Read Online The Garden Path by Kitty Burns Florey - Free Book Online

house. It was something her parents started—roses for their Rose.
    She remembered coming home from school one day when she was eight years old to find her bedroom transformed: rose-colored walls, roses on the curtains, a bedspread to match, roses glowing on the lampshade, the two framed Redouté prints moved from the living room to the wall over her desk, and on the desk a little box whose cover was a full-blown porcelain rose. She was overcome, not least that her parents—garden people, not house people—had done this for her. The rest of the house was a comfortable shambles; her room was a palace, though what her mother called it sometimes, shyly, fearing to be corny, was “Rose’s Secret Garden.” Now, all these years later, if Rosie had burst into that long-gone rosy room, where even the sun coming in the windows had a pinkish tint, she might have found it garish and tacky—all but the Redouté prints, which she still had. But then it was a heavenly place that summed up all the bliss of her early years.
    And when she and Edwin bought the house in East Chiswick she did it up in roses—not a bower, just here and there a touch, a nosegay. She slipcovered the old wing chair, she hung rose-patterned drapes in the dining room (it was these Susannah hurled the blob of acorn squash at, leaving a stain), she put down a rose-strewn runner in the upstairs hall, she hung the Redoutés and bought a large watercolor still life of roses lying, cut, on a table with secateurs and a pair of old gardening gloves. Something about the way the cut roses, fresh and hopeful but with sharp brown thorns, waited there for the vase and water that don’t appear in the picture appealed to her. Would it be too much to say they reminded her of her waiting, thirsty self? Edwin never liked the picture, thought all her roses were a silly affectation, and even disliked the ones in the garden.
    When he left she overdid it, rosifying the house (as Peter, a smart-aleck twelve, put it) to a perhaps absurd degree.
    â€œIt looks weird, Ma,” he said, weird being the word of the moment.
    â€œI’m asserting my own personality, Peter,” Rosie told him with a touch of self-consciousness.
    He understood what she was needing to do, of course. He treated the flowered sheets and rosy towels with affectionate amusement. She heard him, one day, apologize to his friend Ronnie, “See, my mother’s name is Rose, so she gets everything with roses on it.”
    â€œNeat,” Ronnie said, and Peter groaned.
    But then, once, he told her, “It’s not the kind of thing a boy wants to live with,” looking, himself, at thirteen or fourteen, not unlike a dark, graceful blossom of some exotic kind. And though then she scoffed, pointing out that he had his room—a sparsely dressed brown confusion—and the basement rec room with pool table and bare white walls in which to assert his personality, and that the house was hers, dammit, his words affected her, and gradually she “derosified” things a bit, sensing, perhaps, as she let the roses fade, that there were many reasons for Peter’s discomfort with the aggressive femininity of a rose bower.
    But roses aside, they were happy together in their newly roomy, purged house. Peter was a bright, eager, lighthearted boy, a good companion to her always during the lonely parts of those years. Not that he hadn’t his difficult moments, but they were moments —he wasn’t like Susannah, whose sourness was continual, who refused to settle with the world on any terms. Rose didn’t hear from Edwin and Susannah, though her parents occasionally did. She knew they were in New Mexico, where Edwin managed to get himself a company transfer when the divorce became final. She knew when his mother’s money came to him, and she assumed, from the swaggering reports of life deluxe that Susannah’s scrawled communiqués contained, that