Roses (2 page)

“Mary…” Amos strove for his most persuasive timbre. “Rachel’s a swatch from the same cloth as you. Do you think that
you
would have understood if your father had deprived you of your legacy—the plantation, the house, the town that owes its birth
to your family—no matter how justified his reasons?”

Her jaw tightened beneath the slight droop of her jowls. “No, but I wish he had. I wish to God he’d never left me Somerset.”

He gaped at her, truly shocked. “But
why
? You’ve had a marvelous life—a life that I thought you wished to bequeath to Rachel to perpetuate your family’s heritage.
This codicil is so”—he swept the back of his hand over the document—“
averse
to everything I thought you’d hoped for her—that you led her to believe you
wanted
for her.”

She slackened in her chair, a proud schooner with the wind suddenly sucked from her sails. She laid the cane across her lap.
“Oh, Amos, it’s such a long story, far too long to go into here. Percy will have to explain it all to you someday.”

“Explain what, Mary? What’s there to explain?”
And why someday, and why Percy?
He would not be put off by a stab of concern for her. The lines about her eyes and mouth had deepened, and her flawless complexion
had paled beneath its olive skin tone. Insistently, he leaned farther over the desk. “What
story
don’t I know, Mary? I’ve read everything ever printed about the Tolivers and Warwicks and DuMonts, not to mention having
lived
among you for forty years. I’ve been privy to everything affecting each of you since I came to Howbutker. Whatever
secrets
you may have harbored would have come out. I
know
you.”

She lowered her lids briefly, fatigue clearly evident in their sepia-tinged folds. When she raised them again, her gaze was
soft with affection. “Amos, dear, you came into our lives when our stories were done. You have known us at our best, when
all our sad and tragic deeds were behind us and we were living with their consequences. Well, I want to spare Rachel from
making the same mistakes I made and suffering the same, inevitable consequences. I don’t intend to leave her under the Toliver
curse.”

“The Toliver curse?” Amos blinked in alarm. Such eccentric language was unlike her. He wondered if age
had
affected her brain. “I never heard of or read anything about a Toliver curse.”

“My point exactly,” she said, giving him her typical smile, a mere lifting of the lips over teeth that remarkably—unlike those
of her contemporaries, unlike his—had not yellowed to the hue of old piano keys.

He refused to be dismissed. “Well, what about
these
consequences?” he demanded. “You owned—or did—a cotton empire stretching across the country. Your husband, Ollie DuMont,
possessed one of the finest department stores in Texas, and Percy Warwick’s company has been in the Fortune 500 for decades.
What ‘sad and tragic deeds’ led to consequences like
those,
I’d like to know.”

“You must believe me,” she said, straightening her shoulders. “There
is
a Toliver curse, and it has affected us all. Percy is well aware of it. Rachel will be, too, when I show her evidence of
its indisputable existence.”

“You’ve left her a ton of money,” he pursued, unwilling to give up. “Suppose she buys land somewhere else, builds another
Somerset, roots a new dynasty of Tolivers all over again. Wouldn’t this… curse you speak of still hold?”

Her eyes flashed with something indecipherable. Her lip curled with a secret bitterness. “
Dynasty
implies sons and daughters to pass on the ancestral torch. In that respect, the Tolivers have never been a dynasty, a point
you may have missed in your history books.” Her drawl was heavy with irony. “No, the curse won’t hold. Once the umbilical
cord is cut to the plantation, the curse will die. No land anywhere else will have the power to extract from us what Somerset
has. Rachel will never sell her soul as I have for the sake of family soil.”

“You sold your soul for Somerset?”

“Yes, many times. Rachel has, too. I’m breaking her of that tendency.”

He slumped in defeat. He was beginning to think that indeed he’d missed a few chapters in the history books. He attempted
one final argument. “Mary, this codicil represents your last regards to those you love. Think of how its provisions might
affect not only Rachel’s memory of you, but also the relationship between her and Percy when he’s in possession of her birthright.
Are those the regards by which you wish to be remembered?”

“I’ll risk their misinterpretation,” she said, but her look mellowed. “I know how very fond you are of Rachel and that you
think I’ve betrayed her. I haven’t, Amos. I’ve saved her. I wish there were time today to explain what I mean by that, but
there simply isn’t. You must trust that I know what I’m doing.”

