Roses (48 page)

Swung from the hand, or apples in her skirt,

I bring you, calling out as children do:

“Look what I have!—And these are all for you.”

Those lines had perfectly described her love for Percy, but he’d slapped the apples from her skirt and set his heart on a
woman capable of loving only a cotton farm. That was her great quarrel with Mary. Let Percy and those who remembered think
she’d despised her because of her great beauty and style. She’d hated Mary for the simple reason that she’d been undeserving
of winning and holding the heart of the man Lucy loved.

She brought the receiver to her ear, mentally practicing her last chance at the script she’d rehearsed thousands of times
for the arrival of this day. “Percy,” she’d say clearly and crisply, and after allowing a pin dot of silence for him to digest
his surprise, she’d hit him with the line she’d waited five decades to deliver: “
Now
you may have your divorce.”

Before another minute passed and her nerve failed, she drew up her prodigious breasts, pulled in a chest full of air, and
dialed the number. Now that the act was under way, she rather hoped he wouldn’t pick up immediately—that she’d have breathing
space to prepare for the voice she hadn’t heard since the day they buried their son.

He answered on the first ring. “Hello.”

Age… and grief… had dealt a blow to the voice she remembered, but she would have recognized it anywhere, anytime. The years
dropped away, and she stood once more on the porch of Warwick Hall, gawking at the young driver of a spanking new Pierce-Arrow
as it spun to a halt before the steps. The sun flashed off his blond hair, his bronzed skin, his white teeth. “Hello,” he
said in a timbre as rich as the sunshine, and her heart fell at his feet.

“Hello?” Percy repeated.

Lucy let out her breath, then, holding the sound of his voice close in her ear, gently replaced the receiver.

I
n Kermit, Texas, Alice Toliver answered Rachel’s call.

“Mama, this is Rachel.”

“Have we come so far that my only daughter feels it necessary to identify herself to me when she calls me
Mama
, Rachel?”

Rachel felt the usual twist of her heart at her mother’s injured tone. “I’m sorry, Mama. It was only out of habit that I identified
myself.”

“I haven’t been a habit to you in a long time, Rachel. What’s up?”

Rachel sighed quietly. “I’ve called to let you know that Aunt Mary is dead. She died a few hours ago of a heart attack. I
just received word from Amos.”

In the suspended silence, Rachel could clearly hear her mother’s thoughts:
So, Rachel, you are now where you’ve always hoped to be, where your children will be after you are gone, while Jimmy, like
his father and his father before him, reaps nothing
. But she spared her daughter her mental reaction and asked, “When’s the funeral? I’m sure your daddy would like to go.”

“I won’t know until I meet with the funeral director tomorrow. I’m having the company plane pick me up in the morning. I…
was hoping we could all fly out together.”

“Now, Rachel, you know how I felt about your great-aunt Mary, and so did she. It would be the height of hypocrisy for me to
show up at her funeral.”

I don’t want you there for Aunt Mary, Mama, but for me
, Rachel wanted to cry, aching to feel her mother’s arms around her, comforting her as she did in the old days when they had
been close. “Amos asked that I convince at least Jimmy to come with Daddy. He feels Aunt Mary would want them at the reading
of the will.”

A long pause. “You mean your great-aunt had something to leave them? Cotton prices haven’t been good this year.”

“I’m assuming that’s the reason he’d like them to be there. Amos expressed it as her last regards to them.”

“Well, her regards won’t make up for what she promised your father, but we’ll take what we can get. If that means a trip to
Howbutker, then we’ll be there.”

“You too, Mama?”

“I can’t let those two go off alone. They might wear the same underwear twice.”

“I’m so glad you’re coming. It’s been so long since I’ve seen every-body.”

“Well, whose fault is that?”

Rachel reached for another tissue. She tried to stifle the sound of her grief, but Alice must have heard with her maternal
ear. Her tone was several degrees warmer when she spoke. “Rachel, I know you’re hurting, and I feel terrible that I can’t
offer you sympathy for your loss. But you know why….”

“Yes, Mama. I know why.”

“I’ll go wake your father. It’s Thursday, you know.”

Rachel remembered. Thursday was the day that Zack Mitchell’s grocery store, where her father had worked as a butcher for thirty-six
years, stayed open late. Since he was required to man the store until nine o’clock, he was allowed a longer lunch break, and
he habitually took a nap during the extra thirty minutes.

