Beatrice Coleman set a gray accordion file on the potting bench of my greenhouse and unsnapped the clasp, and thirty women of the Tyler Garden Club went quiet among the roses. She was seventy seven years old and the president of the club, but for thirty one years before that she had been a bank examiner for the state of Texas. She slid out eleven pages and laid them side by side on the bench. “Gwendolyn,” she said, “I asked a friend at the bank to pull the cancelled checks. Your son Brian did not write all of them. He had help.”
Beatrice read the numbers aloud. One hundred fifty one thousand dollars, in forty three checks, written to cash over eight months from the account of my late husband Clayton, each one forged in a hand that was nearly mine. Brian, who was a certified public accountant and knew precisely where the bank looked, had written the amounts as forward written fives, so that the tellers did not blink. Behind us, on an overturned flowerpot, my daughter Crystal sat with her knees drawn up and her eyes streaming. Her boyfriend Dwayne leaned against the glass, scratching his arm.
It was Crystal who spoke first. Her voice came out of her like something rubbed raw. “Tell Mama about the brother of Dwayne,” she said, and she looked at Dwayne with hatred and love at the same moment. “Tell her who cashed those checks.” Dwayne said nothing. Beatrice turned over the last page of her file, with a name circled in red ink: Marcus Teel, teller, Tyler Commerce Bank. Brian was standing by the door of the greenhouse, and I watched him calculate the distance to the parking lot.
A rose ledger opened in a greenhouse gave one widow the afternoon to bring her children back to the garden in Tyler.
I gave my terms over the sound of the misters, with a rose cutting in my gloved hand. “Brian, you will go with Detective Hargrove, who is waiting on the gravel, and you will tell him the name of every person who touched those checks. Crystal, you will go to the treatment center in Longview, where Beatrice has found you a bed, and so will Dwayne if he wishes to be welcome here again. I am not selling the nursery. Clayton planted the first bush in 1974, and I mean to be at the potting bench when the last one is dug.”
Crystal slid off the flowerpot, ignoring the chill of the concrete, and crawled across the wet concrete to my feet. “Mama,” she said, “Brian found out I owed the brother of Dwayne money for the rock, and he said he would cover it if I kept quiet about the checks. I thought I was protecting you. I was protecting the pipe.” She laid her cheek on my gardening boot. “I smoked in your greenhouse, between the roses Daddy planted, and I told myself it was our secret. I am the one who is ashamed. Please do not stop loving me.”
Brian, who had edged toward the door, saw the shape of Detective Hargrove in the sunlight, and he panicked. He snatched the ledger from the potting bench, the page with the name of Marcus Teel, and ran for the rows of rosebushes, thinking to lose himself among the greenhouses. He got halfway down the center aisle. Beatrice Coleman and twelve ladies of the garden club, in sun hats and gardening gloves, stepped out from between the benches, each with a long handled pruning shear held in front of her like a pike. Brian skidded to a stop.
“Put it down, Brian,” said Beatrice, in the voice of thirty one years of state examinations. “You were always a sneak in the second grade.” The ledger fell from his hands onto the wet concrete. Detective Hargrove walked up the aisle without hurrying and put the cuffs on him, while a row of Peace roses nodded behind. I walked down the aisle after them, past the Peace roses and the Knock Outs and the old pink Cecile Brunner that Clayton had loved best, and picked up the page from the floor. It was damp. The name of Marcus Teel was still circled in red, and the ink had not run.
The money consequences were thorough. Brian was charged with forgery and theft, and Marcus Teel, the brother of Dwayne, was arrested at his window at the bank on Monday morning, in a tie. The bank restored the whole one hundred fifty one thousand dollars to the account, since its own teller had cashed the checks. The five million, nine hundred thousand dollars from the offer on the nursery stayed with me, and the contract of the buyers was torn up, because I wanted my roses. Clayton would have laughed himself sick at how much I had been willing to lose. Beatrice stayed for supper that night and brought a pound cake, and the two of us sat on the back step until the porch light came on, talking about nothing at all, which was exactly what I needed.
In the name of Clayton, who passed in 2020, I started the Clayton Sparks Fund. It pays for greenhouses, rose stock and horticulture training for recovery programs in Smith, Gregg and Rusk counties. In the first year we built eight growing houses. One was at a recovery home for women in Longview, where a former addict of thirty four planted her first cutting in a coffee can and then stood over it for an hour. She told me she had never before seen anything grow that she had not ruined.
Crystal came home after ninety days, and on her first morning back she walked into the greenhouse in a pair of my old gloves. Dwayne had stayed in treatment, and she said she did not know what she would do about him. The roses were in bloom, and the air smelled sweet and damp. I handed her the pruning shears of Clayton, worn smooth by his hands, and showed her where to cut. She snipped the first spent bloom, held it a moment, and laid it in my palm like a small red promise.
