The week before my daughter's wedding, and I'm on my knees in the dirt behind my mother's house, trying to remember how she arranged her roses.
She's been gone twelve years. The garden she kept is nothing but crabgrass and thistle now.
I drove down from the casino town where I clean teeth for a living, forty dollars in gas and a fold-out map on the passenger seat with one route highlighted in yellow.
My mother always said the key was putting the tallest in back, the pink ones next to each other so they'd cross-pollinate.
I never listened when she showed me. I was too busy trying to get out of this town.
But my hands remember things my head forgot. They know how deep to dig, how much water the roots need.
I bought the roses at the nursery by the old highway, the one that was there when I was a girl. The pinks cost fourteen dollars each.
Tomorrow my daughter walks down an aisle, and I'll be in the front row, smelling like dirt and roses.
I think that's what my mother would have wanted. Me, finally putting things back where they belong.