Roses Read Free Page A

to love
     and spoil in his declining years. Tomorrow all that would be over for him, too.
    He heaved a sigh and opened a door in the credenza. Never did he take a drink before six o’clock in the evening, and then
     his limit was two shots of Scotch mellowed with twice as much soda. Today he took a bottle from the cabinet, dumped the water
     from his glass, and unhesitatingly poured it half-full of Johnnie Walker Red.
    Glass in hand, he crossed to the French windows overlooking a small courtyard rife with the summer flowers of East Texas—pink
     primroses and blue plumbago, violet lantana and yellow nasturtium, all climbing the rock fence. The garden had been designed
     by Charles Waithe, son of the founder of the firm, to serve as a mental retreat from the heartsick duties of his office. Today
     the therapy didn’t work, but it evoked memories that Mary’s visit had already jogged to the surface. He remembered the day
     Charles, then a man of fifty, had turned from this window and asked if he’d be interested in a junior partner position. He’d
     been stunned, elated. The offer had come within the forty-eight hours he’d given William Toliver his train ticket, seen Mary
     on the stairs, and met her locally prominent husband and the equally powerful Percy Warwick. It had all happened so fast,
     his head still spun when he thought of how fate had been kind and parlayed his decision to part with his ticket into the fulfillment
     of his dreams—a job in his field, a place to call home, and friends to take him to their bosoms.
    It had all come about one early October morning in 1945. Just discharged from the army, with no job on the horizon and nowhere
     to hang his hat, he was on his way to Houston to see a sister he barely knew when the train stopped briefly outside a little
     burg with a sign over the station house that read:
W
elcome to
H
owbutker,
H
eart of the
P
iney
W
oods of
T
exas. He’d gotten off to stretch his legs when a teenage boy with green eyes and hair as black as a cornfield crow ran up
     to the conductor hollering, “Hold the train! Hold the train!”
    “Got a ticket, son?”
    “No, sir, I—”
    “Well, then, you’ll have to wait for the next train. This one’s full to capacity from here to Houston.”
    Amos had looked at the flushed face of the boy, his breath coming out in fast, chilled puffs, and recognized the desperation
     of a boy running away from home. He’s taking too much with him, he’d thought, recalling his own experience as a boy of fifteen
     on the lam from his parents. He hadn’t made it. That’s when he’d handed the boy his ticket. “Here. Take mine,” he’d said.
     “I’ll wait for the next train.”
    The boy—whom he later discovered to be the seventeen-year-old nephew of Mary Toliver DuMont—had rushed out on the platform
     to wave at him as the train bore him away, never to return to Howbutker to live. And Amos had never left. He’d hoisted his
     duffel and started into town with the idea of staying only one night, but the morning train had taken off without him. He’d
     often reflected on the irony of it… how William’s exit out of Howbutker had been his entrance in, and he’d never regretted
     a single day of it. Until now.
    He took a fiery swallow of the Scotch, feeling it go down like broken razor blades.
Dammit, Mary, what in the world possessed you to do such a deplorable thing?
He ran a hand over his bald scalp. What in God’s name had he missed that would explain—
excuse
—what she had done? He’d thought he knew her history and those of Ollie DuMont and Percy Warwick inside out. What he hadn’t
     read, he had heard from their own mouths. Naturally, he had arrived too late to witness the beginning of their stories, but
     he’d made a point to fill in the gaps. Nowhere had he come across anything—not a scrap of gossip, newspaper clipping, journal,
     not a word from people who had known them all their lives—that would explain why Mary had