“Bunny-hop, I’m so sorry,” he said when he came on the line, and at the sound of his voice, she broke down completely. Its
consoling, reaching-out quality had the same effect as the times he’d held her after an argument with her mother over her
strengthening ties to Houston Avenue. He’d never taken sides, and to give her mother her due, she’d not tried to turn him
against her. “Bunny-hop” was the name he’d given her when she was learning to walk.

“Are you better now, honey?” he asked after a moment’s wait.

“Yes, Daddy, it’s… that I miss you and Mama and Jimmy so much, especially now. Mama may have told you that Amos has asked
you and Jimmy to attend the reading of the will. I really would like for us to fly out together in the company plane tomorrow
morning. We can pick you up at the Kermit airport.”

William Toliver cleared his throat. “Uh, Rachel, honey, there are several problems with that suggestion. First, don’t you
think it would be a little tense sitting in close quarters with your mother feeling as she does? Secondly…” He seemed to have
heard her audible sigh and rushed on before she could protest, “I won’t be able to get out of here until day after tomorrow
at the earliest. I can’t leave Zack holding the bag.”

“Why not? Don’t you think these circumstances warrant the consideration you’ve earned from Zack after all these years?”

“Beggars can’t make demands, Rachel, and we’re going through midyear inventory.”

Rachel blew out a breath in aggravation. Her father wouldn’t have made demands anyway. He’d never been one to assert his due.
“Promise me you won’t let Jimmy dig in his heels and refuse to come. I want to see him, Daddy. He’ll make us all feel better.”
She’d especially missed her snaggletoothed, freckle-faced little brother this year. Jimmy had thought of Aunt Mary as what
God would look like if He were a woman, and to him she
had
been an omnipresent deity that had hovered on the edge of his family’s lives as long as he could remember.

“I’ll try, honey, but your brother’s twenty-one. I’ll let him know you want him to come.”

When there was nothing more to be said, Rachel hung up with her father’s words
Beggars can’t make demands
still echoing in her ear. Maybe that was soon to change and Aunt Mary had left him enough to tell Zack Mitchell what he could
do with his inventory. Extra cash had been tight this year. Everybody thought Aunt Mary was rolling in money, and some years
she was. But profits depended on weather and markets and costs of labor and expenses, and often in the farming business wealth
was determined by the value of land rather than the amount of money in the bank—realities of which her mother was well aware.

Rachel could hear her now in one of the endless arguments she’d overheard between her parents:
You just wait, William. When Aunt Mary kicks the bucket, there’ll have been the worst drought in farming history or three
months of rain or a cotton surplus or a hike in energy costs—anything to eat up her profits so that there’s nothing left for
you to inherit—nothing but that blooming land and the Toliver mansion, which she’ll leave to Rachel. I’m sorry to say it,
but I curse the day you got it into your head to take her a second time to see your great-aunt
.

Privately, Rachel disputed her mother’s claim that the trip to Howbutker in 1966 had triggered her passion for all things
Toliver. She believed its seed had been planted long before that, even before she was born. She’d simply never been aware
of its existence until the day she discovered a tiny shoot growing beside the garbage bin next to the alley behind her house….

K
ERMIT
, T
EXAS
, 1965

S
he found the sprout in March when the West Texas wind was still heavy with sand and most days looked like the yellow meat
of an eggplant. She inspected it squatting on her haunches in the way that had inspired her father’s nickname for her. It
looked different from the coarse, spiky weeds and nettles and cockleburs that somehow managed to thrive in the Bermuda grass
of the backyard. Light green and tender, it captured her awe so that she thought about the exposed little seedling all through
supper and the dishes and homework and went out to cover it from the frost before going to bed. The next day, she hurried
home from school and made a fence of rocks around it to protect it from the careless garbagemen and her father’s deadly lawn
mower.

“What you got there, Bunny-hop?”

“I don’t know, Daddy, but I’m going to take care of it until it’s full grown.”

“Wouldn’t you… rather have a puppy or a kitten?” he asked, and she heard an unfamiliar note in his voice.

“No, Daddy. I like pets that grow from the ground.”

It turned out to be a vine that snaked over the rocks and produced a dark-skinned butternut squash. Her father explained that
it sprang from a seed that had escaped from the garbage sack and sprouted where it fell. By the time of its fruition, Rachel
had heard him say to her mother, “Don’t be surprised if we’ve got ourselves a little farmer.”