I want to tell you about those roses, because otherwise I am only a woman fussing over a flower bed.
My husband Dale was not a gardener. He was a brick man. He put in twenty-one years at the brick plant here in Mexico, Missouri, until it shut down, and then he kept the boilers and the buses running for the school district until he retired. Every house on our street is brick, small and square and red, because half the men who built them worked at the plant and could get seconds cheap. Dale could tell you what was wrong with a furnace from the sound it made. He could not have told you a petunia from a pansy.
In March of last year the doctor in Columbia told us what the trouble in his side was, and how long that kind of trouble generally takes.
In April, Dale went out to the front walk with a yardstick.
I watched him from the window. He measured the walk from the porch step to the sidewalk, and he wrote on the back of an envelope, and he measured it again, because he never trusted a number he had only taken once. Thirty-six feet. He came in and showed me the envelope. He had drawn the walk as a long box, and down one side of it he had made eleven little circles.
“Three feet apart,” he said. “First one three feet off the step, last one three feet shy of the sidewalk. That’s eleven.”
“Eleven what?”
“Roses.”
“Dale Henry, you have never planted a thing in your life.”
“Then it’s about time,” he said, and he went and got the truck keys.
He drove out to Pruett’s Garden Center on the highway and came home with eleven potted rose bushes standing up in the truck bed like passengers. Six were Mister Lincoln, which is a dark red. Five were Queen Elizabeth, which is pink. He had them alternate, red and pink, with a red one at each end. They were thirty-two dollars apiece. I know that because he left the receipt on the kitchen table under the salt shaker the way he left every receipt for forty-four years, and it said three hundred fifty-two dollars, and I said, “Three hundred and fifty-two dollars, for flowers,” and he said, “For eleven flowers. That’s cheap, per flower.”
It took him four days to plant them. He could only do three in a day by then. On the last day he did two, and he sat on an overturned bucket to plant the eleventh, the one by the sidewalk, and I knelt down and tamped the dirt in around it with my hands because he was worn out.
He lived to see them bloom once. He died the second week of October, and there was still one red rose open on that end bush the morning of his funeral. I cut it and it went with him.
So that is what the beagle was standing in.
Vicki had moved into the Hayes house next door in April. I knew three things about her. She was somewhere in her fifties. She answered the phones at the propane company. And every morning at half past six she walked that dog down her front step, across the end of her yard, and straight into my rose bed, as regular as the freight train.
The first time I asked her, I was nice about it. I said, “I wonder if you could keep him out of the roses. My husband put those in.” She said, “Oh, he’s harmless,” and smiled, and the next morning he was back.
The second time I held out a roll of bags. She looked at the bags like I had handed her a parking ticket. “He’s a dog,” she said. “It’s what they do.”
The third time was the fertilizer.
My daughter Amy lives two hours west of here, in Blue Springs, and she calls on Friday nights. I told her about it while I was drying the supper dishes.
“Mom. Call the city.”
“I’m not calling the city.”
“There’s an ordinance. There has to be. They’ll send somebody out and that will be the end of it.”
“Amy, I am not going to have a man from the city come to a woman’s door over an old dog. She’s lived here two months. She’d never speak to a soul on this street again, and I’d have to look at her house every day for the rest of my life.”
“Then put up one of those little wire fences. The green ones. They’re ten dollars.”
“Your father planted those roses along the walk so a person could walk up to them. He didn’t plant them to be put in a cage.”
She let out her breath. She sounds just like Dale when she does that. “Then go over there and tell her off.”
“At half past six in the morning? Over a hedge? In my housecoat?”
“So what are you going to do?”
I did not know. I told her so, and we talked about the grandkids, and I hung up and put the dish towel over the oven handle.
I thought about it all weekend. I thought about it in church, which is not what church is for.
What I kept coming back to was a plain fact. A person will let her dog do nearly anything in an empty yard. But I had spent thirty years behind the counter at the license office, handing people numbers and telling them they had brought the wrong paper, and I knew something about people. Hardly anybody will do the rude thing with somebody sitting right there smiling at them.
Sunday evening I went out to the garage.
Dale had two lawn chairs hanging on nails on the back wall. They were the old kind, aluminum tubing with woven webbing, the kind that folds flat and pinches your finger. We bought them as a pair at the hardware store the summer Amy was in the fourth grade. His was the one with the arm he had mended with a stove bolt. Mine was the other one.
I took mine down. I wiped it off with a rag. I set it by the front door with my coffee mug on the seat so I would not have to think in the morning.
