But Mom doesn’t seem to hear. She is looking tired now, her eyelids flutter and droop. It is all that she can do to keep awake, observing Trix and me digging holes with a shovel and a hoe, setting the rosebushes carefully in place, watering the roots, covering the roots with soil. Exhilarating to work with Trix, my so-capable cousin.

How grateful I am for the beauty of flowers. Thank God for beauty, a balm to the soul.

Trix goes away, returns with more grapefruit juice. Mom makes an effort to drink but her hand shakes, she spills some of the liquid onto the front of her smock, which I dab with a tissue. Mom laughs, and reaches for my hand. Impulsively, she kisses it.

“Well. Here you are—‘Violet Rue.’ Why did you take so long?”

Forgiveness

VIOLET. HELLO.”

Lionel’s voice is cracked, hoarse. In prison he’d injured himself, as prison medical records would state. Mysteriously crushing his larynx in an “accidental fall” in the way that, if you’d suspected that another man had injured your brother, whether another prisoner or a C.O., would seem to indicate that he’d been kicked in the throat, hard.

Of course, if that were so, if Lionel had been violently attacked in the prison, kicked repeatedly in the throat, possibly his assailant had even jumped on his throat as he lay on his back on the floor, intent upon crushing every bone in his throat, Lionel would not have told authorities about the assault. In prison you dare not snitch. You dare not rat.

“Lionel! Hi.”

Shyly you take your brother’s big-knuckled hand which is extended not to you exactly but toward you, guardedly. As if, if your hand recoils from his, Lionel is prepared to quickly draw back his hand, too.

Cold fingers, somewhat stiff, unyielding. You can feel the wariness in your brother’s body as you’d feel in an animal that is tensing before leaping away. Or leaping at you.

Shy with your brother whom you have not seen in more than thirteen years.

Yet eagerly you stare at each other. Strangers trying to see in the face of the other a trace, a clue, explaining the connection between you.

Lionel seems to be mystified that your hair isn’t the color he’d expected—yet, now that he thinks about it, he can’t seem to recall the color of your hair when you were a girl.

Like his own, you tell him. More or less.

His own?—Lionel touches his hair, his close-cropped head. As if he can’t recall the color of his hair, either. You would describe it as wheat-colored, light brown. Not a remarkable color. Not darkly dramatic like your father’s hair before it had become threaded with gray. Not strawberry blond like your mother’s hair when she’d been young.

Mild panic in Lionel’s eyes. Unless you are imagining it.