He laced his hands over the codicil. “I have the rest of the day. Susan has rescheduled my afternoon appointments. I have
all the time in the world for you to explain to me what this is all about.”

She reached over the desk and covered the gnarl of his rawboned hands with her slim, blue-veined one. “You may have, my dear,
but I do not. I believe now would be a good time for you to read the letter in the other envelope.”

He glanced at the white envelope he’d withdrawn facedown from the one containing the codicil. “Save that one for last to read,”
she’d instructed, and suddenly—with a sharp flash of intuition—he understood why. His heartbeat arrested, he turned over the
envelope and read the sender’s address. “A medical clinic in Dallas,” he muttered, aware that Mary had turned her head away
and was fingering the famed string of pearls around her neck that her husband, Ollie, had presented her, one pearl on each
of their wedding anniversaries until the year of his death. There were fifty-two of them now, large as hummingbird eggs, the
strand falling perfectly in the collarless opening of her green linen suit. It was on these pearls that he fastened his eyes
when he’d finished reading the letter, unable to bring them to her face.

“Metastatic renal cancer,” he croaked, his prominent Adam’s apple jouncing. “And there’s nothing to be done?”

“Oh, the usual,” she said, reaching for her water glass. “Surgery and chemo and radiation. But all that would simply prolong
my days, not my life. I decided against treatment.”

Burning grief, like acid, spilled through him. He removed his glasses and squeezed his eyes shut, pinching the bridge of his
nose to hold back tears. Mary did not like sloppy displays of emotion. Now he knew what she’d been about in Dallas last month
besides arranging for the sale of Toliver Farms. They’d had no idea—not her great-niece or her longest friend, Percy, or Sassie,
her housekeeper for over forty years, or her devoted old lawyer… all those who loved her. How like Mary to play her last cards
so close to the vest.

He reset his glasses and forced himself to meet her eyes—eyes that still, despite their lined settings, reminded him of the
color of spring leaves shimmering through raindrops. “How long?” he asked.

“They give me three more weeks… maybe.”

Losing the battle to his grief, Amos opened a drawer where he kept a supply of clean handkerchiefs. “I’m sorry, Mary,” he
said, pressing the voluminous square of white lawn to his eyes, “but too much is coming at me all at once….”

“I know, Amos,” she said, and with surprising nimbleness, she hooked the cane on her chair and came around the desk to him.
Gently, she drew his head against her linen front. “This day had to come, you know… when we had to say good-bye. After all,
I’m fifteen years your senior….”

He pressed her hand, so thin and fragile-boned. When had it become an old woman’s hand? He remembered when it had been smooth
and unblemished. “Do you know that I still remember the first time I saw you?” he said, keeping his eyes tightly closed. “It
was in the DuMont Department Store. You came down the stairs in a royal blue dress, and your hair shone like black satin under
the chandeliers.”

He could feel her smile above his bald pate. “I remember. You were still in your army serge. By then you’d learned who William
was and had come to check on the sort of people who would cause a boy like him to run away from home. I must say you did seem
rather dazzled.”

“I was bowled over.”

She kissed the top of his head and released him. “I’ve always been grateful for our friendship, Amos. I want you to know that,”
she said, returning to her chair. “I’m not one to emote, as you know, but the day you wandered into our little East Texas
community was one of the more fortunate ones of my life.”

Amos honked into his handkerchief. “Thank you, Mary. Now I must ask you, does Percy know about… your condition?”

“Not yet. I’ll tell him and Sassie when I get back from Lubbock. I’ll make my funeral arrangements at that time as well. If
I’d planned them earlier, news of my coming demise would be all over town by the time I left the parking lot. Hospice has
been engaged to come a week after I return. Until then, I’d like my illness to remain our secret.” She slipped the strap of
her handbag over her shoulder. “And now I must be going.”

“No, no!” he protested, vaulting up from his chair. “It’s early yet.”

“No, Amos, it’s late.” She reached behind her neck and unclasped the pearls. “These are for Rachel,” she said, laying the
strand on his desk. “I’d like you to give them to her for me. You’ll know the proper time.”

“Why not give them to her yourself when you see her?” he asked, his throat on fire. She seemed diminished without the pearls,
her flesh old and exposed. Since Ollie’s death twelve years ago, she was rarely seen without them. She wore them everywhere,
with everything.