Monday I was up at a quarter to six. I filled the thermos. At twenty past six I carried that chair down the front step and along the walk, past ten rose bushes, and I unfolded it in the grass right at the end of the bed, beside the brown Mister Lincoln, about four feet from the sidewalk. I sat down. I poured my coffee.
It was a pretty morning. The light came in long and low between the houses. The pink ones were open and the red ones were open, and the dew was still on, and I could smell them.
At half past six on the dot, Vicki’s front door opened.
She came down her step looking at her phone. Biscuit came down beside her, one stair at a time, like a man with bad knees. They crossed the end of her yard. He put his nose down and started for the roses the way a horse starts for the barn.
Then Vicki looked up.
I have seen that face across a counter many times. It is the face of a person who has just been told the office closes at noon on Saturdays.
“Good morning, Vicki,” I said. “Good morning, Biscuit.”
She stopped. Biscuit did not. He went to the end of his leash and leaned.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“Having my coffee.”
“Out here.”
“It’s the nicest spot in the yard.”
She looked at the chair. She looked at the mug in my two hands. She looked at my housecoat, which is pale blue and has been washed about four hundred times.
“Well,” she said.
“It’s supposed to get up to eighty-four,” I said. “They’re saying no rain till Thursday.”
She stood there for what felt like a full minute. Biscuit looked up at her, then at the mulch, then at me, the way you would look around a table to see who was going to pay. Then she turned him around. It took some doing. They went back up the sidewalk the other way, past her own house, and I heard her say, low, “Come on. Come on, buddy.”
I finished my cup. I will admit that it was the best cup of coffee I had drunk since October.
Tuesday she came out at a quarter past six. I had come out at six.
“Good morning, Vicki. Good morning, Biscuit.”
She did not answer. She turned him around on the sidewalk like a woman backing a boat trailer.
Wednesday she waited. I could see her kitchen blind move. Half past six went by, and seven. I had brought the crossword. At a quarter past seven her door opened and she came out dressed for work with her purse on her shoulder and the leash in her hand, and I looked up from thirty-one across and said, “Good morning, Vicki. Good morning, Biscuit. You’re running late.”
“You can’t sit there all day,” she said.
“I’m retired,” I said. “I don’t know why I couldn’t.”
Thursday it rained, as promised. I thought about that at a quarter to six with the rain coming down the kitchen window, and then I thought, well, the dog does not take rain days. I put Dale’s ball game poncho on over my housecoat, the red one that came down to my shins, and I took the big golf umbrella, and I went out and sat in the wet webbing with my thermos between my feet.
Vicki came out under a little folding umbrella with a broken rib. She got as far as the sidewalk. She looked at me sitting there in a red plastic poncho, in a lawn chair, in a rose bed, in the rain, with the umbrella over me like a woman selling tickets.
“Good morning, Vicki. Good morning, Biscuit.”
She put her hand over her mouth. Her shoulders went up and down. It took me a second to see she was laughing, and trying hard not to.
“You are out of your mind,” she said.
“It’s a good soaking rain,” I said. “The roses needed it.”
That was the first week.
By the second week, the street had noticed.
You cannot sit in a housecoat four feet from the sidewalk and not be noticed. Jeff across the street, who leaves for the feed mill at twenty till seven, started lifting two fingers off the steering wheel at me, and then by Wednesday he was rolling the window down. “Morning, Carolyn. Guarding the roses?” The boy who throws the paper started walking it up and handing it to me. Brenda Tucker, three doors down, came by with her walker on her morning lap and stopped to rest, and then she stopped to rest every morning, and on Friday she brought me a cinnamon roll in a napkin.
“I’ve been wanting to say something to that woman since April,” Brenda said. “He does it in front of mine on the way back if he’s got anything left.”
“I’m not saying anything to her,” I said. “I’m only saying good morning.”
“That’s worse,” said Brenda, with great satisfaction, and she went on down the walk.
I want to be fair. I was enjoying myself, and I knew it, and I was a little ashamed. So I started watching the dog instead of the woman, and that took some of the fun out of it.
He could not make it to the corner. That was the whole of it. The corner is maybe two hundred feet from her door, and there is a vacant lot there where every dog on the street has always gone. By the time Biscuit got halfway he would stop and sit down on the concrete with his back legs out to one side, and he would not get up. She did not pull him. I will say that for her from the start. She would stand there with the leash slack and wait, sometimes five minutes, and then she would bend down and pick up all thirty pounds of him and carry him back in her arms like a sack of feed, in her work clothes.
