Free Rose's Garden by Carrie Brown Page B

moment, Nolan’s dismissive expression, Toronto’s careful silence. And May Brown’s closed-up face, her eyes darting away. I should have kept it to myself, he thought.
    But Lenore continued, quietly. “My aunt saw them, too,” she said, packing Conrad’s eggs sideways in his bag. Conrad glanced at her face, was distracted by the bracelets on her arm, the charms dancing there, her freckled skin like a pigeon’s breast, mottled beneath the secondary feathers. One of the charms, a little pair of pewter shoes laced with a ribbon, held his eye.
    â€œEver since she was a little girl,” Lenore went on. Conrad looked up at her. “Said she always saw them in the fig tree, talking and laughing and eating figs. They told her she would die painlessly and so she never had to worry. And she never did, after that.” Lenore took Conrad’s bills, smoothed them in her hands, turned them faceup. “And do you know what?”
    â€œWhat?” Conrad asked, leaning toward her.
    â€œShe did die painlessly. Fell asleep at eighty-five years old in the waiting room, waiting on the dentist, and never woke up. Never had to have her tooth pulled, either.” Lenore handed him his bag.
    Conrad felt disappointed. He had thought Lenore would tell him something more persuasive, more—uplifting. Something about how the woman’s life had been changed.
    â€œWhat was it like?” Lenore asked. “May Brown said you showed her the place where it landed.”
    â€œIt wasn’t like martians,” Conrad said, offended suddenly. “It didn’t land.
He
didn’t land.”
    â€œIt was a he,” Lenore said, nodding, as though that confirmed it. “It always is.”
    â€œIt is?”
    â€œSeems like it. My aunt’s always were. You know—” She paused to inspect her hands, her white fingers splayed, her many rings bunched nearly to her knuckles. “I used to go out to that tree sometimes, stand underneath the branches. I’d had a little brother who’d died. I used to stand there, thinking about him and missing him. I thought maybe the angels, my aunt’s angels would, you know, sense me there, and come down and give me some comfort. Show me my brother again.” She stopped and looked at Conrad. He was startled to see tears in her eyes. “He was just a little boy,” she said, staring at him as though she were seeing not Conrad but the child, a boy in a white nightgown sweating under a fan that revolvedslowly in a darkened room, insects gathering thick at the window screen.
    â€œYou’re lucky,” Lenore whispered. “Very lucky.” She straightened her back, looked hard at Conrad. “Rose would be happy,” she said.
    Just then, another customer stepped up behind Conrad, a young man with a ponytail, a bunch of cellophane-wrapped roses in his arms. Lenore glanced at him, smiled.
    â€œHave a good day,” she said then to Conrad. “And don’t be a stranger.”

Four
    AT HOME, CONRAD tied Rose’s apron around his waist and fried himself three eggs, prodding them with a spatula and listening to the snap and spark of butter in the pan. He considered Lenore’s surprising confession, the image of angels in a fig tree, fitted in among the crooks of the branches, passing the soft fruit from hand to hand, their robes tucked up around their knees. Her story had seemed so unextraordinary, he thought—as though angels were perhaps always present, and it was all a question of looking up at the right moment and seeing them picking their teeth, spitting out skins.
    His eggs set, he put the plate on a tray, along with the box of cinnamon rolls and two oranges, and went outside to the garden. He pulled a chair over to the stone wall at the edge of the highest terrace and set the tray down. As he ate he looked out over the gardens. The perennial borders, which Rose had orchestrated for a long season of