Introduction

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Excerpt

Chapter 1

For a moment, I think I have made a mistake. My tweezers pause and shake over the yellow rose. I have already stripped the petals to expose the stamen, which will release the pollen from this father plant. But is this the rose I had put aside earlier? Or didn’t I want the white rose with orange-tinged petals, with a bloom so open it looks more like a daisy? These parents are known only by their codes: G120 and G10. I double check in my rose notebook. G120. G10. I do not breed the plants without writing down this information. That way, I can recreate an outcome, or adjust by breeding with another plant. My memory has been suffering lately, though I refuse to acknowledge this aloud. I adjust the lamp, calm my twitching hands, and continue.

I am a rose breeder. Not just a rose grower. Most rose hobbyists only grow roses that other people have already perfected. I invent new varieties.

Breeding roses is not something I do for fun. Not solely for fun, anyway. It’s the kind of fun most people classify as “drudgery,” but then again, I’m not like most people.

Roses are my hobby, and what I want to be my vocation. Someday, I hope, I will wake up, find a prize-winning rose peeking out at me in the greenhouse, quit my job, and devote myself to roses full-time. My “past time” inspired me to dig up my nice neat suburban lawn and plant a wild thorny mass. If I lived in an HOA, I would have been booted a decade ago.

You would have to be nuts to want to do what I want to do with these roses. Which is, to make a never-before-seen Hulthemia rose and bring it to market. One which will be prized for its scent and distinctive spots and stripes. If I can produce this rose in my little garden, I will take it to one of the smaller rose shows. If it wins a prize, I might be brave enough to enter one of the larger shows, like the American Rose Society convention show. If a rose of mine wins Queen of Show, it would be like a Barbizon modeling school drop-out winning Miss America. It would give me the confidence that my rose was worthy of a pricey patent, a process costing at least two grand, before attorney fees.

My greatest hope is to get a rose into the American Rose Society test gardens, where a few select new roses are grown in different climates to see how they fare for two years. Of these, the rose society selects one or two varieties as the best of the best.

How long are my odds? Consider that a big rose company, with endless resources, will come up with hundreds of thousands of new seedling varieties every year. Of these, only two or three make it into the market.

And consider me, Galilee Garner, an amateur with an extra-large yard and perhaps a few hundred new seedlings, at best, trying to compete against professional growers. It doesn’t look very good for me, does it?

However, there’s something more important at work here. Luck. You can’t overestimate the importance of luck. It’s like playing the Lottery. Sometimes, a person playing one dollar in the Lottery wins it all, while the person who spends one hundred dollars a week for a year walks away with nothing.

Take the man who bred the Dolly Parton tea rose in his Michigan basement. He was growing all sorts of rose hybrids when he found an ugly little red-orange seedling with only twelve petals at first bloom, not the twenty you might expect. Just as his hand closed around the seedling to yank it out, he thought to smell it. And its smell was incredible.

He left it alone. It grew into an enormous sixty petals, inspiring its name, blossoming into one of the most popular roses ever. That man retired off the Dolly Parton, I believe. All because of luck.

And I grow roses that need a lot of luck. I didn’t pick the easy roses to breed, the sort you can find in any old garden center or big box store. I love the Hulthemia roses. They are difficult and obstinate, thriving when I introduce them to an impossible variety of conditions. Like any rose grower, I have my own particular methods of doing things, my own fertilizer formulas, my own routine. I pay as much attention to temperature as an ice cream maker does in the middle of the Sahara, though I know one day my successful seedling will have to survive in a variety of punishing climates. I apply the exact amount of water and fertilizer necessary, at exactly the correct times. When fungus appears, like powdery mildew or black spot, I attack it before it spreads to other plants. I set loose ladybugs to eat those little green aphids, the tiny bugs that have plagued roses since before the time of Moses.

And as long as no other event occurs to throw them off course—which doesn’t happen often, in my mostly protected greenhouse—they do wonderfully.

Difficult and obstinate. Thriving under a set of specific and limited conditions. That pretty much describes me. Maybe that’s why I like these roses so much.

