A Rose by the Door Read online

  “Hey.” Gemma had already started fishing in her purse again. She plopped another three dollars on the counter. “Not so fast. I think she gets another try.”

  Mrs. Bartling picked the money up and handed it back to Gemma. “I’ll pay. No sense you throwing your good money away on some gray-headed old woman who doesn’t even know how to win her granddaughter prizes anymore.” She plunked a five dollar bill on the counter. “Now, mister. Why don’t you line me up another target.”

  Down the pulley the new target flew. Alva and Charlene shoved their way up through the sparse crowd, clapping and hooting to cheer her on. Mrs. Bartling sighted down the length of the barrel. She squeezed the trigger. Pop-pop-pop. Pop-pop. Pop. She took it slower this time, making certain she widened her aim on the target. She didn’t say a word when she’d finished the twelve shots and returned the air gun to its stand.

  The target zoomed forward.

  Andy Cleeland leaned over her shoulder to inspect it.

  “We have a winner!” the barker bellowed loud enough that everyone in the arcade could hear him. “Congratulations, young lady.” He winked down at Paisley. From beneath the counter he pulled a tiny plastic bear that wouldn’t have cost more than thirty cents at a dime store. “Enjoy your prize!”

  “No,” Mrs. Bartling said. “This won’t do. We’re going to trade this in on something bigger.”

  “You have to play again and win if you want to trade up.”

  She pointed high over their heads at the massive brown bear with the huge lavender bow that dangled above them. “How many times do I have to win to get that?”

  “Six more times.”

  “Okay, then.” Mrs. Bartling tossed out a twenty. “Winning this little girl a bear is worth a whole lot more than that. I’ve got something to prove to everybody here. Six more targets. Set them up.”

  Paisley stopped jumping up and down. The little girl stood frozen in place, her dark eyes as big around as walnuts. She waited in somber silence while Mrs. Bartling lifted the pellet gun, shot, and won. She shot and won again. And again.

  The crowd around the shooting gallery grew quieter each time a target came up the pulley. Even Andy Cleeland yielded and in the end gave her slight applause. By the time the gentleman in the tent employed a huge metal hook and hauled down the enormous teddy bear with the lavender bowtie, Alva Torrington had rounded up at least a dozen Cramalot coffee customers to watch.

  Deputy Jay Triplett, who had also stopped to see, kept shaking his head and saying, “We ought to sign you up for the sheriff’s department, Mrs. Bartling.”

  Charlene Grover’s Boy Scout nephew had appeared with a roving band of his closest friends. “Wow, Aunt Charlene,” he announced. “I never knew grandmas could shoot like that!”

  “Well, now you’ve seen it. They can.”

  When Mrs. Bartling handed Paisley the bear, the monstrous stuffed animal seemed almost bigger than the little girl.

  “It’s the best teddy bear in the whole fair!” Paisley squealed. The little girl’s arms clasped both the stuffed animal and Mrs. Bartling’s neck all at the same time without restraint. Her small lips—moist and smelling faintly of cherry slushee—briefly pressed Mrs. Bartling’s mouth full on.

  “Thank you.”

  “No,” Mrs. Bartling said, “Thank you, Paisley. You’ve reminded me how much fun it is to come to the fair.”

  Gemma revealed a pink cloud of cotton candy she’d been hiding behind her back. “If I had a candle, I would have used it. But I got scared that cotton candy might catch fire.”

  “Oh, my goodness.”

  “Happy birthday.”

  Mrs. Bartling took the cotton candy and shook her head despairingly at all of them. “How did you know it’s my birthday today?” she asked in a soft voice filled with gentle pleasure. “Did Nathan tell you that, too?”

  Gemma hugged her and grinned. “It wasn’t Nathan this time. It was that old Bible on the coffee table. I was looking through it one morning and found the date written there.” Gemma lifted her hands like a choir director, counted to three, and began singing “The Birthday Song.” Everyone around joined in.

  “Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday to you!”

  Andy Cleeland and his grandchildren hummed along.

  Five other people in line at the shooting gallery, who didn’t know Mrs. Bartling from Adam, sang because everyone else was singing.

