Roses by Leila Meacham Read Free Book Online Page A

forget. Now she wanted to go back. She wanted to remember
     everything. This would be her last chance to return to the past, and the champagne would take her there. Sipping calmly, she
     waited for the arrival of her magic carpet. After a while, she felt herself spinning back into yesterday, and her journey
     had begun.

Chapter Five
    H OWBUTKER , T EXAS , J UNE 1916
    I n chairs ranged before the desk, Mary Toliver, age sixteen, sat with her mother and brother in the funereal atmosphere of
     Emmitt Waithe’s law office. A smell of leather and tobacco and old books reminded her of her father’s study at home, now closed
     with a black ribbon strapped across the door. Tears sprang to her eyes again, and she clasped her hands tighter, lowering
     her head until the moment of grief passed. Immediately she felt Miles’s consoling hand covering hers. On the other side of
     her brother, dressed completely in black and speaking through a veil covering her face, Darla Toliver gave a little exclamation
     of sympathy and said with annoyance, “I declare, if Emmitt doesn’t come soon, I’m sending Mary home. There’s no reason for
     her to have to sit through this so soon after burying her father. Emmitt knows how close they were. I can’t imagine what’s
     keeping him. Why can’t we simply tell Mary the contents of the will when she’s up to it?”
    “Perhaps it’s mandatory for a legatee to be present on these occasions,” Miles said with the formal wordiness he’d taken to
     using since going away to college. “That’s why Emmitt insists she be here.”
    “Oh, fiddlesticks,” Darla said, her tone unusually sharp toward her son. “This is Howbutker, darling, not Princeton. Mary
     is a minor recipient of your father’s will. There is not the least necessity for her to be here today.”
    Mary listened to their dialogue with half an ear. She’d been so emotionally removed from them since her father died—from everyone—that
     Miles and her mother often discussed her as if she weren’t in their presence.
    She still could not believe that she would wake up tomorrow and the day after that and all the tomorrows to come in a world
     without her father. The cancer had taken him too fast for her to adjust to his imminent death. It had been devastating enough
     to lose her grandfather five years before, but Granddaddy Thomas had lived to seventy-one. Her father had been only fifty-one,
     too young to lose all that he had worked for… all that he loved. For most of last night, she’d lain awake in her room and
     wondered what would happen to them now that her father was gone. What would become of the plantation? Miles wanted no part
     of it. That was common knowledge. He desired only to become a college professor and teach history.
    Her mother had never cared much for Somerset and knew very little about its operation. Darla’s interest lay in being the wife
     of Vernon Toliver and the mistress of the mansion on Houston Avenue. To Mary’s knowledge, she had rarely ventured outside
     of town where the plantation began and stretched for acres and acres beside the road, almost clear to the next county. Dallas
     lay beyond and Houston the other direction, cities where her mother loved to take the train to shop and stay overnight.
    Many Junes had come and gone, and her mother had never seen the fields starred with thousands of cotton blossoms ranging in
     colors of creamy white to soft red. Mary never missed a one. Now only she was left to thrill at the sight of the blossoms
     gradually giving way to hard little bolls until August, when suddenly—here and there upon the sea of green—could be spied
     a white fleck. Oh, to watch the whiteness spread after that, to ride out on horseback as she often did with her father and
     Granddaddy Thomas into that white-capped vastness billowing on its green undertow from horizon to horizon and know that it
     belonged to the Toliver family.
    There was no greater joy or glory, and now