The thing in the hand of Lily was a small gold pendant, no bigger than a thumbnail, cast in the shape of a rose. It hung on a thin chain so old that one link had been mended with solder, and on the back, worn almost smooth, were three tiny letters, E. H. H. Lily held it up to the porch light and turned it, and the petals caught the glow like something alive. Walter lowered himself into the porch swing. “That belonged to my grandmother,” he said. “My mother wore it every day for fifty years. She wore it the night my father proposed, and the night she buried him. She never took it off, not even to sleep.”
Lily could not speak, so I spoke for her. “Walter, we cannot accept something like that.” “Please,” he said, and then he laughed, a soft, wet laugh. “Tonya, I have heard that sentence from the lawyer of my mother, from my wife, and from my own conscience this week. I am out of patience with it.” He drew a folded paper from his jacket. “Mother wrote this herself on the fourteenth of April, in the hospital, when she could barely hold the pen. I am going to read it, and then you may refuse if you must.”
“To whom it concerns. My name is Eleanor Hargrove, I am eighty one years old, and I am of sound mind, whatever my son may say. For ten summers a child named Lily has watered my roses and never once asked for a thing. I was too proud to thank her, because thanking her meant admitting that I needed her. I did need her. I leave her my rose pendant, my garden, and my house on Pecan Street. Her mother may live there as long as she wishes. My son may visit whenever he likes, and may bring his own watering can.” the voice of Walter cracked on the last line.
A gold rose pendant that never left a neck for fifty years found a new home in the hand of a girl with a watering can.
I grabbed the doorframe, just as Walter had warned, because the porch seemed to tilt. The house next door. The one with the sagging porch and the climbing roses over the fence. A house I had walked past ten thousand times on my way to a night shift at the nursing home. “That is a mistake,” I said weakly. “She has a son.” “She has a son who lives in Oregon and has not been home for Christmas in nine years,” said Walter. “Do you think I do not know what I am? Mother knew. She forgave me anyway. That is the trouble with her. She forgave everybody and told no one.”
Lily finally found her voice. It came out thin and cracked. “Mr. Hargrove, I just watered them. That is all I did.” “That is all anyone ever does,” Walter said, “and almost no one does it.” He looked at the dried roses leaning against the porch rail, the color of old wine. “Do you know what these are? She cut them from the bush she planted the year she married. She dried them the week she knew she was dying. She told me to bring them to you because roses that are kept can be watered again, if you know how. I did not understand it then. I think I do now.”
The lawyer came on Monday, a brisk woman named Mrs. Alvarez with a leather briefcase, and she confirmed everything. The will was clean. The house had no mortgage. A small fund from the life insurance would cover the taxes for years, and a second account, set aside for Lily, would pay for any school she chose. Walter signed what needed signing and did not argue once. When it was done, he asked if he might stay at a hotel and come by in the evenings to help in the garden. Lily, with the pendant already around her neck, told him that he would need to bring his own gloves.
He stayed three weeks. In the heat of the evenings, the two of them worked among the rose bushes, he with the hose and she with the pruning shears, and he told her how his mother taught him to graft cuttings when he was nine. He cried over the oldest bush, the one by the fence. Lily did not say anything. She handed him the watering can. By the end of the third week, there were eleven new cuttings potted on our porch, and he had promised to come home at Christmas. I believed him this time. So did Lily.
The following spring, Lily started at the community college, studying horticulture, with a part time job at the nursery on Main Street. I moved into the house on Pecan Street that April, and I will confess that for the first week I walked from room to room like a guest. Then one morning I found a row of empty mason jars lined up in the pantry, one for every birthday of my daughter, and I understood that this house had been waiting for us for years. I put a single rose in a jar on the kitchen table. It lasted nine days.
This June, the garden won the blue ribbon at the county fair, and Walter flew in from Oregon to see it. He stood at the gate with a straw hat in his hands, the same pale blue eyes as his mother, looking at roses taller than he was. Lily stood beside him. “Do you think she knows?” she asked. He was quiet for a long time. “Mom always knew,” he said. “She just waited until the end to say so.” Then he turned to me and did something I had not expected, and I will remember it all my life. He bowed.
In the evenings now, when the light goes gold, Lily sits on the porch with her pendant glowing at her throat and her boots up on the rail. She talks to the bushes sometimes. I pretend not to hear. Last week a little girl from the end of the street came by with a plastic watering can and asked if she could help. Lily looked at me over her shoulder and smiled. Then she handed the girl the hose and showed her where to start. The roses, I swear, leaned in to listen.