LITMIR.BIZ

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more wonderful than a happy marriage. It’s what I want for all my children.”

      “Then why won’t you marry again?”

      “Beth, stop! I’ve been there, done that, okay? Look at who’s available for me to choose from, anyway? The single men my age will have failed marriages or be old, lonely widowers with too many needs or have resentful children. Even if I did find some never-before-married man my age, what sort of person could he be?”

      Beth rolled her eyes. “Everyone has baggage, Mom. None of the men I meet are pristine young innocents.”

      “Have you been going to church?”

      “Of course. I’ve met some decent men—but everyone has baggage.”

      “You don’t have any baggage. You grew up in a two-parent home in Tyler, Texas, with a nice church and an active social life. You got a good education, and now you have an interesting job.”

      “I’m practically perfect in every way, like Mary Poppins?” Beth grinned. “Yeah, you and Dad did a fine job raising me, Mom. I’m just not in a hurry to marry. I have other things to do before I settle down. And I want you to come to New York and visit me.”

      Jan reached over and fiddled with the magazine. “I might,” she said finally. “I have time now, and your dad left me in good financial shape. So I suppose I could.”

      “How about this summer?”

      “Oh, no, I’m still settling in here in Lake Palestine. I have a lot to do.”

      “I’ll help you unpack. I’m here for three days. I bet we can take care of it all before I leave.”

      “No.” Her voice growing serious, Jan rose from her chair. “Don’t touch anything, Beth. Leave those boxes in the guest room exactly as they are. I’m the only one who knows where things should go. Seriously. Hands off.”

      Beth studied her mom, who looked shorter and tinier now than ever. Despite her auburn hair and pert blue eyes, Jan showed her years. Did she want to shrivel up and fade away as her husband had done? Disease had robbed him of all movement, and then his breath and finally his life.

      Before the tears could start, Beth stood. “Good night, Mom,” she whispered as she folded her mother in her arms. “I love you.”

      In the guest room, Beth rooted through her suitcase. She had grown so accustomed to living out of it that she hardly had to search for things. Underwear on the left. Toiletries on the right. Casual clothes at the bottom. Business attire near the top. She bought knits that needed no ironing, and lingerie she could wash at night and wear by morning. Her mother had no idea of any of this.

      As she tugged her T-shirt over her head, Beth focused on a plaque Jan had painted long ago. It had always hung in the spare room at their house in Tyler. “Welcome, Friend,” she had painted in delicate, curling script—black ink on a pale purple background. And then beneath it she printed words from a William Cowper poem:

      Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast,

      Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,

      And, while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn

      Throws up a steamy column, and the cups,

      That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each,

      So let us welcome peaceful evening in.

      Beth wondered if this was truly what her mother desired most. Shutters fastened, curtains drawn, cups of hot tea and a quiet life in which nothing ever changed.

      She mused on their evening together. While talking of New York and her job, Beth had felt her mother’s scrutiny. It was as if Jan were trying to read her offspring, define her, decipher this odd creature in her living room. If only she could label her daughter in the same way she tagged other things, the child would make sense at last.

      In fact, now that Beth thought of it, her mother had branded her. Near the window in her cotton-candy pink bedroom, Jan had hung this verse:

      What are little girls made of?

      Sugar and spice, and everything nice,

      That’s what little girls are made of.

      Sugar and spice? Hardly. Now, as she opened the closet door to toss in her travel bag, Beth wondered where the framed sayings and poems had ended up. Were they in one of the boxes stacked around the guest room? Or had her mother thrown them into the trash on moving day?

      Of course, the inscription painted in bright pink letters over the bed in Beth’s room would have been left behind. She recalled gazing at it for hours, wondering if it were true. “Queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls,” read the words by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

      Queen rose. Beth had pondered the elaborate calligraphy as she lay in her pink bedroom with its reproduction white French Provincial furniture, its flowered spread and curtains and its pale pink carpet. She had imagined the Tyler Municipal Rose Garden, a fourteen-acre park with five hundred varieties of roses among its forty thousand bushes. She had pictured a girl’s face inside each rose…her friends, models in the Sears catalog, actresses on television. In the center of the park grew one large bush with a single deep red blossom…the queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls. And whose face did Beth see when she peered among the petals of that marvelous flower?

      Her mother’s.

      Janice Amelia Calhoun Lowell.

      In her heart, Beth knew she herself was no rose. She inhabited the pink room, but it had never belonged to her. She didn’t match the soft hues, fragile blossoms and sweet poetry. An olive-skinned tomboy, she ran around the neighborhood with scuffed sneakers, scabby knees, tattered shorts and skinny arms. Twigs of hair stuck out in every direction from her long brown braids. She climbed trees and built forts. She was a pirate king, a mermaid ruling an undersea city, a soldier slogging through the jungle, a spy on a secret mission. She hated pink.

      “I don’t know how you became this person,” her mother had mused aloud. But had Beth changed so much?

      As she set out her toiletries and Bible, she tucked a length of hair behind her ear. Scripture taught that change was not only possible but essential. In his second letter to the Corinthians, Saint Paul had written that a Christian must become a new person in Christ. A different creature.

      This was troublesome for a girl who had given her life to Jesus at a church revival when she was eight years old. How much sin could a child that age have committed? How much change could one expect? Yet, Beth sensed that because of Christ, she was changing all the time—renewing, working out her salvation, striving toward righteousness.

      The more she dug into Scripture, the odder and less normal she became. These days, she felt transparent and single-minded and deep and narrow and open and loving and intolerant and all kinds of contradictory things. In the same way that she had failed to blend into her pink bedroom as a child, she now failed to identify with most of her coworkers and friends. She was metamorphosing into an alien, someone not even her own mother recognized.

      With a sigh, Beth pressed a dab of toothpaste onto her toothbrush, picked up her cleanser and comb, and cast a last look at the Bible on the bed. Tired and a little cranky from trying to communicate with her mom, she considered skipping her daily Scripture reading. But she knew she wouldn’t. The ritual had come to mean too much.

      As she brushed her teeth in the guest bathroom, Beth could hear her mother in the kitchen—putting away dishes, opening and closing the refrigerator, tucking place mats back in their drawer. Touching everything and setting little bits of herself here and there, shaping and molding her small, well-ordered world.

      Did her mother feel she had failed? Skinny, dark-haired Beth, Jan’s only daughter, hadn’t grown up to become the queen rose. She certainly wasn’t sugar and spice and everything nice. Beth had traveled away from her family and had kept on going, until she was someone else entirely.

      As she headed back into the bedroom, Beth

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