The sewing of artificial roses is an occupation that keeps the Dead sisters busy and quiet throughout their childhood and into their adulthood, as they spend hours every day carefully “tracing, cutting, and stitching the costly velvet” (5). All of their hard work scatters when Ruth Foster Dead drops a basket and the painstakingly sewn velvet rose petals fly everywhere. The image of delicate beauty and artifice captures the attention of bystanders. The image is so arresting that Guitar remembers that scene years later, juxtaposing the rose petals with the bits of girls’ dresses that went flying in the aftermath of the 1963 16th Street Church Bombing that killed four girls.

This connection between the fake roses and death is reinforced by Corinthians, who remembers the doll-like body of Robert Smith, whose suicide caused Ruth to drop the basket. Roses and death are forever connected for Corinthians, who will do anything to escape a future of rose-making.

While Lena seems content to a lifetime of making roses, she abruptly changes her mind when she sees that her father and brother have worked together to end Corinthians’s relationship with Henry Porter. She excoriates her brother for acting like their sexist father and treating women as inferior.