“She may not accept them after our talk, Amos, and then what would I do with them? They mustn’t be left to the discretion
of the docents. You keep them until she’s ready. They are all she will have from me of the life she was expecting.”

He bumped around the desk, his heart thudding. “Let me go with you to Lubbock,” he pleaded. “Let me be with you when you tell
her.”

“No, dear friend. Your presence there might make things awkward for the two of you afterward if things go wrong. Rachel must
believe you’re impartial. She’ll need you. Whatever happens, either way, she’ll need you.”

“I understand,” he said, his voice cracking. She held out her hand, and he understood that she wished them to express their
farewells now. In the days to come, they might not be afforded this opportunity to say good-bye in private. He sandwiched
her cool palm between his bony slabs, his eyes filling in spite of his determination to keep this moment on the dignified
plane she’d lived all her life. “Good-bye, Mary,” he said.

She took up her cane. “Good-bye, Amos. See after Rachel and Percy for me.”

“You know I will.”

She nodded, and he watched her tap her way to the door, back straining for the regal posture so typically Mary. Opening it,
she did not look back but gave him a small wave over her shoulder as she stepped out and closed the door behind her.

A
mos stood in the silence, staring numbly into space, letting the tears trickle unchecked down his face. After a moment, he
drew in a ragged breath, locked his office door, and returned to his desk, where he carefully wrapped the pearls in a clean
handkerchief. They felt cool and fresh. Mary must have had them cleaned recently. There was no oil, no feel of her, to his
touch. He would take them home at the end of the day and keep them for Rachel in a hand-carved letter box, the only memento
of his mother’s he’d chosen to keep. He removed his tie, unbuttoned his collar, and went into an adjoining bathroom to wash
his face. After toweling it dry, he administered eyedrops prescribed for ocular fatigue.

Back at his desk, he punched an intercom button. “Susan, take the afternoon off. Hang out the closed sign and hook us up to
the answering machine.”

“Are you all right, Amos?”

“I’m fine.”

“Miss Mary—is she okay?”

“She’s fine, too.” She didn’t believe him, of course, but he trusted his secretary of twenty years to say nothing of her suspicions
that all was not fine with her employer and Miss Mary. “Go and enjoy your afternoon.”

“Well… until tomorrow, then.”

“Yes, until tomorrow.”

Tomorrow.
He felt sick at what that day would bring to Rachel, who right now was no doubt surveying cotton fields she thought would
one day be hers. Tomorrow it would all be over—everything she’d given her adult life to. She was only twenty-nine and soon
to be rich. She could start over—if she wasn’t too shattered to begin again—but it would be beyond Howbutker, beyond the future
he’d envisioned for himself when Percy was gone, the last of the three friends who’d constituted the only family he’d ever
known. He regarded Matt, Percy’s grandson, like a nephew, but when he married, his wife might have something to say about
her family filling the void left by Ollie and Mary and Percy. Rachel, now, would have been another story. She adored him as
he did her, and her house would have always been open to him. His old bachelor heart had so looked forward to her coming to
live in Howbutker, residing in the Toliver mansion, keeping Mary’s spirit alive, marrying and raising kids for him to love
and spoil in his declining years. Tomorrow all that would be over for him, too.

He heaved a sigh and opened a door in the credenza. Never did he take a drink before six o’clock in the evening, and then
his limit was two shots of Scotch mellowed with twice as much soda. Today he took a bottle from the cabinet, dumped the water
from his glass, and unhesitatingly poured it half-full of Johnnie Walker Red.

Glass in hand, he crossed to the French windows overlooking a small courtyard rife with the summer flowers of East Texas—pink
primroses and blue plumbago, violet lantana and yellow nasturtium, all climbing the rock fence. The garden had been designed
by Charles Waithe, son of the founder of the firm, to serve as a mental retreat from the heartsick duties of his office. Today
the therapy didn’t work, but it evoked memories that Mary’s visit had already jogged to the surface. He remembered the day
Charles, then a man of fifty, had turned from this window and asked if he’d be interested in a junior partner position. He’d
been stunned, elated. The offer had come within the forty-eight hours he’d given William Toliver his train ticket, seen Mary
on the stairs, and met her locally prominent husband and the equally powerful Percy Warwick. It had all happened so fast,
his head still spun when he thought of how fate had been kind and parlayed his decision to part with his ticket into the fulfillment
of his dreams—a job in his field, a place to call home, and friends to take him to their bosoms.