Free A Rose From the Dead by Kate Collins Page B

Strange. My dad never phoned this late.
    “Hi, Dad. What’s up?”
    “Sorry to bother you, honey. Are you busy right now?”
    I pushed open the heavy back door and saw my hunk-a-hunk-of-burning-love standing outside near the curb, his phone pressed to his ear. He glanced at me and shook his head to signal that things weren’t going well with his conversation.
    “Marco and I are just leaving the convention center. Is there a problem?”
    “Your mother is throwing clay, Abby. I don’t know what to do.”
    There was nothing odd about her throwing clay. That’s what my mom called it when she sat at her potter’s wheel producing her weird sculptures. It was a hobby she’d started a year ago, although she’d since moved on to other media to produce her works of art, such as mirrored tiles and feathers. What was odd was how tense my dad sounded.
    “Whatever she’s making can’t be worse than her Naked Monkeys Table,” I joked. Marco glanced at me with raised eyebrows.
    “You don’t understand, Abby. She’s actually throwing clay—at the walls, on the floor…I don’t know how to help her. Listen. Can you hear that?”
    In the background I could hear my mom shrieking, “I hate this clay. Hate it, hate it, hate it!”
    “Let me talk to her.”
    “I don’t know if I want to get that close.”
    “Come on, Dad. This is your wife of thirty-five years.”
    “No, this is an alien life form disguised as my wife. Hold on. I’ll give it a try.”
    I waited while he maneuvered his wheelchair toward the spare room at the back of the house, where Mom had set up her art studio. My father had been wounded in the leg while chasing down a drug dealer, and while on the operating table had suffered a stroke that had left one side of his body paralyzed. Although he’d retired from the force, that hadn’t stopped him from living a full life.
    “Maureen,” I heard him say, “your daughter is on the line.”
    “Did you phone her?” the alien life-form snarled as she took the phone; then in a sweet voice, my mom said, “Hello, Abigail.”
    “Mom, is everything okay?”
    She let out a tinkling laugh. “Of course. Why? What did your father tell you?”
    “That you, well, aren’t yourself.”
    “How silly. Who else would I be?”
    I didn’t dare mention my dad’s theory on the subject. “Then you’re feeling all right?”
    “I’m perfectly fine.”
    She certainly didn’t sound like the same woman I’d heard screeching moments before, but my dad wouldn’t have called unless he was truly concerned. “Are you working on a new sculpture?”
    “I’m trying to finish a gift for Marco’s sister’s baby shower, but the clay isn’t cooperating”—she took a tense breath and let it out—“and naturally it has to be finished by next weekend, not to mention that I have to find a dress, and a pair of shoes, and my hair needs cutting and highlighting, and of course my stylist couldn’t get me in until Friday, and you know how I hate my hair the day after it’s been cut, so when am I going to do all that, huh? When? ”
    She was making a sculpture for Marco’s sister’s baby shower ? Oh, no! How would I ever live down the embarrassment? Trying not to betray the lump of anxiety in my throat, I asked pleasantly, “So, you’re making something for Gina’s shower?”
    “Isn’t that what I just told you?” she said churlishly.
    I was determined not to let her irk me. “What are you making?”
    “A lamp.”
    I knew my mom’s creative tendencies. It might be an octopus-armed lamp with a snake scale–covered shade and an elephant-footed base, but it would never be just a lamp. With more than a little trepidation, I asked, “Do you want me to come over to see it?”
    “Abigail, I said everything was fine. And the next time your father complains about me, you can tell him that he’s going to have to be a little more understanding of my artistic temperament. Now, go back to whatever you were doing before he