The Rose Thieves by Heidi Jon Schmidt

the same day I first saw it, but now, discovering it in the back of an old bureau we had stored in the cellar, I remembered my mother’s face, distorted with anger, returned to composure only after she came out of the shower, her hair wrapped in a towel that gave her the height of a statue. I did not mention it this time. I reached into the drawer for the shoe and carried it up to my room, where I stuffed it inside one of my own boots. Knowing Ma’s response to it, I waited until I was alone with my grandmother.
    â€œWhere did you get that?” she said, when she saw the shoe in my hand. I had never heard her speak so sharply.
    â€œIt’s just like the one at your house,” I said.
    â€œThere’s only one shoe like that,” she said. “Give it to me.” She took it out of the room, and when she returned, she was kind and befuddled again, asking if I wanted to help her make candied apples.
    That night, I sat on the top stair and listened to her arguing with Ma. Grandma sounded tired, frustrated. Over and over again she said, “I don’t know.” Ma’s voice was bitter sarcastic, very low. I could hardly hear it, and what I heard I couldn’t understand.
    I searched the shoe stores for a pair like the jeweled wedgie I had found, but there were no wedged heels at all that year. When I finally described the shoe to a saleswoman, she went behind the counter and said to the cashier, “Marty, this girl wants a pair of hooker shoes.”
    *   *   *
    I’m at work on the hips, in particular. My grandfather is not a man who would place great emphasis on his hips, I don’t think. His shoulders are very sharp, his spine is straight, but his hips are casually at rest. His feet are slightly apart, and his body rises comfortably out of this powerful stance, mannered and elegant with a hard, sure gaze.
    My classmates regard me with derisive awe.
    â€œWhat was this guy, a male model?”
    â€œOne of the first,” I say. “That’s how he put himself through architecture school. It was the Depression, you know.”
    â€œWell,” says this woman, whose grandmother must have been a potato farmer, from the attitude she strikes, “maybe you should think of him later in life, give him some more character.”
    She means to be helpful, I know. “He died in World War II,” I say. I don’t think of this as a real lie.
    â€œWell, you can’t just do a pose. Look how stylized this is.” I look into the mirror as she runs her finger along the curve of my outstretched arm. Maybe style was his natural way. “You’ve really got to get in there and give us his heart,” she tells me.
    I strive. I know he stands at the fence. I know he’s attractive, intriguing to the men and women who pass him, carrying baskets of bread, sausages, and cabbage. The air is stingingly cool, the sweetness of the decaying leaves is masked by an odor of coffee and diesel exhaust. Two children squeeze through a break in the fence, and my grandfather looks above them, outward, making a plan, I think. He’s still too stiff, too separate. I sag a little and lose him altogether. I want to be stoop-shouldered and cross-armed, to hang my head. It is his ideas, his emotions, that give him his substance. I don’t know how to work backward.
    *   *   *
    When I was seventeen, my boyfriend went away for the summer and came back engaged to be married. For weeks I was despondent. My mother was despondent for me. We stayed up all night watching late movies, and I shuffled to school exhausted, got high in the parking lot at noon, giggled through French class, and fell asleep in study hall.
    One night, in the middle of Zombies from Beneath the Swamp, we were picturing the married life of my boyfriend and his fiancée: gray dish towels figured prominently in the discussion. I would get even with them just by letting them live