The Flower Shop Across the Street
I worked Friday as if nothing had happened. I built six bouquets and wired the mothers’ corsages. I did not say one word to Dale that was not about flowers.
Saturday I was at St. John’s Lutheran at six in the morning with the shop van.
I did the altar in white stock and peonies, low and wide so Pastor Mark could be seen over them. I tied the pew bows myself, every other pew, twelve in all.
Katie’s bouquet was white peonies, pale pink spray roses and a little blue delphinium. In the handle, under the ribbon, I tucked a scrap of lace her mother had given me in an envelope. It was off Connie’s own veil.
I had done Connie’s own bouquet, a long time ago, when she was twenty-two and wanted daisies.
When I handed Katie her flowers in the bride’s room she looked down at the lace and then at her mother and started to cry, and Connie said, “Not yet, the pictures,” and then she was crying too.
Connie caught my arm at the door.
“Jolene, Megan’s getting engaged at Christmas, I just know it. You’ll do hers. Next June. I want it on your book today.”
I have never lied to a bride’s mother and I was not going to start in a church.
“I won’t be at Petrie’s after Monday, Connie.”
Her face went still.
“What do you mean, you won’t be at Petrie’s?”
“I mean today is about Katie. Go on, they’re lining up.”
“Jolene Marsh.”
“Go on.”
That is all I said. