“Wait for me. Both of you.”
Miss Spratling would have her hair done by Mr. Antoine himself—even on a holiday. The hairdresser was years younger, but he knew the old-fashioned way to curl her limp locks, using rollers the size of coffee cans and a helmet-shaped hair dryer—the kind beauty parlors had back in the 1950s.
After her hair appointment, Miss Spratling was driven up Main Street to Meade’s Flower Shoppe, where she would purchase one dozen white roses. She had purchased the same thing every Monday for nearly fifty years. Her assistant came into the store with her because it was Sharon’s job to actually carry the thorny roses.
This Monday, Meade’s was unexpectedly crowded.
“Miss Spratling! So good to see you again!”
“Mr. Meade.” She tugged on her elbow-length black gloves and slid her cat’s-eye glasses up the bridge of her nose. “Who are all these people?”
“It’s Memorial Day, ma’am.”
“So?”
“They’ve come in to buy flowers to take out to the graveyards.”
“I see. Need a federal holiday to remember the dead, do they? Where were these people last Monday?”
Mr. Meade nodded sympathetically. “You know, Miss Spratling, I was just asking myself the same thing.”
“Enough chatter. Move along. Bring us our roses.”
“I’ll be right with you. Mrs. Lombardi needs—”
“We haven’t the time to wait.” Miss Spratling moved forward, her hands clasped behind her back. “You know what we require. Either produce it immediately or next Monday we will be forced to make alternative arrangements.”
“Yes, Miss Spratling…. Of course, Miss Spratling….”
The florist skittered away. An elderly woman in a faded Windbreaker smiled at Miss Spratling. She was clutching a bouquet of red, white, and blue carnations.
“They’re for my Arnie,” she said.
“What?”
“The carnations. They’re for my son. He died in the war. I take him flowers every Memorial Day.”
“I see. That makes it easier to remember, doesn’t it? The federal holiday.” Miss Spratling fussed with her hard helmet of hair. The woman in the Windbreaker stared at her.
“God in heaven, woman, whatever are you gawking at?”
“That dress. I had one just like it. Years ago. When Mr. Lombardi and I went to our first formal at his fraternity. Must have been 1948.”
Miss Spratling wanted to be left alone. “Mr. Meade?” she called out.
“Of course Mr. Lombardi passed on. Last year. Congestive heart failure. I’m all alone now. I do the best I can. Stay busy. Volunteer at the thrift shop…”
“Mr. Meade?” Miss Spratling rapped her knuckles on the counter.
“My dress was white,” Mrs. Lombardi said. “Not black like yours.”
“Mr. Meade!”
The frazzled shopkeeper came hurrying out of the back room with a dozen white roses wrapped in a cone of clear cellophane.
“Kindly charge them to my account,” Miss Spratling snapped as her assistant took the flowers from the frightened little man.
Mr. Meade smiled feebly. “Of course. No problem, Miss Spratling. Have a nice day.”
“How sweet of you to suggest such a thing,” she coldly replied. “Unfortunately, I have not had, as you say, a ‘nice day’ for nearly fifty years!”
The two cars crawled out of North Chester and headed up Route 13. A few miles outside of town, both vehicles parked on the soft shoulder of the road.
Mr. Willoughby once again shuffled around to the rear of the Cadillac and pulled open the heavy door. Miss Spratling snatched the roses out of her assistant’s hands and carried the bouquet as though it were her wedding day. She crossed over the drainage ditch and made her way up a well-worn path until she came to a gigantic oak tree.
There was a white wooden cross nailed into the tree. It had hung there so long, swollen bark had grown in around its edges. A small aluminum bucket, also painted white, was bolted to the tree underneath the cross. It was filled with a dozen wilted white roses, their tissue-thin edges rimmed brown with a week’s decay.
Miss Spratling did what she did every Monday: She tossed out last week’s dead roses and put the fresh ones in. She pressed her left hand against the furrowed bark and said some prayers.
Five minutes later, she made her way back to the waiting car. Her assistant met her at the crumbling edge of the roadway.
“We have done our duty, Sharon.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Take me home, Mr. Willoughby.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said the ancient chauffeur.
The Cadillac drove away. Miss Spratling would come back again the next Monday and the next one and the one after that. Every week, she’d bring fresh white roses to decorate her roadside memorial at the crossroads where Route 13 met Highway 31.
“The Tree of Life has three hundred and twenty-five images of endangered and extinct animals carved into its trunk, roots, and branches,” said Judy.
On Memorial Day, Zack, Judy, and George—the whole new Jennings family—wound their way around the fourteen-story-tall man-made baobab tree that was the centerpiece to Disney’s Animal Kingdom amusement park.
“It’s awesome!” Zack stared up at all the animals etched into the fake tree like a gigantic interlocking jigsaw puzzle.
“Can you see the lion?” his father asked. “In the bark there? I think it’s a lion. Maybe a leopard. I know it’s not a panda bear….”
“Yeah. Cool.” Zack had been having a blast in Orlando and figured his new stepmom could turn out to be a whole lot more fun than his real mom.
That’s when he smelled her, smelled the cigarette.
His mother.
Zack imagined she had come back from the dead to teach him a lesson. How dare he have fun with his pretty new stepmother when his real mother was dead on account of him? This wasn’t the Tree of Life. It was the Tree of Death!
“Zack?” his dad asked. “Are you okay?”
He nodded. Tried to speak. “Yeah. Fine.”
Judy sniffed the air. She smelled it, too.
“Somebody’s smoking,” she said.
“I thought the whole park was nonsmoking.” Zack’s dad sounded mad.
“It is,” said Judy. “But you know smokers. They have trouble reading signs.” Now Judy looked at Zack. She must have seen the panic in his eyes. “You okay, hon?” she asked softly.
“Yeah. Thanks.”
Zack knew smokers, too. Lived with one most of his life. His mother went through two or three packs a day. Sucked on them hard, like she wanted to drain each stick dry. His mother kept smoking until the day she died, even though the cigarettes were what caused the cancer.
“They’re the only joy I have left,” she used to croak from that hospital bed in the dining room. She would stare at Zack with a look that seared his soul deeper than the glowing tip of a cigarette could scorch his skin. “My only joy in the world.”
Gerda Spratling lived in the one true mansion near North Chester, Connecticut: Spratling Manor.
Her great-great-grandfather Augustus J. Spratling, the founder of Spratling Clockworks, had built the stately stone castle in 1882 on one thousand forested acres six miles west of town. Miss Spratling had lived in the manor her entire life. When her father died in 1983, he left her the house and a handsome inheritance. Her mother had died years earlier, when Gerda was an infant.
It had been twenty-five years since her father had passed away, and the money was starting to run out. Still, she had enough to live on, provided she lived frugally. She sold off some of the land, trimmed the staff to three, shut down parts of the mansion, and kept most of the rooms upstairs locked or boarded shut.