Roses Read Online Free PDF

going to buy books come September.”
    “So he said in his thank-you note. He writes a fine hand, that boy of yours. We’re proud of him.” Vietnam, Mary decided. It
     had to be Vietnam.
    “Well… he’s got a lot of folks round here to live up to, Miss Mary,” the barber said.
    She smiled. “Take care of yourself, Bubba. Tell the family… bye for me.” She continued down the street, feeling Bubba’s puzzled
     stare. Now that was a bit melodramatic, but Bubba would feel a sense of importance later when he repeated what she’d said.
She knew,
he’d say.
Miss Mary knew she was dying. Otherwise, why did she say what she did?
It would add to her legend, which would eventually die out as Ollie’s had with him, and once the generation of Bubba’s children
     was gone, there would be no one to remember the Tolivers and who they were.
    Well, so be it! Mary thought, pressing her lips together firmly. Only Percy would be leaving a descendant to carry on in the
     family tradition. And what a chip off his grandfather’s block he was! Matt Warwick reminded her of her Matthew in so many
     ways, though her son had inherited her Toliver features, and Matt, his grandfather’s. Even so, sometimes looking at Matt as
     a man, she saw her own son grown.
    She stepped down from the sidewalk onto the street. Motorists wishing to turn right were momentarily held up, but Mary did
     not hurry, and no one honked. This was Howbutker. People had manners here.
    Safely across, she stopped and stared in startled interest at a gigantic elm whose branches shaded an entire side of the courthouse
     common. She could remember when the tree had been a sapling. In July 1914, that was, the year the courthouse was finished,
     seventy-one years ago. A tall statue of Saint Francis stood under its branches, the saint’s famous prayer chiseled around
     its stone base.
    Mary put a halting step forward, staring at the bench where she’d sat in the elm’s patchy shade, listening to her father deliver
     the dedication speech. It was happening once more, this sense of being young again, new blood running through her veins. It
     was not “In life we are dying” that she minded so much. It was that in dying, she should feel so alive, so new, so fresh,
     the whole future before her. She remembered—
felt!
—being fourteen again, coming down the stairs that morning in her white eyelet dress with its green satin trim, a ribbon of
     the same satin holding back her hair, its ends as long as the black curls that bounced off her shoulders. Below, her father
     had looked up at her with paternal pride and pronounced that she was “heartbreakingly fetching!” while her mother had pulled
     on her gloves and reminded her in her crisp manner, “Pretty is as pretty does!”
    She had drawn everyone’s eye at the dedication… everyone’s but Percy’s. Her brother’s other friends had teased her fondly,
     Ollie remarking at how grown up she was becoming and how the green satin set off the color of her irises.
    Mary closed her eyes. She remembered the heat and humidity of that day, how she’d thought she’d die of thirst, when suddenly
     out of nowhere, Percy had appeared and handed her an ice-cream soda from the drugstore across the street.
    Percy…
    Her heart began to race as it had then to find him suddenly standing there, tall, blond, and at nineteen so handsome that
     one could hardly bear to look at him. She had once thought him awfully gallant, the hero of all her secret dreams, but when
     she became “a young lady,” she’d felt a change in his affection. It was as if he saw in her some private cause for amusement.
     Many times she’d stood before her mirror puzzling over his new attitude, hurt by the mockery she saw in his eyes. She was
     pretty enough, though there was nothing of the pink-and-white Dresden doll daintiness about her. She was too tall for a girl
     and too long in the arms and legs. Her olive complexion was a constant bone of contention