The Care and Handling of Roses With Thorns Read Online Free PDF Page A

She held her arms out to me.
    I scooped her up and took her over to my parents’ house. It was hours before Becky woke and realized her daughter was gone.
    Riley went to live with her father after that, and we thought everything was all right. His mother watched Riley while he worked. Becky cleaned up, stopped partying, and saw her daughter regularly. We chalked the incident up to immaturity.
    A few years later, Riley’s grandmother passed away, and Riley’s father got another woman pregnant. A woman who didn’t like the fact that Riley’s father had had another family before hers. He married her and moved to Boston, and Riley went back to Becky. I understand that Riley’s father hadn’t offered more contact than his monthly signature on the support checks.
    Becky had moved to San Francisco for her new job, at a different drug company. Now, if Becky partied, she made sure to show up to work sober, or at least functional, because she’d held on to this job for years. I’d suspected that though she’d slowed with the alcohol, she wasn’t averse to the occasional super-strength pain reliever, palmed out of her samples. I could hear the fog in her voice on the rare occasions when we talked on the phone. Though she pulled in a good salary, she was always, somehow, in financial straits. Her boyfriends had been numerous, and always had questionable job titles like “nightclub promoter.”
    My mother refused to believe anything was wrong. “Riley would tell me,” she would always say. Mom would fly up to get Riley, fly back down with her, keep her for weeks at a time during the summer. I had to think my parents had a stabilizing influence, as had her paternal grandmother, during her very young years. I had to believe Riley couldn’t remember her earlier neglect.
    “Riley doesn’t want to be taken away from her mother,” I said. At eight, Riley showed a fierce and undeserved loyalty to my sister.
    “Everything is fine, Aunt Gal,” she told me on the afternoon of her eighth birthday, when I phoned.
    “Look in your cupboards and tell me what’s there,” I challenged her.
    She had responded immediately. “SpaghettiOs, pizza, and a lot of vegetables. A lot of vegetables. My mother makes me eat them.”
    I caught her out. “You keep pizza in your cupboard?”
    “I thought you meant freezer.”
    And it was always like this, Riley protecting and covering up for her mother, Becky wheedling whatever help she could get out of my mother, without admitting she should have given up her daughter long ago.
    I remember this as I stare at the ceiling, listening to my mother make excuses for my sister. At last I say, “What Riley needs is a good education in a stable home. Her mother’s ruined her.” I think of my colleagues with children. The first child gets free tuition. It had always pained my frugal little heart that I could not take advantage of the program. “She oughta come here. Get a free private school diploma.”
    “You couldn’t handle her.”
    “You haven’t seen me in action with my students.” I chuckle. Oh, I’m close to sleep. I think I’m on the beach in San Diego, dipping one toe into the frigid Pacific. “Pollution levels are high,” I mumble and slur. I’m dreaming of another high school science project, testing the ocean water.
    Her tone softens. “I better let you get to resting.”
    It’s all I can do to hit the End button on my phone receiver. The pain medicine is better than a sleeping pill. The moonlight comes in, dappled through the chiffon curtains, making abstracted rose patterns on the ceiling. I close my eyes and picture my rose family pedigrees. Hulthemia. They rise three dimensionally around me, dancing like I’m Alice in Wonderland visiting those snotty flowers. I smile in my delusion. Maybe I can breed the pink to the yellow. I cross Hulthemias in my head, their offspring reborn as quick as film passing by. Until I fall asleep.



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    O N THE M ONDAY AFTER MY PROCEDURE, I