The Flower Shop Across the Street
“Mrs. Marsh, I heard that.”
“I expect you did, honey.” I handed her a bundle of leatherleaf. “Strip those for me, would you? Bottom four inches.”
She did not say another word, but I could hear her thinking all afternoon.
Ray was on the porch when I got home, pulling a splinter out of his thumb with his pocketknife. Thirty-four years climbing poles for the electric co-op and he still will not use tweezers.
I told him at the kitchen table. I told it flat, the way I would read off an order.
Ray is not a loud man. He stood up, walked to the back door, looked out at the garden for about as long as it takes to say the Lord’s Prayer, and came back and sat down.
“I’d like to go down there,” he said. “I’m not going to. But I want you to know I’d like to.”
“I know it.”
“What do you want to do, Jo?”
Here is how it stood. Ray’s pension from the co-op paid for the house and our insurance. My check paid for everything else: the groceries, the gas, the property tax, and whatever we slipped our daughter when her hours got cut. At eleven dollars I would be working full weeks to go backward. But at fifty-eight, in a town of nineteen hundred people with one flower shop in it, I was not going to find another bench to stand at.
“I can’t afford to quit,” I said. “And I can’t stand to stay.”
“You could call Evelyn.”
I had thought of it. Evelyn Petrie hired me when I was twenty-seven and did not know a carnation from a chrysanthemum. She was eighty-one that summer and living at Prairie View since she broke her hip in January, and I saw her most Sunday afternoons.
“I won’t do that,” I said. “She signed that shop over to her boy so she could quit worrying about it. I’m not going to carry a tale to an old woman with a broken hip and set her against her own son. If I can’t fix this without her, it doesn’t get fixed.”
Ray nodded slowly.
“Walt Kimmel’s shoe store has been empty six years,” he said.
“Right across the street. Fourteen foot wide, tin ceiling, big front window. He heats it all winter so the pipes don’t freeze. He told me at the Legion he’d take anything for it.”
“Ray. I don’t have a shop. I have a pair of clippers and a knife.”
“You have thirty-one years,” he said. “What does a florist need? Say it out loud.”
So I said it out loud, and he wrote it on the back of the electric bill.
A cooler. A bench. Water and a deep sink. Buckets, vases, wire, tape, foam, ribbon. A sales tax permit from the state. An account with a wholesale house, which means a tax number and money up front, because nobody ships flowers on credit to a woman they have never billed. Insurance. A phone.
“And customers,” I said. “And I won’t take one name out of that shop, Ray. Not the order book, not the card file. Those are Evelyn’s. She built that file one family at a time.”
“Nobody said take anything. How much is in the furnace money?”
We had twenty-six hundred dollars in a savings account we called the furnace money, because the furnace was twenty-two years old.
“The furnace has made it this long,” he said.