Chapter 10: The Rose Bed
Spring came late that year.
It was April before the garden was warm enough to work in properly.
Thora had been asking about the rose bed since February — she had noticed it was overgrown, had asked why, and I had told her that it had been her mother's and that we would fix it together when the weather turned.
She held me to that.
On a Saturday morning she appeared at my bedroom door in her boots and her coat, holding a small trowel I hadn't seen before.
"Patricia gave it to me," she said.
"It's mine.
For the garden."
We went out together.
The rose bed was worse than I remembered — the canes had crossed and tangled, the dead growth matted in with the new.
But the roots were sound.
I could see green at the base of every plant, patient and ready.
Thora worked beside me.
She was not much help in any practical sense, but she was serious about it, turning the soil carefully with her small trowel, examining every worm she uncovered with intense professional interest before setting it gently aside.
"Daddy," she said, not looking up from the soil.
"Yes."
"Is the bad lady going to come back?"
I set down my pruning shears.
"No," I said.
"She's not."
"How do you know?"
"Because a judge said so." I sat back on my heels.
"And because I won't let her."
Thora considered this.
She turned another section of soil.
"Good," she said.
Heloise had entered a guilty plea six weeks earlier.
Fraud by false representation.
Forgery.
The sentence had included a suspended term and a formal prohibition order — she was not permitted to contact me, Thora, or the property in any form.
Warren Fitch had been charged separately and was awaiting trial.
The Law Society had issued a public notice.
None of that was in the garden with us.
The garden was just soil and roots and a five-year-old in muddy boots.
Patricia came over the fence at eleven with tea in a flask and three biscuits wrapped in a cloth.
She handed them over the top rail without ceremony and went back inside.
That was Patricia.
Thora ate her biscuit in four careful bites.
By noon we had cleared the whole bed.
The canes stood clean and bare, ready for the season.
I had no idea if I had pruned them correctly.
Miriam had always done it.
But the roots were there, and the green was there, and that seemed like enough to start with.
Thora stood back and looked at what we had done.
"Will flowers come?" she asked.
"In a few weeks.
If we water them."
She nodded, satisfied with this arrangement.
We went inside and I made lunch.
Thora sat at the kitchen table — her chair, the one she had always used, not the floor, not a corner — and drew in her notebook while she waited.
I watched her from the stove.
She was drawing the rose bed.
Bare canes, careful lines, and at the top of each one a small red circle.
Flowers that weren't there yet.
She was drawing what was coming.
I turned back to the stove.
The kitchen smelled like soup and soil and the particular warmth of a house that is, finally, just a home.
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*Sometimes the people who offer to carry your grief are the ones you need to watch most carefully.
And sometimes the truth about who loves you is written down in a small green notebook, in the hand of someone who is gone but never really left.*
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