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

because she slept with them, that “serial monogamy,” as he called it, was an unhealthy, dangerous lifestyle. But Rosie was lucky in love—up to a point, the point being one just short of remarriage—because she had an instinct for nice men. She had used up all her bad judgment and gullibility on Edwin. After the divorce, she was canny. She developed a nose for phonies, and for the smell of dullness. Her life, during the years of her thirties and her forties, was busy with men, full of delights for both the spirit and the flesh, with here and there a sad parting thrown in for drama.
    Peter got used to his mother’s liaisons and began to have some of his own, the nature of which Rosie had no inkling of at the time. Or very little inkling. He had girlfriends, too. He told her, all those years later, with tears in his eyes, how he had tried to want to do with his girlfriends what the guys at school boasted they did with theirs, and how he had failed. He had taken Nancy Kirkpatrick to the senior prom. Nancy Kirkpatrick had had an aggressive and highly visible crush on Peter all through high school. Rosie could never understand why he didn’t like her—a bright, pretty girl who knew something about gardening. Ideal daughter-in-law material.
    â€œI couldn’t stand her lipstick,” Peter told Rosie during his Christmas night confession. “She laid it on with a palette knife.”
    â€œBut, Peter, a lot of men don’t like heavy lipstick,” she said.
    He gave her a reproachful look she’d never forgotten. “Ma,” he said gently, and she blushed. “I’m telling you how I am,” he went on. “You’re not going to talk me out of it. It’s not just a matter of lipstick.”
    She apologized. She swore to herself that from that moment she would accept it. She became by an act of will the tolerant, large-minded mother Peter was so proud of and so amused by, and gradually she became that way naturally, genuinely, wishing for her son exactly what she’d told him she wished—happiness.
    As Rosie lay awake that night, imagining the soft snow falling outside on her garden, she despaired of it, of happiness for Peter. She could think of him only with woe. What would become of him? She wondered whether Hollis had come to hate Peter as she had hated Edwin, had looked on his face as he slept with loathing, had cringed at picking up an article of his clothing or sitting on a chair still warm from his bottom, had come to dread the sound of his voice.… Oh, it was unimaginable. She remembered the sweetness of the two of them together. She half considered getting in touch with Hollis and begging him to go back to Peter, offering him money, weeping on her knees—finding a certain pleasurable disgust in picturing this grotesque scene. It was preferable, at least, to the scene Peter’s last words had conjured up. “You’re going to have to face her sooner or later,” he had said. It was, of course, true, and it edged closer and closer to her imagination until she got out of bed, put on the lights, and went downstairs to her pile of seed catalogs. Susannah hath murdered sleep , she said to herself, making tea and a peanut butter sandwich.
    But sitting down to the catalogs was a treat she’d been saving up all month, holding off until she had them all, leafing through them as they came but waiting for the right moment to actually get down to business, make charts and lists and diagrams and decide what to order. She put on her reading glasses and let the catalogs console her, their thin pages crowded with color photos showing improbable lushness, unattainable perfection, staggering beauty. Rosie got out the paper plots she had made of her garden in spring, summer, fall, to see where the gaps were and what had died or failed or been a mistake, and how she could fill them in. They wouldn’t be taping this year, so this wouldn’t be