  Jay Triplett took off his cap and lifted it to the sky with his words.

  Gemma sang in a low, contented hum.

  Alva’s coffee customers chimed in with their gruff, eager voices.

  Charlene’s nephew and his friends sang, too, only they added words that little boys always add: “You live in a zoo! You look like a monkey! And you smell like one, too!”

  And, oh, little Paisley, with her arms wrapped around the neck of the magnificent bear! She sang like a chirping sparrow, the notes she knew so well ringing sharp and clear.

  Chapter Eighteen

  By the second week of August, the endless grass on the far hills beyond the cemetery had begun to cure in the sun, the color and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests.

  For lack of rain, the dust on the little cemetery road had gotten so thick that it rose in billows, tingling nostrils, coating cars as they drove up and down each neatly trimmed, rocky lane. Wreaths that had been placed beside headstones on Memorial Day had long since faded and the bright sunflowers along the way, dancing with the breeze every time a vehicle passed, gave the impression that these loved ones rested in a living, golden place.

  “It’s time,” Bea had said to Gemma without any warning this morning. “It’s time for me to take you to see Nathan’s grave.”

  Gemma sat beside Bea in the Chevrolet, her fingers plaited in the lap of her skirt, her eyes watching out the window, searching. Paisley occupied her normal place, sitting forward in the back with the huge teddy bear beside her, hands clutching the bench seat, her chin propped squarely between her mama and Bea.

  Bea, who’d taken a much more authoritative role in Paisley’s life since they’d chased the ice cream man and ridden the merry-go-round and shot targets like Buffalo Bill, glanced over her shoulder at the little girl. “Your seat belt isn’t on, young lady. You can’t sit forward like that and still have your seat belt on.”

  “But we’re almost there. I want to see.”

  The car crested a small hill and, about the time Paisley got her seat belt buckled, Bea directed them to a cemetery plot off to the left, manicured and tidy, a narrow ridge of dirt no longer freshly turned, but bare compared to the others around it. She navigated the car alongside and parked out of the way of the road.

  “Well.” That’s all she said, while Gemma hung out her open window and they all three peered at the tiny parcel of earth.

  Well.

  Bea turned the key to Off with one hand. The engine died. “They’ve gotten the headstone up. It must have come sometime this week.”

  Gemma didn’t move. Bea could see the delicate stretch of the young woman’s jaw, arched away from her, as Gemma looked intently out the window at the meadow grass and sky.

  “If you look real far over that way—” Bea’s gesture spanned the breadth of the town, her voice gone soft with reverence. “—you can see the steeple of St. Elizabeth’s. See that street there? Follow it with your eyes and you’ll see Pattison Drive. Back that direction is the highway, the exit signs, the tourist billboards that point travelers to Ash Hollow.”

  “It’s pretty up here.”

  “Bought this for myself, you know. I thought it was a nice plot. Nathan would have liked it because you can see the river.”

  “I’m scared,” Gemma said. “I’m scared to get out of the car.”

  Bea reached across the front seat and took the girl’s hand. “I’m scared, too, bringing you here. It’s sad for me every time I come.”

  She could feel Gemma’s pulse throbbing through their clasped fingers. The gold of Gemma’s w
edding band grew warm where the precious metal touched Bea’s skin. Bea gazed down at it.

  “I’m glad you haven’t taken it off.”

  Gemma’s eyes followed Bea’s to her ring. “I don’t know when I will. I can’t imagine the day.”

  “You stay here in the car just as long as you need to.” Bea released Gemma’s hand and patted her on the knee. Then she reached forward and unlatched her door. “Paisley, do you want to help me plant roses?”

  Paisley bounced up and down in the backseat. “Yep! Yep!”

  The Chevy chassis bounced, too.

  When Bea looked back, Gemma was still fingering her wedding band. “Nathan was the only person who ever loved me,” Gemma said. “Nathan was the only person who was ever kind.”

  No, Bea wanted to say. She was beginning to see it more, in the stubborn way he’d stayed away from home so long, in the stark way he had married Gemma, in the selfish way he’d entered Paisley and Gemma’s lives and had withheld them from those who might have cared for them the most.