A student of mine described me in these words—difficult and obstinate— on the Rate Your Teacher website my school’s headmaster, Dr. O’Malley, set up. A silly website. Another place where everyone is the expert, but no one knows the real story. A website I imagine the headmaster and parents clucking over while they sip their coffee at Headmaster Coffee Break. “That Ms. Garner,” they probably say. “Won’t she ever learn?”

Obstinate. I was impressed with this anonymous student’s word choice and by the apt description. If this student put as much time into my biology class as he did into writing this review, maybe he would have passed. I suspect the student is a “he,” because the student added as a post script, “Constant PMS. Get over it.” Females take exception to such accusations.

Most people are surprised by my rose hobby. I look more like I’d have a secret science lab in my basement, a torture chamber, perhaps, than a rose garden. Visually, there is no good explanation for my rose obsession. Roses are frilly and soft and sweet-smelling, which I am not. If you saw me in the teacher line-up, our faces bathed in harsh light against the black height lines, would you pick me for the rose lover? No. You would pick someone like Dara, the art teacher, with her carefully messed halo of Botticelli curls. Or Mrs. Wingate, the English teacher, whose fluffy circle skirts sometimes remind me of roses in their layers and frilliness. Not plain-spoken me, squinting unmercifully back at you, my eyes barely visible behind my round gray-tinted lenses. A garden gnome without the jolly expression.

I am short, due to the childhood onset of my failed kidneys; an inch under five feet on my best day. I have never been called “pretty.” More like, “she looks pretty good, all things considered.” My face is always puffy. My skin, while not glowing, at least has been spared freckling from the sun, thanks to my sunblock and hat diligence.

If you looked at the rose more than superficially, you’d see why I am drawn to them. Florists strip those thorns for you so you don’t stick your fingers when you buy them, while some breeders have engineered the bite right out of them, creating smooth-stemmed varieties. I personally wouldn’t try to strip mine down for anyone. I love roses, thorns and all. People should learn to take care.

My house is in Santa Jimenez, a small community inland of San Luis Obispo, in central California. It’s a great place to grow roses, with fairly mild winters, and early warm springs. We have a mix of houses, from small tract cottages, to working farms, to mansions of the well-to-do where we get many of our students. I live on the outskirts of town, on a corner parcel on a rectangular acre of land. My house sits near the front of the short side of the rectangle, my land stretching out behind it. The result is that my neighbors on either side are in spitting distance, though I’m on an acre.

It’s a far different place than where my sister and I grew up in Encinitas, down in southern California. The lots were postage-stamp sized and you could not only spit on your neighbors, but say “Bless you!” when they sneezed. My parents still live down there in the same three-bedroom ranch they bought for a song back in the day.

A muffled rap sounds at the vinyl door. The greenhouse is vinyl, glass being out of my price range currently. I push my golden-wire rimmed glasses back up my sweaty nose. “Come in.” I’m not very much concerned with strangers. I’ve been on my own for far too long to worry about anything except what is right in front of me.

It’s my friend Dara. Dara taps on her bright yellow plastic watch. “You’re not ready.” Her curly hair is bound up in a ponytail. I push my own dark brown bangs off my forehead, out of my eyes. We met in the teachers’ lounge of St. Mark’s School, nearly three years ago, when Dara was new to the school.

I had asked Dara for help drawing the Hulthemia I’m trying to breed, since my sketches are little better than cave drawings. She responded by creating a watercolor painting of my dream flower, so beautiful that I had it framed and hung it on my bedroom wall. After that, Dara asked to see more roses, and would come over to my garden just to sketch. Then Dara asked me for photos of DNA sequencing to use in some of her other art projects. Before long, she was dragging me to see artsy films and I was dragging her to popcorn flicks. Our friendship has taken off over the years. She is my closest friend.

