“It’s only fertilizer, Carolyn.”
She said it over her shoulder, the way you would tell a child the shot would not hurt.
It was half past six on a Friday morning in the first week of June, and I was standing on my own front step in my housecoat with the newspaper in my hand. Vicki Sloan was standing on my front walk in a pair of gray sweatpants. Between us, with all four feet planted in the cypress mulch of my late husband’s rose bed, was her beagle.
He was an old dog, white in the face, with a back that swayed a little in the middle. He looked at me. He was not embarrassed. He finished what he had come to do, at the foot of the last rose bush before the sidewalk, in the very same spot as the morning before and the morning before that.
“That is the third time I’ve asked you,” I said.
“I know it is.” She gave the leash a little shake. “And I’m telling you, people pay good money for manure. You’re getting it free. Come on, Biscuit.”
Biscuit stepped out of the bed one stiff leg at a time and they went back up the sidewalk to her house, which is forty feet from mine. She did not look back. He did, once.
I stood there a while with the paper. Then I went and got the trowel and the bread sack I had started keeping by the door, and I cleaned up after a dog that was not mine, and I looked at that last bush.
It was a Mister Lincoln. The canes were brown from the ground to about the height of my hand, and the bottom leaves had gone yellow and dropped. In the first week of June, a rose ought to be the greenest thing in the yard.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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