Free The Garden Path by Kitty Burns Florey Page B

Susannah—about Edwin, too, as if they’d abandoned their souls and left them to moulder away. They had flat, light blue eyes that seemed good for nothing but to see with—mere sense organs, like ears, with no depth or mystery, no revelations lurking there.
    The memories of the years she spent with them returned to her painfully, like headaches, as she stood there in the snow. There, stabbing behind the left eye, was the recollection of Susannah turning away from a hug, a kind word, a smile—right up until the last time, when she was leaving. She stood in the front hall, in sunlight, her hair clean for once, a large leather purse tucked absurdly beneath her ten-year-old arm, her three suitcases stowed away in the cab and the cabdriver waiting to take her to the airport. She was meeting Edwin in New York. She and Rosie stood in the hall. Susannah looked petulant, she had set her mouth in a line and made her eyes go hard, but Rosie thought she detected beneath this a glimmer of regret, or at least of the childish sadness you’d expect from a ten-year-old kid about to leave her mother for the first time and forever.
    â€œYou can still stay, Susannah,” she said. “You can still have a home here with Peter and me.”
    Any glimmer she saw there disappeared, or had been imaginary in the first place, the culmination of years of disappointment from her daughter. “No, thank you,” Susannah said. That was all—a simple negative, with the uncharacteristic polite tag at the end, for emphasis.
    Partly to see what she’d say, Rosie went further: “Sure you don’t want me to drive you to the airport?”
    She was only ten years old, she had never been on a plane, she was about to leave home forever, and she didn’t answer. She picked up her bag of stuffed animals and walked out the door to the taxi while Rosie stood gaping in the hall. By being silent, she got the last word.
    All Rosie’s little memory-headaches were variations on that scene: love offered, love rejected. Perhaps Susannah’s memories were similar. Who rejected whom first? Could such a tangle ever be sorted out? It was true that in babyhood Susannah had often cried when Rosie held her and quieted down for Edwin; was it instinctive distaste, or the apprehension of some tenseness or roughness that Rosie wasn’t aware of? It was certainly true, also, that Rosie had seen Edwin’s features in Susannah’s, and had recoiled from the resemblance. But Rosie had painful memories of a sullen, whiny, unloving daughter; Susannah’s may have been of a flinty, distant mother who playacted affection from time to time. Both of them, no doubt, remembered accurately.
    Rosie stood there looking through the dusty window until her toes began to freeze, and then she went into the Liquor Boutique for a bottle of sherry.
    â€œPlanning to get snowed in in style?” the proprietor asked as he bagged it. He was a fat man dressed gangster-style in a dark shirt and light tie.
    She snickered dutifully.
    â€œTell me the truth,” he said. “Is this stuff really worth the extra money? Is it really that much better than the stuff from California?”
    â€œI think it is.”
    â€œI really want to know,” he pursued. “I’m serious. Now I’m not a sherry drinker. Do I look like one?” He roared with laughter; whether he referred to his weight or his masculinity or some other quality Rosie didn’t know, but she snickered again. “So level with me,” he said. “Is it really better?”
    â€œI think it’s good,” she said obligingly. “Nice and dry.”
    â€œWorth the extra dough? Tell me the truth.”
    â€œDefinitely worth it,” she said again, and held out the money. Time to ask her question and scram. It may have been laughable, at her age, to worry about men trying to pick her up, but they still did, often enough, and she could see the