Chapter 32: Home Smelling of Roses

I planted the rose on the first morning of October.

I chose the front bed, along the porch rail.

The sun came in there at seven and stayed until noon.

Torin had dug the hole for me before dawn.

He had left a trowel in it and a note on the porch step that said: Don't lift anything heavy.

I lifted the bucket of compost anyway.

Pia leaned on the gate and watched me with a mug in both hands.

"You know it's a rose," she said.

"I know."

"The Sabine rose."

"It's a cutting, Pia. It's a green stick."

"It's a stick from the woman who wore roses into your ex-husband's bed for fourteen months."

"That's not what it is to me."

I knelt and slid the stem into the hole.

I pressed the soil around it with both palms.

The cutting had no smell at all yet.

It only had a cut end and two small leaves.

"It smells like dirt," I said.

"It smells like a point."

"It smells like a rose, and someday it will have flowers."

I sat back on my heels.

"I'll cut them and put them in a jug on the kitchen table. And they will be mine."

Pia was quiet for a moment.

"You really did take it back," she said. "All of it."

"Not all of it. I'm still working on the lavender."

"You are such a show-off."

I laughed.

I put a stake beside the rose and tied the stem to it with a strip of cloth.

Then I scooped water from the can into a ring around the roots.

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