cheeks, once plump and naturally blushed, were now hollow and pale. Her shoulders, once straight, now bent forward as she moved. I realized how long it had been since I had come to the farm, and I felt an intense pang of guilt. Six years. Gone in the blink of an eye. The last time I came was for my mother’s funeral.

Grandma squinted as we drew nearer, as if she were looking at strangers. “Katie? Is that you?” She craned forward and took on a look of recognition. “Oh, yes, I’d know those Vongortler brown eyes anywhere. You’re just as pretty as ever . . . but you’ve let your hair grow long.”

The last part sounded like a complaint, and I wasn’t sure what to say. I found myself self-consciously smoothing the wisps of shoulder-length dark hair into my hair clip. I wondered how she had expected me to look.

Grandma didn’t wait for my reply. “My word! I’ve been worried sick.” She looked as if she’d been walking the floors since before dawn. “I expected you this morning, and here it is two o’clock, and with this rain going on, I just thought the road was icy and you had slipped into the ditch.”

“Grandma, I told you we wouldn’t be here until afternoon.” I would have blamed her forgetfulness on the stroke, except that for as long as I could remember she’d been purposely forgetting things she didn’t want to hear. I took comfort in the fact that in this respect she hadn’t changed. “Besides, it’s fifty-five degrees. There is no ice.”

She gave me a blank smile that told me she wasn’t digesting a word. “I thought for sure you’d be here for lunch. Katie, you look like you could use a little farm cooking. You’re far too thin, just as you always were. Now, I’ve got biscuits, some green beans, green-pea salad, and a good roast, but it’s cold now. Oh, look at the baby!” Joshua was still sound asleep in his carrier. “I’ll put it in the oven and warm it up.”

Ben shot me a grin and crossed his eyes as she went through the side door into the kitchen. His crooked grin made me laugh, and I coughed to cover it up as Grandma looked suspiciously over her shoulder.

I stopped, taken aback by the extent of the smoke damage. The sheriff hadn’t been exaggerating when he called Aunt Jeane in St. Louis to warn her that Grandma’s mental slips were getting dangerous—more dangerous than her occasionally puttering to town in the old car she refused to part with, even though the doctor had told her she shouldn’t drive anymore and she had promised Aunt Jeane she wouldn’t. She had also promised Aunt Jeane she would use a timer to make sure the iron and the coffeepot weren’t left on, but in truth, what she had tried to pass off as “the iron getting too hot” had been a potentially serious fire. The iron must have been left unattended for hours.

Still talking, she walked past the soot, as if oblivious to it, ignoring the evidence that she’d almost burned down the utility room a few days before. “Well, come on in. It’s cold out there,” she snapped. “Now, I’ll take care of the baby and you two can just eat and rest. You can wait a while to bring in your things. Just make yourselves at home in here. I had that neighbor boy help me move some of my things to the little house out back. I’ll stay out there so as to ease the strain on that septic line here in the basement. All of us in the house might just be too much waste going down.”

She set the stoneware plates in the oven and lit the gas with a long match. “Now, I never leave this pilot running on the oven. It’s no problem to light it each time, and it saves on gas.” Closing the oven door, she paused to clean the fog from her eyeglasses, then let them hang from the chain around her neck and walked back to the table. “There now, you two just get what you need. I’ll look after the baby. He’ll surely be waking up.”

It’s strange how it’s always easier to tolerate other people’s grandparents than your own. Ben, who had been so concerned about getting to work on his computer, didn’t even raise a protest when Grandma solicited him to drive her to town for her daily grocery run and visit to the church office. Grandma wrote the church news for the local paper, and it was very important, according to her, that she stop by so as not to miss a thing. Normally, a neighbor man took her, but she had canceled him today because we were coming. And by the way, she didn’t want us to think there was anything going on between her and Oliver Mason, despite what we might hear in town. He was too old for her, had a bad leg, talked too much, and smoked cigars. She had been on her own for thirty years and had no need for an old man eating her food or messing up her house, and besides, cigar smoke would stain the ceilings, which she had paid a great deal of money to have painted. . . .

Leaning close to me, Ben fanned an eyebrow and grinned as he grabbed Joshua. Grandma insisted the baby should accompany them to town, even though I argued against it and Ben would have preferred to leave him home. It was Grandma’s firm opinion that I would be more successful in getting unpacked if Joshua went with them. Of course, the truth was she wanted to take her only great-grandchild to town and show him off to all her friends.