Today, in my greenhouse, her face is red and two semi-circles of sweat are forming on her midnight blue silk blouse. It’s late March, unseasonably hot this day as southern California sometimes gets, but I have not noticed the temperature, even out here in my sweat lodge of a greenhouse. Where we live, the summers cook to over a hundred degrees, and we are too used to air conditioning. The results are people like Dara: unused to real air, they get overheated and cannot handle it. Humans are not meant to live in overly controlled climates. I’ve kept my temperatures as close to natural as I can, given my health restrictions.

“You’re interrupting me at a very crucial moment,” I say to her, though I am in fact almost done. “I’m making a new rose baby.” Dara says roses are a Freudian substitution for my lack of love life. I tell her I can’t miss something I’ve never had. Well, there was once that fellow biology student I met in college. I thought all our late study-dates and joking banter were something more, but he saw it differently.

“Are you ready?” Dara does look like she’s about to swoon, so without moving my arms I kick another stool on wheels toward her across the concrete floor.

Dara could be my twin sister, if twins were polar opposites of each other. While I am five feet tall on a good day, she is tall and long-limbed. Where I am thin, with hanging skin that makes me look two or three decades older than I am, she is muscular and firm. My hair is nearly black, and hers is that gold blonde people try to get out of a bottle. Add to this that she is the art teacher at the private Catholic school where we teach, and I am the biology nerd, and we’re perfectly yin-yang. The only matching thing between us is our feet, both size ten. The big feet look better on her height; even I, the non-artist, can tell that.

Of course, she would never deign to wear the practical sneakers I own, while I would fall over if I tried to wear her spiky heeled, pointy toed shoes that I think the Wicked Witch of the West would choose. “It’s what they say to wear on WHAT NOT TO WEAR,” is her response.

“They’re telling you NOT to wear it. It’s the name of the show,” I always say, teasing her. “Besides, I don’t believe in cable. It’s expensive, and life’s too short.”

To this she rolls her eyes, as though she’s my young teenage sister instead of a colleague only four years younger than I.

“You’re going to be late.” She leans her elbow on a table and points her sweaty face toward the fan. “I’m surprised you’re not dead out here.”

“I could have driven myself.” I transfer the stamens, now free of petals, into a clean glass jar. Later, the anthers at the tops will shed their pollen, which I will then collect and transfer to the mother plant.

After I set the pollen from the father rose into the mother rose, I will leave it alone. In fall, if I’m fortunate, the mother rose will ripen into a rose hip, containing the seeds. I cut this seed pod open and put them into peat moss, then put the seeds in the refrigerator to induce dormancy. Next spring, I will plant these seeds, and from this new variety will hopefully spring a magnificent new rose, with the best traits of its parents.

The mother is a Hulthemia of vivid magenta, with an equally vivid crimson sunburst in its very heart, bleeding outward toward the petals. Hulthemias are not widely known to consumers; they are relatively new and the most difficult type to grow. Most amateurs simply don’t try to undertake their breeding. These blossoms are round, like an Old-Fashioned rose, but the center opens up to reveal the welcoming yellow stamen and the distinctive dark blotch at its heart. Blotch is not the prettiest word to describe the color, but it’s how breeders refer to it. The blotches are usually red, but can also vary from deep pink to a purple to orange. It’s always darker than the surrounding petals.

If they look different than any other rose you’ve seen, it’s because they are. They are not a true rose. These roses are hybrids of flowers called Hulthemia persicas that the Persians considered weeds with barbed vines running amok. In 1836, an accidental Hulthemia hybrid growing in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris caught the attention of rose breeders. They coveted the red hearts for regular roses.

It took one hundred forty-nine years to get there. The first Hulthemias, including that specimen in the Paris garden, were homely and infertile. It wasn’t until the late 1960s that an Englishman named Jack Harkness, of the famous Harkness Roses, was the first to get a breakthrough. His friend Alec Cocker decided that if the flower could exist by accident, it could exist if he bred it. He got more Hulthemia seeds from Iran and gave some to Harkness. In 1985, Harkess finally got a Hulthemia variety that could reproduce: Tigris. These early Hulthemia were crossbred with true roses, a project taken on by multiple other breeders, and eventually we got what we have now.

