Elizabeth knelt at the edge of the rose bed. Damp black earth ground itself into the plush fabric beneath her knees.
The bare, grayish brown rosebushes cast shadows on the darkened earth. Moonlight gave them an eerie look, like twisted hands from an ancient reptile, each finger thickened by age and studded with huge thorns.
Behind her, she heard the sound of a door creaking open and clicking closed, then the rhythm of footsteps on the brick path.
“Hey, Anita,” she said without turning around.
“It’s amazin’ to think that those roses’ll be bloomin’ in just a few months.”
“I was just thinking the same thing.”
When she was little, Elizabeth had often cried when her mama’s favorite flowers wilted and died. Now, though, as a woman full grown, she understood the importance of rest. It was the very bleakness of winter that made spring possible. She wished such a thing could be true for housewives who’d lost their way, that instead of wasting a life, you could be hibernating, gathering strength for the coming spring.
A breeze kicked up, sent a few dry, brittle leaves skittering across the path. “I tended those roses by hand all these years. I never let a gardener near ’em.”
Elizabeth sat back on her heels and looked up at Anita. “Why?”
Anita smiled sadly. Her platinum hair was a mass of curlers; thick night moisturizer glistened on her cheeks and forehead. A heavy blue-plaid-flannel nightdress covered her from throat to foot. She looked ten years older than her actual sixty-two. “I smelled her perfume once.”
Elizabeth felt a shiver. She remembered the pretty little bottle that had sat on her mama’s vanity table. “Mama’s?” she whispered.
“It was one of those days—when you were in a mood, as your daddy used to say—you disagreed with everything I said. So I stopped talkin’ at all. I came out here, ready to attack your mama’s garden. I wanted to fight somethin’ I could see. But when I sat out here, all alone, feelin’ sorry for myself, I smelled your mama’s perfume. Shalimar. It wasn’t like she spoke to me or anything weird like that. I just … realized I was fightin’ with her baby girl, who was broken up inside. After that, whenever you made me crazy, I came out here to the garden.”
Elizabeth heard the pain in Anita’s voice, and for once, she understood. “No wonder you were out here so often.”
“I should have done things differently, I guess. I knew you missed her somethin’ awful.”
“I started forgetting her. That was the worst part. That’s why I always asked Daddy about her. But he wouldn’t say a thing, ever. He always said, ‘Keep your memories close, Birdie.’ He never seemed to understand that my memories of her were like smoke. I couldn’t hold on to them.”
“I imagine your mama is giving him a piece of her mind about that right now.”
“I don’t think anyone held as much of Daddy’s heart as you did, Anita.” Try as she might, a slight bitterness tainted her final words.
“Thank you for that.” Anita gazed out over the fallow fields. “Why didn’t you fly home with Jack and the girls?”
Elizabeth felt the cold suddenly. She shivered and stood up, crossing her arms. “He had to be at work first thing in the morning. I thought I’d stay and help you clean the house.”
“Heloise cleans the house. She has since you were in pigtails.” Anita looked down at her. “You can tell me to mind my own business, y’ know.”
“The truth is I don’t know why. I just wasn’t ready to go back to New York.”
Anita took a step forward. Her silly pink slippers sank into the black earth. “Your daddy used to say to me, ‘Mother, if that girl don’t spread her wings, one day she’s plumb gonna forget how to fly.’ He was worried that you were missing out on your own life.”
“I know.” Elizabeth didn’t want to be talking about this. It hurt too much, and right now, in her mama’s garden, she was fragile. She wiped her eyes—when had she started crying, anyway?—and looked at Anita. “What about you? Will you be okay?”
“I’ll get by.”
It wasn’t really an answer, but it was all there was. They had both known it would come, the day when Anita would be left alone in this white elephant of a house. For a while, the phone would ring almost hourly and friends would show up on the porch with a casserole, but sooner or later, the stream would run dry, and Anita would have to look widowhood in the eye. “I’ll call you when I get to New York, just to make sure everything is okay.”
“That would be nice.”
Silence fell between them again. Wind whispered through the shrubs and played the chimes that hung from the porch roof. A melancholy sound.
Elizabeth wished suddenly that things were different between her and Anita, that they could hold hands and comfort one another. But it was too late now to recraft a relationship whose time had come and gone.
“We’ve missed our chance, haven’t we?” Anita asked softly.