And her own yard was no good to him. The landlord had put down white river rock from the foundation to the sidewalk so he would never have to mow, and that dog would not so much as set a foot on it. He would stand at the edge and look at it the way I look at a gravel parking lot in good shoes.
My rose bed was the first soft ground past her front door. He had not picked it to spite me. He had picked it because it was as far as he could get.
I did not move the chair. But on the ninth morning, which was a Tuesday, I put a crust of toast in my housecoat pocket.
“Good morning, Vicki. Good morning, Biscuit.”
“Good morning,” she said. It was the first time she had said it back. She said it the way you would pay a toll.
And she was carrying a cup.
It was a tall green one with a lid. She stopped on the sidewalk, on her side of the last rose bush, and she stood there and drank from it and looked down the street as if she had always taken her coffee standing on a public sidewalk at dawn. Biscuit sat down on her shoe.
“Can he have toast?” I said.
She looked at me a long moment. “A little.”
I held it out. He took it more gently than some people take communion.
“He likes you,” she said. She sounded put out about it.
“He likes toast.”
We drank our coffee. Neither of us said another word for ten minutes. Then she said, “I’ve got to get to work,” and she picked him up and carried him home.
She stood there Wednesday too, and Thursday. Thursday she said the propane company was getting a new computer system and nobody could find anything. I said the license office got one in 1998 and I never found anything again. Friday she asked what the pink ones were called.
“Queen Elizabeth.”
“And the red?”
“Mister Lincoln.”
“Mister,” she said. “Not Abraham. Like he’s the principal.”
I laughed. I had not meant to.
That night I went out to the garage and stood looking at the other chair for some time.
It was only a chair. It had hung there since a warm evening the September before, when Dale sat in it in the driveway and listened to the ball game on the truck radio with a blanket over his legs. The stove bolt in the arm had a little rust on it. I had not touched it since. I had not been able to see what I would ever take it down for.
I took it down. I wiped the webbing with a damp rag, both sides.
Saturday morning there were two lawn chairs at the end of the rose bed.
Vicki came down her step and across her yard and stopped. She looked at the second chair for quite a while.
“I’m not going to bite you,” I said. “And you can’t keep standing. You’ll get those veins.”
She sat. She sat on the front three inches of it, like a girl in a principal’s office. Biscuit turned around twice in the grass between us and lay down with his chin on my slipper.
“This arm’s been fixed,” she said, feeling the bolt.
“My husband fixed everything. He’d have fixed a paper cup.”
“This was his?”
“Yes.”
She took her hand off the arm and put it in her lap. Then, after a minute, she put it back.
It was the fifteenth morning, a Monday, when she told me.
She had not been sleeping. I could see it. She sat down without being asked and held her cup with both hands and watched the dog, who was asleep already.
“He was my dad’s,” she said.
I waited.
“Biscuit. He was Dad’s dog. Dad lived over at Vandalia, in the house I grew up in. He got him as a pup the year after Mom passed, and for fourteen years the two of them walked to the end of the block every morning at half past six, rain or shine, and Biscuit did his business in the empty lot by the water tower, and they walked home and had breakfast. Fourteen years. That dog has never in his life gone anyplace but at the end of a walk.” She turned the cup around in her hands. “Dad died in February. My brother didn’t want a dog. So.”
“So you took him.”
“I’d been divorced since November. Twenty-nine years, and then one afternoon he told me he’d been done for a while, he just hadn’t gotten around to saying. I was in a one-bedroom apartment in Columbia that didn’t take pets. I found this house because it was the only thing I could afford that would let me have him.” She laughed, and it was not a happy sound. “And then I get here, and he can’t make it to the corner. He sits down halfway and looks at me. Like I’ve moved the corner on him.”
Biscuit sighed in his sleep.
“I know what he’s doing to your roses,” she said. “I’ve known it since the first week. I saw that bush going brown. I’m not blind.”
“Then why on earth did you say it was fertilizer?”
“Because I didn’t know what else to do with him.” Her voice went thin. “Because I’d been on this street six weeks and not one person had said a word to me, and the first thing anybody did say was to keep my dog off their flowers. And I thought, well, fine. If that’s who I am here, that’s who I’ll be. I’ve got a smart mouth, Carolyn. It’s the only thing I got in the divorce.”
I sat there with that.
She was right, and it stung. When the Hayes family moved into that house in 1994, I was at their door before the truck was unloaded, with a ham loaf and a list of which nights the trash went out. When Vicki moved in, I watched from behind the curtain. I had not carried a dish to anybody’s door since Dale’s funeral. I had been taking them in, not sending them out.