He laughed about her pointed denial of a romantic relationship with Oliver Mason. “Hear that?” he told Joshua. “We’re going to town with a hot babe. Hope old Oliver doesn’t decide to knock me in the head with his cane.”

The picture made me laugh even as they piled into Grandma’s old Buick and disappeared down the driveway. Watching them go, I engaged in a quick moment of mother-panic about whether Ben knew how to properly buckle Joshua’s baby carrier into the car seat. I suddenly realized that, in Joshua’s four months on earth, this was the first time he had gone somewhere without me. We’d been at the farm for only a few hours, and Grandma Rose had already kidnapped my husband and my infant son.

The house was completely still after they left except for the faint hum of the furnace. I wandered down the dogtrot, looking up the wide oak stairway where pictures of my aunts and uncles on birthdays, graduations, and wedding days had always hung. After the fire, someone had taken the pictures off the wall. The outlines of the frames were yellowed into the paint, so even though they were gone, they were still there, like ghosts.

Standing on the first step, I touched the shadows, wondering where the pictures were, and if Grandma had even noticed they were gone. But I knew she must have. Nothing out of order in the house escaped her notice.

Every inch of the place whispered of the relentless pursuit of perfection that was Grandma Rose. The house was Grandma, and Grandma was the house, married since she had come as a bachelor farmer’s bride sixty years before. I wondered how we were going to convince her to give it up, and if she could, and what would happen if she wouldn’t. I wondered what she was going to say when the family confronted her, and whether I should try to prepare her ahead of time. I wondered what would happen when all of us saw one another for the first time since my mother’s death. Six years of drifting apart puts you at opposite ends of the ocean, and it takes something cataclysmic to push you into the same port.

The uneasy feeling stayed with me through the rest of the afternoon, though I wasn’t sure why. The rain had stopped and the day turned bright and unusually warm for December. Joshua returned from town in a fine humor, and Ben was more relaxed than I had seen him in months. Only Grandma seemed to be in a foul state. Ben chuckled as he quietly told me that Oliver Mason had shown up in town and, much to Grandma’s disgust, tagged along on their rounds of the grocery store and the church—as Ben put it, like an old stray dog trailing a T-bone steak. Ben said he figured poor Oliver had nothing better to do.

It was so good to see Ben loosened up, I decided not to tell him that another enormous hospital bill was in our stack of forwarded mail. They just kept arriving. Maybe that was where my uneasy feeling came from. Even here at the farm, in the middle of nowhere, there was no escape from the hospital bills and the house payments, car payments, credit cards—all just a little behind, getting worse. Ben was right. I shouldn’t have taken this last month of unpaid family leave to be with Joshua. We couldn’t afford it. . . .

She stopped and looked at me for a moment, frowning as if she were seeing right through me. “Well, Katie, you look worn-out,” she said finally. “Why don’t you put on a sweater and come sit on the porch with me? It’s seldom we get such nice weather this time of year.”

“No, thanks,” he said without turning around. “Probably too late to talk to anyone in Chicago, anyway, but I’d better get this thing plugged in and give it a try. I need to download some plans so I can get a bid in on a job tomorrow. It’s a design for four big new Randolph stores like the one in Springfield. Can’t miss the chance at a contract like that.”

He gave Grandma one of his most charming smiles, but beneath that was the undercurrent—the one that said if he didn’t get the contract to do the structural design for the new Randolph stores, disaster was imminent.

Grandma watched him go with a narrow-eyed look, moving her lips as if she were chewing on a thought, or as if she were reading the undercurrent, too. She had that look of being just about to sink her teeth into a new worry, and Grandpa had always said that she could jump on a worry like a bulldog on a fresh bone.

Hoping to distract her with a change of scenery, I grabbed my jacket and Josh’s carrier and headed for the porch. “We’d better hurry up before the sun starts to go down and it gets cold.” The last thing she needed to be doing was worrying about us.

She followed me onto the porch, and we sat on the swing, enjoying the warmth of the Indian summer afternoon. For a moment, neither of us said anything. Grandma’s eyelids drifted downward and her head sagged, as if she were falling asleep. I had never seen her let herself drift off like that before. It was one of the habits she had always disdained in other old people. Watching her filled me with a sense of sadness and regret for having stayed away so long from the farm, and from her. I couldn’t explain it now. After my mother’s funeral, I just went back to Chicago, buried myself in my work at the Harrison Foundation, kept busy, kept moving up the ladder, kept raising more money for worthy environmental causes, and kept my mother’s unexpected death out of my mind.

