Free The Garden Path by Kitty Burns Florey Page A

the trees, and the sun shone on everything, laying distinct angles of black across the white.
    Rosie awoke utterly refreshed. Looking out on the purity of the day, she felt as if the snow had fallen on her own hot soul, cooling and cleaning it, leaving it new. After she had her oatmeal, she put on her boots and mittens and down jacket and knitted cap and, after shoveling a path, she went for a walk. The streets were quiet; even the Post Road, where the plowed snow was gradually turning to slush and leaving bare spots, was nearly deserted, and she walked along it, liking the way the soles of her boots met the fresh snow, the merest pull as the snow grabbed on, the slight difficulty as she lifted her foot again. It was “good packing weather,” as Peter and his pals used to say, and she made a snowball now and then and threw it at the side of a building or a parked car. It was a beautiful day, so beautiful that even the tawdry stores—Big B’s Discount Haven, The Liquor Supermarket, Galetti’s Drug, E-Z-Do Laundromat, Alexander’s Hair Works—seemed purified in the snow and the sun.
    She walked west, into Chiswick. Her objective as she stated it to herself was to see if Zakrzeski’s was open—the Polish bakery where she sometimes bought poteca —a fresh, yeasty hunk of poteca being just the thing to munch on when she returned. But as she walked she realized, with a furtive and unexpected sense of adventure, that she was heading for the vacant storefront in Chiswick that Susannah and her husband had rented. She would see if it was true; she would spy on them, anonymous in her cap and her heavy clothes. She imagined peeking in a window and seeing Susannah languid in a chair eating a candy bar while her poor husband huffed and puffed over packing cases full of ginseng and soybeans.
    She passed Zakrzeski’s—yes, they were open, she’d stop on the way back—and headed quite deliberately past McDonald’s, Arnie’s Auto Body, the Glitter City Roller Dome, Fosdick Body Works, Shoe City, Dunkin’ Donuts, Chiswick Princess Beauty Supply Shop, and finally the site of the failed bookstore, in a mini-shopping center between Wendell’s Tropical Fish Paradise and the Post Road Liquor Boutique.
    Rosie trudged across the pristine parking lot. Only the Liquor Boutique was open. In Wendell’s, there was the purple gloom of rows of dimly lit fish tanks. The plate glass window of the empty store was dusty and bare—no hand-painted sign announcing the imminent opening of SUE ’ S NATURAL EATS or IVAN ’ S GOURMET HEALTH EMPORIUM or whatever absurd and probably inaccurate label they planned to tack on their place. She peered cautiously in through the grime, ready to pull her collar up and her hat down at any threat of recognition. But there was no one inside. The store was still lined with bookshelves, one of which had fallen over. There was a counter. There was a filthy black and white tile floor. There were empty-looking cardboard cartons in a corner. That was all, just those bleak innards staring out at her indifferently. Rosie felt a vague disappointment—she had liked the idea of spying. She also felt a pang of pity for her daughter, for her ugly, taciturn husband, for the anonymous local friend who had talked the two of them into this nonsensical step or who had let them talk him into it. Doomed crazy hippies who would never grow up. Irresponsible flower babies who hoped to push tofu burgers in this wonderland of exhaust fumes and Big Macs and sweet pink wine and hair spray. It all looked, to say the least, unpromising. The view in that dusty window, Rosie decided, was one of the most depressing sights she’d ever seen.
    And, perhaps unreasonably, she took it as an emblem of her daughter, the empty store killing off her good mood just as definitively as Susannah used to. There had been that same drowsy indifference, that deadness at the center, about