Free Rosie O'Dell by Bill Rowe Page B

more than anything in this world.
     Would you like to go for a ride to Bowring Park on the bikes?”

    ONE EVENING A FEW weeks after Joyce O’Dell’s death, I
     went to Rosie’s with the Janis Joplin album I’d bought as a present. I knew she
     loved “Me and Bobby McGee.” From the porch where she met me I saw a huge bouquet
     of flowers on the table in the hall. Rosie took the record with a distracted
     thank you and less delight than I’d anticipated. She seemed unsettled. Then, as
     if remembering something important, she left me in the porch abruptly and
     stalked down the hall to the kitchen. I heard her lighting into her mother,
     obviously continuing an interrupted argument. A quarrel between this mother and
     daughter was not rare enough to make me wonder much about it so, as the voices
     ranged back and forth, I wandered into the hall and admired the flowers. There
     must have been a dozen varieties: roses, yellow and pink; carnations, white and
     red; yellow mums; some sort of a delicate iris, white with a purplish tinge; and
     the rest, though familiar, I’d never learned the names of.
    Rosie flounced back out of the kitchen still carrying the record album. “Sorry
     about that,” she said, “but I had to get my point across to the poor thing.
     Want to go upstairs?”
    “Okay. Those flowers are some nice.”
    “Way too nice if you ask me. I was just telling dear Mother in there that it is
     very bizarre for her to accept them at this point: every flower known to
     humankind.” She reeled off names as we went up, including those I hadn’t
     known.
    “Why, who gave them to her?”
    “Oh the famous Dr. Heathcliff Godolphin Rothesay,” she said, almost spitting
     out the name. “They must have cost a hundred bucks. And for what purpose, you
     may ask, so soon after the funeral when the funeral notice said clearly, No
     flowers by request?”
    “He’s from England. Maybe they—”
    “It is creepy, I told the poor woman. He hardly even knew Daddy. Friendship
     with his family? Nearly three years he’s been here and he never came within a
     country mile of us until the funeral. What’s he trying to prove giving a
     grieving widow something like that right now out of the blue? It is absolutely
     bizarre.”
    In her bedroom she put the record on her player and I felt so
     uncomfortable, for a reason I could not fathom, from her over-the-top reaction
     to the flowers, that I changed the subject. Did she want to go to the Regatta
     with me down at Quidi Vidi Lake in a couple of days? I had to ask her twice
     before she came out of the thoughts absorbing her and nodded, but with scant
     enthusiasm for the delightful mob scene that heretofore she’d professed to
     love.
    When Rosie’s mother dropped in to see Mom a day or two later, I heard them in
     the kitchen from my room upstairs, talking about Dr. Heathcliff Rothesay. “He
     says he wants to be friends, Gladys, and that’s all,” said Nina. “And of course
     it goes without saying that’s all I’d be interested in from any man from now
     till the day I croak. I made all that clear enough to him. Rosie calls his
     attentions weird, bizarre, and creepy. What’s weird, bizarre, and creepy is the
     very thought in her head that it might be anything beyond pure
     friendship—acquaintanceship, really, because I don’t ever expect him to be my
     good friend, or want him to be, for that matter. ‘Look, Rosie, ’ I told her,
     ‘he’s a cultivated man who admired your deceased father’s widely acclaimed
     poetry and he’s interested in the friendship of his family. What do you find so
     damned strange about that?’ ‘Oh, Mother, Mother, Mother, ’ she says in that
     insufferable superior manner she can put on, ‘don’t try to play dumb with me.’ I
     think the girl is pathologically jealous.”
    “Jealous?” said Mom. “Of what?”
    “Everything, just about. Of Joyce’s memory, worried someone will replace him in
     my