The Garden Path Read Free Page A

the mustard?”
    â€œOld guy indeed! You should be in such good shape when you’re fifty-five. And it’s none of your damned business.” She kissed him and patted the knot of his muffler. “Have fun with your little machines, dearie.”
    He picked his way down the slushy front walk, and Rosie watched him from the door until he got into his Volkswagen and drove off, honking. The sun was gone, the sky flat gray, and it looked like snow again; it was as if the dark shadow of Susannah was already blighting the weather, putting any sunny predictions out of whack. Rosie slammed the door and returned, shivering, to the fire to think about her daughter.
    It’s not that she hadn’t been a good mother. She was dedicated to Peter from the start, from the minute he was handed to her by a perky nurse, his eight pounds swaddled in blue flannel, his eyes shut and his mouth open, and his red fingers, with their tiny ragged nails, opening and closing in a way that seemed to Rosie heartbreaking. She fastened him to her breast as if he were a little lost thing in a storm and she the Saint Bernard with the cask of brandy, and felt a pang of unprecedented joy—symbolized, she always felt, by the pinching pains that tugged at her uterus whenever the baby nursed. The organs tightening up again, the doctor told her, getting ready for the next one, heh heh heh. But Rosie knew better—they were the bittersweet pains of motherhood, and she welcomed them.
    She tended him gladly, restless while he slept, running to the crib at his first waking cry to change him, nurse him, cuddle him, exchange baby talk—anything. She was a mother before all else; when her baby was asleep it was as if she ceased to exist. She bragged, like any mother, about what a good baby Peter was—meaning he slept a lot, slept through the night after a couple of weeks, took long naps—but she would have actually preferred him colicky or high-strung or just plain active, so long as he was awake.
    â€œI don’t know anyone who’s such good company,” she used to say to people, especially the other mothers she met on the Common. While they complained about night feedings and diaper rash, Rosie confounded them with her unbroken serenity, and she must have disgusted them with her smugness. She was unpopular, but she didn’t care. She had Peter, after all—her snugglewumps, her baby bunny, her muffin, her piggywig.
    She was twenty years old when Peter was born. She had been married to Edwin for a year and already things were going badly. Peter was her refuge, and though she had a glimpse now of how unhealthy that was, then it saved her from certain despair. She left Edwin out completely, deliberately, laughing at his disgust when he came upon her cooing and making silly noises at the baby. “Oh, Edwin, you old prune,” she used to say, smiling a little as if she were joking.
    â€œYou’re spoiling him with all that attention,” Edwin would say, and Rosie would turn to Peter. “Was oo a spoiled muffin? Was oo?” watching Edwin’s disapproval from the corner of her eye.
    He was five years older than she, just out of law school, working in the legal department of a big Boston insurance company. They lived in a dark, grubby building on Marlborough Street, in a third floor apartment at the back. Rosie had been plucked from her parents’ vast green acres—Liliano’s Garden Center, on Route 1 near Westerly, R.I.—and transplanted to the barren wastes of the city, where the only garden she had was a row of houseplants that grew in the one window of the apartment that didn’t face north. During that first year, before Peter was born, she used to walk not only in the Common and in the Public Garden with its bright formal beds of annuals, but out as far as the Fenway where there were wildflowers, and vegetable plots grown by city dwellers, and one gorgeous rose garden tended by an