There are specific attributes a Hulthemia needs to be successful with the casual rose grower. People want a rose bush that will not get too gigantic for their small backyards. They also want a fragrant bloom. They want a rose bush that will produce dozens of blooms over and over again throughout the season. This repeat blooming is something that was only fairly recently bred into our modern roses, obtained from Chinese roses. The French began to cross Chinese roses with European roses around 1798.

In short, the consumer, as always, expects the impossible. At a mass-market price.

To date, this Hulthemia doesn’t yet exist. Whoever is the first Hulthemia grower to bring this kind of consumer-friendly plant on the market will make a fortune. Her (because I plan to be the winner) name will be sung by the rose breeding bards.

Of these assets, fragrance is the most difficult thing to come by. It’s been bred out of modern stock. Generally, rose breeders wanted hardiness and disease resistance at the expense of fragrance, which ensures growers can massively produce and ship roses all over the world, at any time of the year.

Fragrance tends to appear more randomly, not always linked to a recessive gene, not always predictable. For example, if a rose’s grandparents were all fragrant, it doesn’t mean the grandchild will be. Perfumed roses also tend to be more delicate, and most casual gardeners do not want to attempt them.

I have a repeat blooming Hulthemia on my hands, a fifth-generation plant I’ve created after five years of crossing its ancestors. Last year, it bloomed in the spring, summer, and fall, generating bloom after bloom as I clipped it. I’m going to take it to a rose show in San Luis Obispo next month.

I haven’t officially named the rose yet. It is only G42 to me, an orange Hulthemia with that crimson center. This year, I hope to have the scent as well. If it does make it to trials, it will be known as the Gal.

The rose is top secret, occupying a special spot in my greenhouse. My father, a retired contractor, built this greenhouse for me from a kit during a visit five years earlier. Here I have workbenches, built to my modest height, and a rolling seat. No bees are allowed inside, though a few, like the aphids, find their way in. Bees are not my friends. I am the only one who will pollinate these roses. I am their mad scientist.

I have always been somewhat of a mad scientist, beginning in my teen years when I bred roses as a science project. In one season, I was hooked. I turned my parents’ garage into a de-facto breeding center. Though none of my creations were unique enough to go to a rose show, I could never stop. The hobby is addicting.

Now, with Dara perspiring next to me, I clean my tweezers with a sterilized cotton ball and alcohol and return them to their plastic case, where they rattle with the other tweezers. “But now that you’re here, you might as well take me.”

Dara grins and pops pink bubble gum. “You can’t get home alone.”

I smile at my friend and punch her lightly on the arm, tomboy-style. “Thanks, kiddo.” I don’t know what I’ll do if Dara ever gets her own life.

“Let’s get going.” She shifts her water bottle in her hand. I know she wants to take a drink, but she remembers I cannot have any liquid before the procedure, and so she won’t. Dara is too polite like that. She shouldn’t be. Yet I do not encourage her to take a drink, because it really will make me thirstier. My mouth is dry and sticky and I wipe my chapped lips with the back of my hand.

I point to the black notebook on the table. “Brad’s coming in today. Remind me to leave the greenhouse key under the mat.” Brad is the football team quarterback, the starting pitcher on our baseball team, the ASB president, and inexplicably the best student in my AP Biology class. As his required community service project for high school, Brad helps me with the roses. Brad is, of course, my favorite student, on some days the only reason I make myself go into the classroom.

Brad has the ability to remember the Latin names for things, the groups, the subgroups, the phylum and the sub phylum and the grouping. He does this as easily as some young boys do baseball statistics. He has an attention to detail I appreciate. Our brains work alike, though I would never tell him so. I am considering naming the rose after him, though I probably won’t. Roses aren’t usually named for men. No man wants to buy his wife a bunch of Brad roses.

It’s because of students like Brad that I got into teaching in the first place. Shaping young minds and all that. It’s fun, as long as they’re willing to be shaped. That and the summers off, plus the early day, make teaching perfect for me. It leaves me time to tend to my roses, in spite of my other problems.

