The Rose Thieves by Heidi Jon Schmidt

Kate would go to live in Amir’s barren country and bend herself to his ways. And no oil-lit tents either, she admonished herself, no Arabian Nights. They’d live in a tiny apartment over an asphalt bazaar. Passion would have to suffice.
    â€œI see what you mean, Pop,” Audie said, staring out the window.
    â€œI don’t,” Ma said. “I’d say expression was the force of the will, if I was asked. I’d say Kate should write symphonies of her own.”
    Operas, Kate thought, everything. What a lush world! When a flock of blackbirds scattered and regrouped overhead, she felt sure they were hearing Haydn too.
    *   *   *
    Without furniture the living room had a brute, medieval look: the beams were tree trunks again, and the fireplace was big enough to roast a foe. The piano, a concert grand that had materialized after Pop made a killing in July wheat and Ma made a breakfast of Moët & Chandon, stood alone on the blue rug as if it had set off to sea. Kate started the sonata again. Then again. And another time. This was dedication, a rational art and a noble one. She sat back to think how noble, and pictured a conservatory: the slim, pointed window of the practice room, the weary delirium after hours of work, toast and tea and Lives of the Composers back at the dorm. This was expression: playing the music, you could feel the life of the composer. You saw the women walking under his window, heard their laughter and guessed their hearts, too.
    Ma had shooed them all out of the kitchen so she could talk to Pop. They had so many catastrophes! Last week the washing machine had overflowed: back they had stumbled as the sudsy flood advanced, bearing brassieres like bloated corpses on its crest. There had been no clean clothes, not a rag, until the girls, wrapped in tablecloths like saris, had waded into the brook and pounded the laundry on stones. They were equal to any disaster, Ma told them. She told Pop he had left them at the mercy of the tides.
    â€œGasket must have gone,” Pop said. “I didn’t realize it was that old.”
    â€œOf course not,” Ma said. Her voice was turning, and Kate at the piano girded herself as a passenger will press an imaginary brake. “You weren’t here. ”
    â€œI can’t be two places at once,” he said, petulant as Chucky.
    â€œSo hide your head in mommy’s apron,” Ma said, “or under it.”
    â€œDon’t be vulgar, Lila.”
    â€œVulgar?” She sounded as if he’d named her place of birth. “ Why not? Vulgar, that’s what I am, vile and stinking with no clean clothes, unlike the Great Mother Vanderwald, Our Lady of the Suburbs with her ice-blue eyes and her crystal cunt.”
    Here was a word Kate had never heard her mother speak, and she closed the piano lid and escaped upstairs. If she were braver, she knew, she would have gone to her parents’ aid. “Now you’ve lost track of the problem,” she’d say, pulling out chairs so they could sit and listen. “The problem is she misses you, Pop. She’s afraid you don’t love her.” She’d be very stern with him: “You cannot substitute facts for truths,” she’d tell Pop. “Nobody’s asking you to be in two places at once.” And she would remind Ma that Pop was afraid of her and she ought to be nicer to him.
    â€œâ€™Tis I,” she said, vamping in the doorway of her parents’ bedroom, where Audie and Chuck were watching TV, “the lovely one.” She plunked herself down with them on the quilt.
    â€œHaving a little talk down there, are they?” Audie said, but as they turned their smiles together, they heard Ma coming up.
    â€œYou were delivered with ice tongs! The world’s first test-tube baby, bloodless product of Vanderwald Laboratories…” She went past them to the mirror and tore the pins from her hair while Pop stayed at