  I loved my boy. But Nathan was like everybody else. He was human. Nathan wasn’t always kind.

  “I’ve got to get my garden tools out,” she said instead. “Can you pop the trunk, Gemma?”

  “I’ll get those, Mrs. Bartling. That box is too heavy for you to be lifting.” Gemma climbed out, hurried around, and beat Bea to the trunk. She handed Bea the box with tiny pots and sprouting roses in it. “You carry this one. It doesn’t weigh nearly as much.”

  They walked shoulder to shoulder across the brittle stubble, grasshoppers hurtling against their ankles, toward the place where tender blades of buffalo grass had begun to spike through the dark, loamy soil. Paisley had bounded ahead and they found her kneeling, scrutinizing the simple granite monument.

  “Look. I can read this. Just like on the baseball.” Little-girl fingers traced the engraved letters as she named them. “N-A-T-H-A-N.”

  “Nathan Roger Bartling,” Gemma read with longing in her voice. “Beloved son.”

  The hot wind had unleashed Bea’s hair from behind her ears. She tried to pin it back, to no avail. “Didn’t know what else to write. Could only think of ‘beloved son.’ That’s all.” She set down the pots and yanked up a thistle from the ground, careful to uproot the full length of the weed from the spiny cluster of leaves all the way to the deep taproot. “If I had known about you, maybe I would have added something different.”

  Gemma crouched and splayed her hands against the dirt, as if she could touch Nathan by touching this raw, broken earth where his body lay. “If you had known about me, you could have written ‘beloved husband.’ And for Paisley, ‘beloved father.’”

  A platoon of Canadian geese drifted past on the river, following the glassy current with accidental grace. Their dark necks and black beaks made them look like heavy, black question marks bobbing along downstream. As Bea, Gemma, and Paisley watched, something startled the geese. The flock rose from the watercourse with a great flapping of wings and boisterous honking, taking to the air. Their slender bodies lifted and dropped with each stroke of flight. No sooner had they ascended than they circled back over a distant hayfield, dipping lower, seeking a safe place to land.

  Paisley asked as she watched the birds descend. “Do you think Nathan’s in heaven?”

  “Oh, sweetie,” Bea hurried to say. “Of course I—”

  Her words caught. What right did she have to give a pat answer? What right to rely on religion when it seemed that the truth and the life she had once believed in had gone?

  “Nathan did it the way you did, Paisley. He asked Jesus—”

  Jesus.

  The name she’d once spoken in trust and joy now seemed improper and tarnished for lack of use.

  Jesus.

  The name she’d once called in mystery and beauty and glory, now empty as dry dust, as far from sustaining her as her son’s crumbling bones beneath the dirt.

  I speak it because it’s what Paisley wants to believe. I speak it because, at one time or another, it’s what everybody wants to believe.

  Jesus.

  Bea felt sullied. Unworthy. Removed. How many times had she easily spoken to others about the love and faithfulness of Jesus Christ? How many times, in her trust, had she talked like she knew all the answers?

  Well, she certainly wasn’t such an expert on the subject now.

  Bea had no choice but to finish the statement she’d so randomly begun. “He’s in heaven because he asked Jesus to take over his life. When he was a little boy. Like you.”

  Before either of them could stop her, Paisley sprawled atop the wale of brown Nebraska soil, her feet in the direction of Nathan’s feet, her head in the direction of Nathan’s head. Her eyes followed the fleecy shapes in the clouds—dragons, faces of princesses, pirate ships— as they rolled by. “I wish I could see what Nathan sees in heaven,” she breathed.

  “Paisley.” Gemma, affronted, took her child by the arm. “You mustn’t lay on somebody’s grave. It’s disrespectful.”

  “Nathan isn’t here, Mama. He’s in heaven because he asked Jesus into his heart.”

  “Nobody knows if those things are true or not, Paisley. It makes people feel better, saying it. Especially when they know somebody who’s dead.”

  “Mama,” the child’s plaintive little voice began. “It must be true. It says so in the Bible.”

  “The Bible is a good book. Some stories in there I believe. Others, I don’t. Jesus was a good man. A prophet who lived a wild dramatic life. He might have performed a few miracles. But I don’t see how it could go any farther than that.”

