The House on Coliseum Street by Shirley Ann Grau

Author:Shirley Ann Grau [Grau, Shirley Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4532-4721-1
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2012-10-06T16:00:00+00:00

AURELIE WAS GARDENING. Not that she knew one plant from the other. But her yearly trip to the mountains of Tennessee gave her a vaguely guilty feeling. Her cousins gardened. And it was lovely. They wore wide hats and puttered around the shady part of the gardens, by the rhododendrons. And every hour or so a white-coated butler brought them glasses of iced tea, sweetened with rum or bourbon, and they rested on the little benches and looked out across the valley to the nearest ridges of the Smokies.

Aurelie was jealous. It was part of a lady’s life, this gardening; and it was a part she was missing. When she got home she had promptly ordered a set of copper gardening tools from Hammacher Schlemmer. They arrived a week later and the box, unopened, had been lying on top of the refrigerator in the kitchen.

This morning, passing it, she knew she could no longer put it off. So she got out her gardening outfit—white shirt and full-skirted denim jumper. It smelled faintly musty because it had not been used since last year—but the air would soon take care of that.

She looked over the garden. With the shiny new tools in her hand, she surveyed the handkerchief-sized back yard, the narrow strips on each side of the house, wide enough only for a brick walk and ribbon-sized edging beds. She selected the east side finally, because it was shady. Settling herself on her little gardening stool, and giving her hair one final clean-handed pat, she began grubbing around the roots of the blue hydrangeas and the violets.

Joan came back from the drugstore, walking slowly in the noon sun. Her starched dress was beginning to wilt and there were dark splotches of perspiration across her back. Her petticoat stuck to her legs and she yanked at it as she entered the house. She stopped in the kitchen, grunting good morning to Clara. She found an orange and ate it, sucking it through a hole in the skin with loud noises.

Clara kept silent until she was almost finished. Then she said: “You mother hear you, and she go right through the roof.”

“I’m a grown woman,” she said, “not a child.”

Clara shrugged patiently, “Okay, woman-grown.”

Joan finished and tossed the skin into the garbage pail. “Where is my mother?”

Clara grinned secretly out the kitchen window. “Gardening.”

“Where?”

“Outside. Where else you find mud?”

Joan slammed the screen door behind her. She heard the steady chink chink of the trowel and followed it to the east side of the house. Aurelie did not look up. She kept right on jabbing the trowel into the wet earth.

“Such pretty tools,” Joan said finally, “seems a shame to get them dirty.”

“Just hold them under the faucet,” Aurelie said in time with her jabs, “and they will be good as new.”

“As a matter of fact,” Joan said, “they’d look kind of pretty sitting alongside a window garden. You know—herbs or something like that.”

“An herb garden.” Aurelie studied her own right hand, which kept moving up and down of its own accord.

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