“Come on,” she says, extending her hand to me to help me up, though privately I think she’s the one who needs help, clad as she is in an impractical, impossibly tight pencil skirt.

“I’m pretty sure your skirt is against school dress policy.” I get up as she totters back.

She rolls her eyes and pops her gum again. “It’s called style. You should get some.”

“Form follows function, Dara. An art teacher should know that.” I shut the greenhouse door and lock it. From the other side of the fence, I see my neighbor, Old Mrs. Allen, watering her lawn in her black silk kimono robe with her big black straw hat, looking like an extra from a silent film. From here, I can see the red slit passing for her mouth. I lift my hand in a wave and she almost waves back, then remembers who I am and lowers her hand with a scowl. The stinky fish emulsion I used on the roses caused a police visit to my door last year, courtesy of her. The neighborhood kids call her the Old Witch. If I were a kid, I probably would too. I wonder what the kids call me. Nutty Rose Lady?

I smile at Dara and slide into the front seat of her car.

Though she knows the drill, Dara insists on staying put in the waiting room. I check in with all the seven layers of hell security slapping wrist tags on me like they’re tagging wildlife. Then again, I wouldn’t blame me for running off. The hospital’s been my second home since I was a kid. Two kidney transplants and years of dialysis will do that.

The paper pusher, who must be new because I’ve never seen her before, pauses in her typing to actually take me in. “Galilee Garner?” She can barely spit the name out.

“Yep.” I sit back on the hard chair. “You can call me Gal.”

Galilee is the name my parents chose to saddle me with after a hippy trip to the Holy Land back in the 1970s. The Sea of Galilee.

By the time I was two, it was clear I was not a Galilee. Galilee rolls off the tongue, a musical of notes, meant for a curly-haired little girl in pink dresses with bows. Not me. So they called me Gal for short.

My older sister had it much better. Becky. No one has ever misspelled my sister’s name or asked her to repeat herself.

“You all right?” the woman asks, eyeing my sallow skin, my tired eyes, the scars on my forearms.

I nod. I make hospital workers nervous, if they don’t know me. If I go to the emergency room, I get pushed to the head of the line, even if someone else’s leg is sitting in a cooler beside him. I have that look about me, I guess. The look of impending doom.

The woman asks me all the standard questions about where I was born and what my insurance is.

Today, in the Miami Vice waiting room, there’s an elderly woman with hair resembling light pink cotton candy swirled atop her head, and a middle aged man with an impressive potbelly, who belches every minute or so. I wonder if the hair is pink on purpose, or if her red-haired dye job didn’t do the work.

Then there’s Mark Walters, an older man who is holding ROAD & TRACK up to his face because he forgot his reading glasses. Everyone calls him Mark Twain, because he sports a full white handlebar moustache and has a head of wild white hair. I think he looks more like Einstein. He’s always wearing some uniform of white, as if he fancies himself an angel. Today it’s white jeans, a loose white V-neck shirt that shows his white chest hair. I wish he’d cover up. Even from here, across the room, I can smell the Old Spice aftershave. It makes my nose itch.

As if he feels my eyes on him, he looks up from the magazine and winks, one bushy eyebrow almost covering his wrinkled eye. This does not embarrass me. I’m always staring sternly at people, particularly at my students. A nurse comes in to fetch him. I recognize her as Nurse Sonya, a large Russian woman who seems to take about as much joy in her work as an undertaker.

“Mr. Walters, you’re looking fit as a fiddle!” she sing-songs.

My eyes pop wide open.

“A fiddle that’s been left out in the rain at the beach, perhaps.” His voice is raspy, his breathing a little strained. He gets up slowly and she holds out her arm.

Mark. Mark is here because he did not take his blood pressure medication. He was too busy eating steak and boozing it up to bother. Lost his liver first, got a transplant for that. And now, because he caused his own kidneys to fail, he is on the waiting list.

And he just got higher priority than I.

