The Garden Path Read Online Free PDF

golden-haired.
    â€œI’d love to,” she said.
    â€œHop in the car. I’ll take you over.”
    She admired the red, white and blue extravaganza, then—sensing she hadn’t gone far enough—gushed heartily. Mrs. Mortimer, after all, was a good customer. She beamed at Rosie when she finally hit the proper level of enthusiasm and offered her a lemonade. It was hot out on the lawn, and she accepted. Rosie discoursed on the benefits of planting perennials rather than annuals: the financial saving, the greater variety, the satisfaction of watching something grow from year to year. Edwin, pretending to be interested, asked intelligent questions. His mother nodded patiently for a while, then quit listening and smirked with satisfaction at her petunias. Rosie had a second glass of lemonade and a tuna sandwich. While Mrs. Mortimer was inside fetching the food, Edwin asked Rosie to go to the movies with him. She accepted. They went to see High Noon , and Edwin impressed her profoundly by comparing it to the Iliad . She assumed later that he lifted the comparison from a movie review he had read, but at the time she was limp with admiration—a 24-year-old Harvard law student with intellectual leanings and a passionate curiosity about perennials was a far cry from Roger Mitchell, the boy she’d been dating, a freshman at the University of Rhode Island whose favorite activities were bowling and drinking beer. Rosie would never forgive herself for being taken in by Edwin, and often thought she’d have done better to stick with Roger, a good-hearted boy without a phony bone in his body. But a year later, dazzled by his ersatz culture, Rosie married Edwin Mortimer, who carried within him the seed that sparked Susannah.
    Barney was due for dinner. Their weekends were unvarying—on Friday nights Rosie cooked for him, on Saturdays he took her out to eat. In between, they watched TV, played Scrabble, made love, and—weather permitting—worked in the yard. They were pleasant weekends. Neither of them wanted to elongate them into marriage.
    So after Peter left, and Rosie had brooded a while over another cup of tea and a peanut butter sandwich, she put together the makings of a beef stew and set it to simmer. And then, she decided, it was time to get to work on her book.
    She had signed the contract for Rosie Mortimer’s Garden Book in the fall, soon after they finished taping the shows for the new season. She was scheduled to take two years off from television in order to, as her producer Janice put it, “have a fling at the print media.” The deal was arranged between WEZL and Rosie’s publisher, which were owned by the same vast conglomerate. So far no one had said anything about a major motion picture, but there were pots of money involved. All she needed to do was write the book. So far, she had the title, a thick pile of pages from Janice containing the transcripts of the shows, and an uneasy feeling that writers are born, not made, and that the fairies had failed to sprinkle the proper dust over her wicker cradle in the gardener’s cottage at Silvergate.
    Barney kept saying that any intelligent person could write a book. He was writing one about his twenty years as an elementary school principal, to be called Giant Among Pygmies . It was pretty good, too—a nice mix of theory, advice, and anecdote, which was exactly what Rosie wanted to do in her garden book. But so far, every time she sat down to work on it, she turned in a performance something like Jane Fonda’s portrayal of Lillian Hellman in Julia: she had an overflowing wastebasket, the urge to throw the typewriter out the window and the need for a stiff drink.
    She was at that point when Barney arrived. He was early, and Rosie was glad. If the Muse wouldn’t visit her, at least she could count on Barney Macrae. School had let out early, he said, so the kids could be taken to a performance of The Pirates of