The Garden Path by Kitty Burns Florey Page B

to make it up with you. I feel bad that I was so snide about her. I don’t think she’s trying to get anything out of you, except—”
    â€œSupport,” Rosie said sarcastically. “In every sense of the word.”
    â€œMa …”
    â€œGo along, now, Peter,” she said, opening the door. It was snowing, very gently. She had never kicked him out before, but she was sick of it—his pleas for Susannah, the way he’d let the girl get to him, her own pounding anger that was beginning to appear ridiculous but which she couldn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t shake. “And please drive carefully. And I’ll call you tomorrow, maybe. Do you want to go to a movie one of these nights?”
    He sighed. He drew on his gloves—red woolen ones, with leather palms—and kissed her again, lightly. “Sure,” he said. “Let’s go to a movie. You pick.” And then, just before he left, he said, “You’re going to have to face her, sooner or later.”
    She didn’t even answer. She just pushed him out the door, and then watched him go down the walk to his car, get the brush out of the trunk, clean off the windshield. Do the back window, too , she said silently to him, and was relieved when he walked around to do so. He got in the car and drove off— drive carefully , she said to his taillights—leaving her with her anger. It didn’t go away but intensified as she sat by the fire having a last glass of sherry before bed, remembering for some reason how Susannah had abandoned her playhouse after that first summer, declared it was dirty and full of bugs and spiders, cried when Rosie told her she was spoiled, and gone to Edwin for the approval he was quick to give. “Kids outgrow things,” he had said to Rosie, who hadn’t deigned to answer. She had turned the playhouse into a garden shed, and always felt warmly toward the spiders who built their webs in the corners and scurried over the pots.
    When she finished the sherry, she threw the glass at the fireplace, where it shattered, and she felt better. She even chuckled a little, imagining Peter’s pile of smashed glass. But when she went to bed, tired though she was from the late hour, the sherry, the angry bumping of her heart, she couldn’t sleep for thinking of her children. And lest she dwell on Susannah—her tantrums, her school troubles, the fistful of squash she threw at the dining room curtains, the time she rode her bicycle into the box hedge; all this was waiting just outside Rosie’s consciousness for her fury to pounce on—and lest she dwell on it, she thought of Peter, remembering.
    When Edwin left, followed soon by stony-faced Susannah with her three suitcases and a huge plastic bag full of stuffed animals she should have outgrown, and Peter and Rosie were left alone in the house, she felt happiness settle into her and into all the rooms. It was the feeling she remembered from childhood at the start of summer vacation, of infinite possibility, of blessed release. The house, which had for so many years been blighted with the growing enmity between herself and Edwin, between herself and Susannah, between Peter and Edwin, and Peter and Susannah, was blown clean and healthy again by their exit.
    With glee—yes, it was glee, there wasn’t a shred of sadness in her (though for months she couldn’t bring herself to enter Susannah’s room)—with glee she tossed out the old mattress she and Edwin had avoided each other on for so long and bought a new one, hard the way she liked it. She also got rid of the scratchy white muslin sheets Edwin’s mother had given them, which he had always, perversely, claimed to prefer, and bought herself sheets patterned with roses. Edwin had been scornful, after that brief courting period when he’d faked tolerant benevolence, of the roses she surrounded herself with, not only in the garden but in the