“I should have come over in April,” I said. “With a pie. That’s on me, not you.”
“You’d just lost your husband.”
“Six months before. That’s no excuse for manners.”
She wiped her face with the heel of her hand. “I’m sorry about the roses. I am. I just can’t make him go on rocks.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t suppose anybody could.”
We sat. Jeff went by and lifted his two fingers. The light came up on the brick across the street and turned it the color of a peach.
“Tell me about him,” she said. “Your husband.”
So I did. I told her about the yardstick and the envelope and the eleven circles. I told her he measured the walk twice. I told her he sat on a bucket to plant that last one, the one she was sitting beside, and that I had pushed the dirt in around it myself.
She looked at the brown canes for a long time. She did not say anything at all. She reached down and laid her hand on the old dog’s side, and left it there.
The rest of that week she walked him the other direction, toward the Tuckers’, and carried him home, and came and sat with her coffee after. I kept sitting. I will be honest about why. By then I was not out there for the roses. I was out there because it was half past six and somebody was coming.
On Friday she bent over the Mister Lincoln and bent one of the brown canes with her finger. It snapped like a pencil.
“Is there something you can put on it?” she said. “Some kind of spray?”
“I don’t know. Dale would’ve asked Mr. Pruett. Out on the highway. He’s had that place forty years.”
She nodded. She did not say any more about it.
Saturday was the twentieth morning. She had her coffee with me and left early. A little before nine I heard her car back out.
I was on my knees deadheading the pink ones when she came back, close to ten. She pulled into her driveway and turned the engine off and then she just sat there behind the wheel. I could see her through the windshield. She sat long enough that I got up and brushed off my knees.
When she got out, she did not go to her door. She came around to the trunk, and she stood there with her hand flat on the lid.
“Carolyn,” she said. “I need to ask you something about Dale.”
“All right.”
“Did he ever tell you why he put the red one on the end? By the sidewalk?”
I thought about it. “He wanted a red one at each end. He liked things to come out even.”
She shook her head. Her eyes were red around the rims.
“I went out there for a bottle of something. I told the old man I had a rose going brown at the bottom and was there a spray for it. He asked me where the rose was. I told him. And he took his glasses off and he said, ‘That’s Dale’s walk.’”
I had to put my hand on the fender of her car.
“He remembered all of it. He said your husband came in last April with a drawing on the back of an envelope and bought eleven roses at thirty-two dollars apiece and paid cash, three hundred fifty-two dollars, and counted it out twice. He said Dale told him he’d never planted a thing and to talk slow.” She swallowed. “And he said Dale asked him which one had the best smell. Mr. Pruett told him Mister Lincoln, there’s not a red rose that smells like it. And Dale said, good, then one of those goes on the end by the sidewalk. Because that’s the one she’ll walk past coming home from church by herself, and he wanted you to smell it before you got to the door.”
I had not known that. For fourteen months I had walked past that rose every Sunday at noon, and I had not known it was put there for me to walk past.
I could not say anything. Vicki did not make me.
After a while she said, “He told me there isn’t any spray. He said a dog going in the same place every morning is like pouring the fertilizer on straight out of the bag, every day, in one spot. It’s the salt and the nitrogen. It burns the roots. He said once or twice, a rose shrugs it off. Every day for two months, it’s done for.” She looked at me. “So it was fertilizer. I was right about that. I just had no idea what I was saying.”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t either, or I’d have told you.”
“I asked him what it would cost to make it right. He said thirty-two dollars and a shovel, same as last year, he hasn’t gone up on roses.”
She opened the trunk.
There was a Mister Lincoln in a black pot, with three fat buds on it and one bloom open, dark as a cherry. There was a bag of planting mix. There were two bags of cypress mulch. And there was a shovel with the price sticker still on the handle.
“I didn’t own a shovel,” she said. “I do now.”
“Vicki, you don’t have to.”
“Yes I do. Don’t be nice to me about it. You’ve been nice to me for twenty days and it about killed me.” She hauled the pot out and set it on the driveway. “I’m going to dig the hole. I’m going to do it myself. I only need you to tell me where.”
I showed her where. We cut the dead bush off at the ground first, and she worked the old root out with the shovel and a good deal of grunting. Mr. Pruett had told her to take out the old dirt, too, two or three bucketfuls, because it was full of salt, and to put fresh in. She carried it around back to the alley herself.