Grandma’s head jerked up as Ben came through on his way back to the car for more equipment. She glanced at me with an addled look, and I pretended I hadn’t noticed her falling asleep. I stared at a pair of deer moving in a field of winter wheat in the valley below.

She cleared her throat, patting her cheeks as Ben carried a computer monitor into the house. “My goodness, that boy is a hard worker.” It almost sounded like a complaint. “But I thought the two of you were coming here for a vacation.”

My mind was on the deer. “We can’t afford a vacation,” I heard myself say, and I instantly realized my mistake. Glancing at Grandma, I saw that narrow, calculating look, and I realized she was trying to dissect our situation. “I mean, Ben has to take his contracts when they come. Randolph stores is a big chain. If he can get the structural design contract, it’ll pay really well.”

I just nodded, smiling at her because I knew better. Grandma loved to play the martyr about helping other people. The truth was that she managed her nest egg of farm-rental income and railroad stock with an iron grip. Ben and I would never have dreamed of accepting any of it, and if we did, everyone in the family would forever hear about how she’d gone without groceries for a month and sold her favorite knitting needles at auction, but was happy to do it because her children were welcome to all that she had. The truth was, she had refused to sell or deed over even an acre of the farm to anyone in the family, even after my grandfather died. The truth was, she hung on to what was hers, and she didn’t share, and she wasn’t going to give any of it up without a fight.

I turned to her, openmouthed, flame rising into my cheeks. I wondered if she had been steaming open our envelopes. She didn’t look at me, but out at the deer, her chin tilted stubbornly, her arms crossed over her chest, fingers drumming impatiently.

I took a deep breath and swallowed what I was going to say. Instead, I calmly falsified the truth. “It’s just a little hard right now with Ben new at consulting and me on unpaid leave with Joshua. There were some hospital bills that the insurance didn’t cover. It’ll be better next month when I get started back at work.”

Grandma huffed an irritated breath. “It isn’t right that mothers these days have to give over their children so quickly to go back to work. In my day we women waited at least until the children were school-aged—if we worked at all.”

Her out-of-date philosophy only tightened the knot of maternal guilt inside me. I felt the perverse need to defend myself and my whole generation. “Well, Grandma, things aren’t that way anymore. These days it takes two incomes to have a nice place to live, and cars, and money for retirement funds, college funds, and a meal out or a vacation once in a while.”

Looking at her, I was reminded of the other reason why I didn’t come back to the farm anymore. For most of my life, all I could remember was her picking fights. She had a talent for stirring up unpleasantness, she was an expert on every subject, and she felt the need to control everyone. Which was probably why my father was that way, too. I switched to the defensive to keep from being eaten alive.

“Well, these days that’s what people want, and—” I snapped my mouth shut and forced myself to take a breath. One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five. . . . I didn’t finish until I’d counted all the way to ten and calmed myself down. “It’s not that I’m dying to send Josh to day care, Grandma, but there’s a lot to consider. I’ve worked hard to get where I am with the Harrison Foundation. It’s an important job. We fund a lot of critical environmental research, and I’m the one who raises the money that funds the projects.”

I smiled and rubbed my forehead, unsure of whether to laugh or get a headache. “I don’t think we’ve ever funded a research project on hairspray killing fish, but my point is that I can’t put off going back to work forever. Ben’s income isn’t steady yet. Next year we want to sell our town house and buy a bigger house with a yard for Josh.” The list went on, up to and including paying off the hospital bills, of which Grandma didn’t even begin to know the extent. “If someone can tell me how to do all that without working, I’d like to hear about it.”

I looked at the deer, and my mind continued whirling with the problems that would face us when we returned home—day care, work, hospital bills, payments on cars, payments on the boat, payments on the house . . . My stomach started to churn, and I felt my pulse going up as it did every time I considered how we were going to keep so many plates spinning at once.

I could feel Grandma watching me, and when I turned to her she met my gaze with an extremely lucid look—as if, just for a moment, all of her mind was in the present. “Maybe you should start wanting less.”

We sat for a long time in the quiet of the waning afternoon, watching the deer come into the wheat field on the river-bottom land below. Finally, the sun fell below the edge of the blue, tree-clad hills, and the feeling of winter came into the air.

Grandma patted my hand and smiled. The hints of her former ire were gone, and I wondered if she even remembered our conversation. “Don’t you two look sweet?” She sighed, rocking forward and rising slowly to her feet. “There’s nothing more precious than a mother with a baby in her arms.” After shuffling to the screen door, she started down the steps. “I have a few things to do out in my little house. I’ll be back in a while.”

