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That morning I was a thorn between two roses:

My wife Kay, who sent me out to water the flowers along the front and the driveway side of the house, and my mother, just now marking her first year as a widow and not yet a pest by visiting too often, coming for the day. It was a Saturday, a lazy day off and I wanted to fool around for a while before the day got going.

"Not before your mother gets here," Kay said, blue eyes talking, too. "She'll take one look at me and know what we've been up to. She's always known." She said it the way some women let a secret trickle and go on about its way as if they've not let it go at all. The faint smile rode her cheeks, the corners of her mouth, lit her eyes with promise for later.

She added, "It wouldn't be fair to her. She's only 48 years old and she's not dating yet." I got a smooch in and she burned me by leaning into me in the same tumultuous way she had learned as a fifteen year older on our third date. Anyway, it had only been a couple of hours since she burned me all over. What the hell, it was Saturday and Kay was not yet round, the promise of roundness not yet known, the puma of her being easy in the kitchen where her moves were unavoidably attractive. She cupped me on parting, her mouth ajar.

I went outside to survey a different landscape.

There, in the midst of barren green leaves, in the huddle of briars and brambles of both my rose bushes trussed against the house, like a tile from some Machiavellian mosaic, in the remnants that August usually leaves for deserted and desecrated rose bushes, flaunted a single rose.

Overnight, from a secret source, hardly anemic in color, bred and bled, perhaps a hybrid within time or beset with passion, I swore it had bloomed under cover of darkness, a ritual I was never privy to no matter how hard or long I tried, patience no matter, or torch accountable. The crop of outstanding American Reds had earlier leaped in late May or June's first week and the last one of them, limping, maimed and wounded from a war of heat, wilting the way some seniors walk the walk, supposedly the last one, had disappeared by early August. Summer cut to the quick.

In the start of May they had rouged up, roseate, primrose, and suddenly, after one full weekend of rain and a succeeding burst of heat and solar touch, had turned Adrianople red. God, I loved that smash of brilliance, and, against the white house I had painted myself only a while ago, they gelled like some runaway blood had found the stopgap, had congealed their smashing redness. Somewhere in that spread of summer I rocked with pleasure a number of times, knew pride for a bit, measured my faithful watering can's efforts.

I'd not let that rose go onto its unavoidable destiny. I knew I'd pluck it, bring it inside, put it in a glass for Kay to look at for a day or two, measure how much I loved her.

I reached in for it. A poem of sorts found me muttering. Oh, I would slake a thirst with this one rose, slip it from its vine, give it to my Kay, go wispy-eyed with it to her, a gift from Mother Nature herself, past preening, secluded, granting the last favor from a summer's faithful watering of her bushes. It was a remnant of the first order, a flamboyant remnant, and I would score her kitchen with it.

In my hand I could measure how August carnage had done its work again; the roses, once so radiantly red between pairs of front windows, leaping out past glass prisms, had died, had vanished, had been vanquished by incessant heat. For all of June they had thrilled me and an occasional walker who noted their florescence, the antics of their spread, the prismatic dependence on rain and sun the way grand alliances sally forth in a burst worthy of celebration's gunfire. I casually remembered how in latest July, in one weekend of revolt, the change had begun: a change in shade, a wimping of a petal now and then, a complete fadeout from a rose near the bottom of one tendril, as if an animal had watered there.

That revolt went on until all had been overcome.

Now I stood with the rose in my hand, and a shadow in the window saying Kay was behind the glass sharing my love. I could taste her. Morning had not let go its root. I can smell now the air that was about me then; density of past roses, cut of grass, maple sweetness hanging over me, my wife's residue. Contentment. Life swinging its easy way with me. I had my treasures.

A soft plushing of tires and my mother came swinging her car into the driveway, seeing me with the rose, deciding like old times it was hers. Her face, so recently tired for long stretches, glowed with pleasure. On a number of occasions she had said to my father, "Save the last rose for me," and I had often been there to hear that warm demand. In turn I had done the same thing for her for a few years. Then Kay one night had pressed herself against me.

I looked up at the window. The shadow moved. The window flew up as my mother got out of the car. Kay said, "He's got one last rose for you, Carol. The last one on the bush. Isn't he the sweetheart?"

For all I care, Kay can get round anytime she wants, she doesn't have to be the puma her whole life. But I bet she makes a run for it.

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Copyright 2005 - All Rights Reserved by Tom Sheehan (No reproduction without express permission from the author)

Letter to the Author: Tom Sheehan at tomfsheehan@comcast.net

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