Then she started digging, and I let her go for a few minutes before I said anything, because she was so determined.
It was a terrible hole. It was about as wide as a coffee can and went straight down past her elbow.
“Vicki.”
“What.”
“You’re setting a fence post.”
She sat back on her heels and looked at it. She had dirt on her forehead. “It’s a hole.”
“It’s a well. Get up a minute.”
I went in the garage and came back with Dale’s yardstick. It still had his pencil marks on it.
“He did it the same way every time,” I said, “all eleven. Mr. Pruett told him once and he never changed it. The hole is twice as wide as the pot and not one bit deeper. A rose doesn’t want to go down, it wants to go out. So you fill some of that back in.”
She filled it back in. She widened it. I knelt beside her, the way I had knelt beside him, and it did not hurt the way I had expected. It only felt like something I knew how to do.
“Now tip it out of the pot. Easy. Scratch the roots loose with your fingers, they’ve been going in a circle. Now see this knob, down low, where the canes come out of the stump? That’s where it was grafted. Around here that sits an inch under the dirt, for the winters. Not at the top. Not three inches down. An inch.”
“How am I supposed to know an inch from down in a hole?”
“The way he did.” I laid the yardstick flat across the hole, edge to edge, like a little bridge. “That’s your ground. Now hold the bush so the knob is one finger below the stick.”
She held it. Her hands were shaking a little. I pushed the fresh soil in halfway, and we ran the hose in and let it go down, and filled the rest, and watered it again.
“Don’t I put the rose food in?” she said. “He sold me a little box.”
“Not today. Dale asked him the same thing. You don’t feed a rose the day you plant it. You make it go looking.” I heard myself and nearly laughed. “Six weeks. Then the box.”
“He said to water it every day for two weeks, since it’s summer.”
“Then you’ll be over here every day for two weeks.”
“I’m over here every day anyhow,” she said.
We spread the mulch two inches deep and pulled it back from the canes with our fingers so it would not hold the wet against them. When we stood up, our knees cracked at the same time, and Biscuit, who had watched the whole thing from the shade with his chin on his paws, thumped his tail on the grass.
There were eleven again. Red at both ends.
Vicki looked at the dog. “That still leaves him.”
“I’ve been thinking about him,” I said. “What’s the second bag of mulch for?”
She went a little pink. “I thought, if you’d let me. There’s that strip on my side, by the corner of the back fence, where your hedge quits. It’s four feet of the landlord’s rock. I thought I’d rake the rock back and put down mulch, the same kind as yours, so it would feel right to him. Mr. Pruett said a dog goes by his feet and his nose.”
“Then he’ll want more than new mulch,” I said.
I got the bucket. I filled it from the old end of the rose bed, the mulch he had been using for two months. I will leave it there, and only say that a dog knows his own.
She raked the white rock back by hand. It took her the better part of an hour. We laid down both bags, and I shook the bucket out over the top, and we stood back like two women who had just hung a picture.
Biscuit got up. He walked over, slow, on those stiff legs. He put his nose down. He walked all the way around that patch once, like a man reading the fine print.
Then he stepped up onto it, and he did his business, right there by the fence, on his own ground, twelve steps from his own door.
Vicki cried harder over that than she had over anything else. I put my arm around her. She smelled like dirt and propane and hazelnut coffee.
“Good boy,” she kept saying. “Good boy. Oh, you good old boy.”
She paid for the rose and the shovel and the dirt and the mulch out of her own pocket, and she dug the hole with her own hands, and she watered that bush every single evening for two weeks, and for a good while after that when she did not have to. When Amy called that Friday and asked if I had phoned the city yet, I told her no, I had been busy gardening.
“With who?” she said.
“With the neighbor.”
There was a long quiet on the line. “The dog neighbor?”
“Her name is Vicki,” I said. “She’s coming to supper Sunday. I’m making ham loaf. I’m about two months late with it.”
The new Mister Lincoln took. It bloomed three times before frost.
I still carry my chair out at half past six. I don’t need to. Nobody is coming for the roses. But there are two chairs at the end of the walk now, mine and the one with the stove bolt in the arm, and at half past six the door of the Hayes house opens, and an old beagle comes down the step one stair at a time and goes to his own patch by the fence, and then he comes over and lies down on my slipper.
“Good morning, Vicki,” I say. “Good morning, Biscuit.”
And on Sundays, coming home from church by myself, I slow down at the end of the walk, three feet shy of the sidewalk, right where he measured.
I smell it before I get to the door.
