The Rose Thieves by Heidi Jon Schmidt

Author:Heidi Jon Schmidt
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466886117
Publisher: Picador

Audrey: Keeper of the Flame

Audie was with child. She sympathized, suddenly, with everything alive—tent caterpillars eating the trees, spider egg sacs hanging in the window casement. If she cleaned them out, it would be a jinx. Her mother called to give her advice, Pop was building a crib, but Steve didn’t give a damn. In fact, he even said he didn’t give a damn once, at midnight after a prepared-childbirth class. “Do you really think I give a damn?” he asked. He didn’t mean the baby, he meant the class; but the class was for the baby.

He didn’t care about the wood stoves either—he let Audie handle the situation. Everyone left Audie to handle the stoves.

Ma called her in the evening after Steve had left for work. “I’ve decided to settle this divorce myself,” she said. “I’m going to take your father’s stoves. That should be enough. I’ll throw them down the stairs.”

“How will you get them?” Audie asked. She was adding to a long list of names, girls on the right, boys on the left. Hubert, she wrote … Bright in spirit. “They’re impossibly heavy.”

“He can carry them up here on his back.”

Penelope … A weaver, Audie wrote.

“I need a wood stove. I can’t pay for oil and food on what he gives me.”

“Do you need two wood stoves?” Audie asked.

“How much do you think he spent on those stoves? Hundreds of dollars. Thousands of dollars, but we couldn’t get together the money to buy a new gas stove to cook on.”

“What does the lawyer say, Ma?” Audie could feel the baby press its foot, or its elbow, out toward her side.

“I’ll get them,” Ma said. “It doesn’t matter what the lawyer says.”

Audie returned to her list. No one name seemed right for the child who was gently pressing out her boundaries as she sat staring at the page. The house was so quiet with Steve at work that she was startled each time the heat came up; the rush of warm air through the grate was too sudden, like a massive sigh. She wrapped an afghan around herself and tucked in the ends. When the phone rang again, she hated to uncover herself to answer it.

It was Pop. She sat down again with her list of names.

“She wants the stoves,” he said.

“I know.” She attempted sympathy. “What are you going to say?”

“She can have them,” he said bitterly. “This thing has been going on too long. She’ll trick me out of them somehow anyway. She said she’d give me the gold plates, so I gave her the rug, but now the plates aren’t in any of my boxes and she swears she doesn’t have them.”

Nathan, Audie wrote in the boys’ column … Great gift.

“Besides,” Pop continued, “the stoves are in New Hampshire now. If she can get there to pick them up, she can have them. They’re the last things we own. After this, there’ll be nothing left to fight about.”

“She’ll get Steve to go pick them up.”

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