  From somewhere inside of Bea, somewhere beyond her own spirit, somewhere beyond her doubt, words filled her, touched her, forced their way out.

  “You can’t believe the in-between, Gemma. So many people try to fit it there, but it won’t fit. Jesus was either who He said He was or He was a crackpot.”

  Lord, how can I say something like this when I’m the very one who feels like you’ve forsaken me?

  Bea felt suddenly disoriented, breathless. Oh, heavens, they’d come here to plant roses, hadn’t they? Where had she put the roses? “Let’s get to planting, Paisley. Come over here and tell me which will be yours.”

  She didn’t want to talk right now. She only wanted to dig. She didn’t want anything to stop this clamoring in her heart. This hope.

  Father? Are you who you say you are? Are you who I’ve said you are? Do you speak? Do you listen?

  “How many are we going to plant? A whole bunch?”

  “Three will be plenty. We want to make sure the bushes have room to grow over the years.”

  “Like the one in your front yard?”

  “Yes.”

  They’d almost finished digging holes beside Nathan’s monument when they heard a clatter—the sounds of metal banging and hackberry limbs jostling and an axle squeaking—as the cemetery gardener came whistling with his wheelbarrow over the furrow of the hill.

  “Mr. Goodsell.” Bea saluted him with a gloved hand. “My, but you have more modes of transportation than an emperor. Last time I saw you, you were driving a golf cart.”

  “A golf cart isn’t as handy for carrying around brambles. I drive that when I do the weeding and the hedge trimming. I have a Dodge pickup, too, to use whenever I get out on the highway. A pickup does much better there than the golf cart or this wheelbarrow, either one.”

  He veered his little garden cart along past them until he noticed the pots of roses. “Harison’s Yellow? Is that what those are? Pioneer roses, right here at Ash Hollow Cemetery?”

  “That’s what they are.”

  “Ah.” He whistled under his breath. “You do know how to grow a rose.” He propped the wheelbarrow on its two peg legs and readjusted his load of brambles. Bea noticed him watching Gemma as Gemma clutched the trowel, her knuckles gone white as coriander as she stabbed dirt clods away in chunks. He inclined his jaw at her, unable to pass without giving advice. “You want to dig
that hole twice the size as a lazy person would dig it. Twice as wide as you think it should be. Twice as deep.”

  “I’m not finished yet.” Gemma opened her grip and shut it, stretching her fingers as she held her palms up to him. “It’ll be the right size for a rose when I’m done.”

  Mr. Goodsell poked one hand inside the oversized pocket of his ragged green army pants and pulled out his leather work gloves. He pitched them down, where they lay in Gemma’s lap, crumpled and rotund, their fingers cupped and intimate, still in the shape of his hands. “I don’t need these for awhile. You use them. You’re getting blisters.”

  “This is my family, Mr. Goodsell.” Bea heaved herself up from the ground and introduced them. “My daughter-in-law, Gemma. And Paisley, her girl.”

  The gardener touched the unruly bangs of his hair with his thumb and his forefinger, as if he had a hat brim to tip for them, only he didn’t.

  “Care Goodsell. Nice to meet you.”

  “Nice to meet you, too.”

  With bare hands, he removed the rake and the pile of hackberry limbs from the wheelbarrow. He thumped the inside of the empty wheelbarrow with satisfaction. “Who wants a ride? Mrs. Bartling?” He made a ceremonial bow before her. “Can I take you for a spin?”

  “Heavens, no, Mr. Goodsell. I’m an old woman. I’d be tied up in knots if you bounced me along in that thing.”

  “I need a passenger.” He winked at Gemma. “You want to give it a try? How about it?”

  Gemma laughed. “I guess I’d better not have a ride, Mr. Goodsell. I’ve got roses to plant.”

  All this time, Bea could see him pretending not to notice Paisley sidling up next to him, her hands clasped behind her back in restrained eagerness. “Ah-ha!” He finally looked down and made a quick, surprised jump, as if he hadn’t expected anyone to be standing so close beside his leg. “What’s this? You mean I’ve found somebody who’s brave enough to go?”

  “Can I bring my bear?”