She paused on the steps and craned her neck as if I were speaking gibberish. “No, no. This is better. I don’t want to put too much strain on that sewer pipe in the basement. The little house has its own septic. I’ll just stay out there until everyone goes back home again. Then I’ll have to get back in the big house and wax the floors after everyone . . .” She turned and started down the stone path, still muttering about how the gathering crowd of family would put us all in danger of ruined floors and a sewer-system meltdown.

I let the door close and watched her go, thinking that there wouldn’t be any after Christmas. She didn’t seem to have an inkling that Aunt Jeane was looking into nursing homes in St. Louis and my father couldn’t wait to sell the farm.

I went inside to see if Ben had locked down the Randolph contract. He was sitting in front of his computer in the second-story bedroom that had once been Aunt Jeane’s. Seeing him surrounded by the white French-style furniture and the pink ruffled curtains and bedspread made me laugh.

Ben glanced sideways at me and grimaced. “I feel like Thumbelina.” He tapped the keyboard impatiently, waiting for a file to download. “But this is the only phone jack in the whole place. All the rest of the phones are hard-wired in. Not that it matters much, because I can’t get the stupid phone lines to cooperate. I keep getting bumped off the server. If this thing doesn’t straighten up, I’ll have to—”

Ben slammed his hand against the desk and closed his eyes. “Oh, shoot!” He stood up, scattering architectural blueprints onto the floor. “Shoot! Shoot! Shoot! I’ve been trying to get that file for an hour.”

Josh whimpered on my chest, and I bounced him around to keep him quiet. “Well, maybe it’ll be better in the morning,” I suggested. “It’s always hard to get on this time of the evening.”

Ben went back to the computer as if he hadn’t heard me. I hated it when he did that, and he knew it. He wasn’t in the mood to be social, and he was hoping Josh and I would leave. When we didn’t, he finally sighed and said, “I think it’s something with the phone exchange out here.”

“Oh.” It occurred to me that, if he couldn’t get his computer to log on to the Net, there was no way we would be able to stay for the next three weeks. “Well, we can call the phone company in the morning. Come downstairs and have a sandwich with us. Josh is ready to have a bottle, play a little, and go to bed.” I turned Josh around, hoping he would lure Ben in. As usual, it didn’t work.

Ben shook his head, looking grim and determined. “I’d better stay here and try this file again. I wanted to look John’s specs over tonight so I can talk to him about the Randolph job tomorrow. He was already out of the office this afternoon.”

As usual, it was hard to argue with his logic. “All right,” I said. And, as usual, we said good-bye to the back of his head and left him to his work. “Don’t stay up here all night,” I called back, but I knew he probably would.

He was still there grumbling and trying to get his computer to cooperate an hour later when I went upstairs to bathe Josh. After the bath, I stood in the doorway with Josh while Ben told the computer exactly how he felt about it. No love lost, that was for sure.

He grumbled something about not letting it beat him and turned around to face the dragon again. I left. I could tell Joshua was about to descend into his usual evening crying hour, and Ben had enough aggravation already.

By the time I reached the bottom of the stairs, Josh had worked himself into a full-scale colicky fit, as he always did in the evenings. Nothing, but nothing, ever distracted him from it. Gritting my teeth, I walked him up and down the dogtrot, mentally reviewing the advice of pediatricians, baby magazines, and the child psychologist on the evening news. Colic is harmless. . . . Don’t let yourself get aggravated. . . . It’s just an underdeveloped nervous system reacting to too much stimuli. . . . Some babies need a crying hour to relieve their frustrations. . . . Colic is harmless. . . .

Joshua’s cries echoed through the house like the blast of a trumpet, and my head felt as if it were swelling with every wail. Then Grandma appeared suddenly around the corner from the living room, startling both of us.

Grandma Vongortler, it appeared, had the magic. She held him close under her chin, whispered something in his ear, and apparently a bargain was struck. He took his pacifier, and the two of them went to the living room to rock in her recliner. I went to the kitchen to put away the dishes, and suddenly all was right with the world.

Later, I found them asleep in the chair. They looked so right together, Joshua’s head tucked beneath the stubborn line of Grandma’s chin, her glasses hanging askew on her nose, his tiny fingers gripping and releasing the pale blue fabric of her dress, his lips pursed as if waiting for an invisible kiss.