The Garden Path by Kitty Burns Florey Read Free Book Online

them, which always ended in tears. May was taken in by her father’s sister, Aunt Charlotte Dennison, a grim spinster in a little cap, who made her niece memorize a poem every Sunday. To her death, May remembered bits of poetry and came out with them at appropriate moments. “‘The hounds of spring are on winter’s traces,’” she would call out cheerfully on a March morning to get Rosie out of bed. “‘Hail, blithe spirit—bird thou never wert,’” she would say to her husband when he came in for dinner. He used to laugh, flap his arms and squawk, and then kiss her. Rosie always envied them, their marriage. They were both blithe spirits.
    May used to make “clouted cream” as her mother had taught her to (with mace soaking in it, strung on a thread), and she kept a bird life-list as her father had. She held on to her English accent until the end—it even intensified in her later years, as her mother-in-law’s Italian one did—and Rosie had inherited a thread of it. Barney pointed out to her once that she pronounced the “t” in “Mortimer” as a “t” instead of a slurred “d.” Watching one of her old television shows one night, he said, “There’s the secret of your charm,” pointing to her bedraggled TV self holding some iris she had just uprooted. “You look so earthy and Italian, and you sound like an English schoolmarm.” Rosie took this for a compliment from Barney, especially as spoken in his own sexy Georgia accent, with his wandering arm around her.
    After Rosie’s father died, her mother declined. When she set her apron on fire, severely burning her left arm and shoulder—the skin delicately pink and translucent when it healed, like puckered mother-of-pearl—Rosie brought her from the old stone house in Westerly to a nursing home just outside Hartford. She visited her almost daily, doing Edwin’s old commute, for the three and a half years it took May to fade out of life. She died, finally, of nothing her doctor could pinpoint. Old age, he said, though she was barely seventy-two. She just pined away. “I miss him so,” was one of the last coherent things she said. Rosie brought her a cake on her last birthday, but she had no appetite for it. She smiled her sweet smile, holding her daughter’s hand, and said “I miss him so” with tears in her eyes. A couple of weeks later she stopped making sense. She looked out the window once and said to Rosie, “Look at the frost on the lawn, Sandra.” It was July, and Rosie wasn’t Sandra—she had no idea who was. The last thing May said to Rosie, with a giggle, was “Goblins.” She died that night in her sleep.
    And then the funeral, three days later. Rosie had finished her crying by then, and was talking to her Uncle Jim, her father’s remaining brother, in the vestibule of St. Terence’s Episcopal Church in Hartford, when Susannah walked in. Rosie could remember it all with perfect clarity.
    â€œI believe she had a happy death,” she had been saying, and her old uncle nodded and nodded, his brown eyes mournful. His hair was thick and white, and his big white mustache was yellowed at the corners. He put his hand on her arm. “Rosie,” he began, and was about to say something. She took her arm away with what must have seemed rudeness. “Excuse me,” she said, and walked over to Susannah.
    â€œWhat are you doing here?” she demanded. Susannah stood there looking at her mother. Rosie hadn’t seen her since she was ten, but she would have known the girl anywhere. She looked exactly like Edwin, though her coarse blonde hair had darkened slightly and she’d lost her baby fat. She had Edwin’s big white teeth and his long thin nose and his air of fatuous assurance.
    â€œI wanted to come and pay my respects to Grandma.” She looked around at the