I was born with reflux. This means the flap at the end of the passage from the kidney to the bladder didn’t close properly. My mother could not change my diapers fast enough, I made so much urine. Constant bladder infections were the result, then kidney infections. By the time the doctors figured out what was wrong when I was four, one kidney had already withered away. The other one, already on its way to failing, went when I was twelve. My mother was the first donor; this one lasted for twelve years. The second was from a cadaver, someone who checked the box on their driver’s license. That one only lasted four before my body decided it was definitely a foreign object. I’ve been on dialysis for eight years.

Dialysis basically cleans your blood, like a kidney. You’re hooked up to a machine attached to a vein, and all your blood pumps through and gets filtered. There are different kinds of dialysis, but I do the kind where I have to go in every other day. You can do dialysis overnight, or during the day. I do dialysis overnight, because it’s simpler and I can sleep. If you skip a treatment, you will feel like you have the flu and your brain will stop working. If you stop dialysis altogether, eventually your organs will all shut down, and you’ll die.

There are more than half a million Americans on dialysis. Theoretically, people can survive for a very long time. It depends on the accompanying problems of a patient. During the first year of dialysis, 20 percent of dialysis patients die, half within the first three months. These folks most likely have more pressing problems, like high blood pressure or diabetes, which caused the kidneys to fail in the first place. Infections are another big problem; your immune system is nonexistent, so a little cold can turn into a deadly problem.

The odds of death go up with each year you spend on dialysis. In year two, the survival rate is 64%. Year five, 33%. By year ten, it drops to only 10%.

I am approaching year ten statistics.

Thus, it’s vitally important to get a kidney as soon as possible, but there simply aren’t enough to go around. People don’t line up to donate kidneys like they do to donate blood.

Today, I’m at the hospital for a blood flow test, to show how well my blood will move around a new kidney. The doctors would not want to give me one of those precious kidneys, only to have it expire because it can’t get any blood.

I take my place in the waiting room chair. The same nurse returns to take me back.

“You ready, Ms. Garner?” Nurse Sonya is already walking away.

I try to think of a joke, something to make her laugh. Nothing comes to mind.

I’ve seen Sonya for the past five years, and she’s never commented on more than my blood pressure and pulse.

I decide to hell with it, and her, and Mark. I don’t care. I shuffle along behind her, painfully aware that my gait is no better than Mark’s, though he’s at least thirty years older. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1. Consider the title of the book —what multiple meanings might it convey?

2. In the early chapters, as we're getting to know Gal as a character, what is your opinion of her? Does her struggle with kidney disease affect your perception of her character?

3. Gal often views the world in black-and-white, and is inclined to stick to rules in the name of order and fairness. But at times, other adults in the story question or undermine her decisions, believing that individual circumstances merit a special response. Whom did you agree with during these conflicts? Do you see rules more as guidelines that should be flexible, or do exceptions make rules meaningless?

4. The book highlights the complex and fraught system of organ donation, where in the face of a limited supply of organs, potential recipients must be ranked according to criteria that may not always seem fair . . . and this ranking can mean the difference between life and death. Do you agree with Gal's implication that she's more deserving of a kidney than Mark? What criteria would you take into account if you were doing the ranking?

5. Riley comes to live with Gal at a fragile time during her teenage years, when she's still trying to identify interests, solidify skills, and find her passions. How does living with Gal help her grow in these respects? Which other adults and peers also influence her development?

6. Irresponsible, flaky Becky is an interesting foil to Gal, who is rigidly consistent in both her outlook and actions. Did your opinion of Becky change over the course of the novel? Do you sympathize at all with the struggles she faces and the choices she makes?

7. As we learn in the book, rose breeding and cultivation is both a competitive endeavor that can lead to financial gain and a collegial undertaking in which fellow hobbyists share tips and information for mutual benefit. How do Gal and the other breeders handle the fine line between sharing and competing? Do you think Gal's anger toward Byron was justified?

8. In what ways does Gal become transformed by the end of the story, as a teacher, sister, friend, and stand-in parent?

Weblinks

»	Author Margaret Dilloway's web site
»	Publisher's Book Info

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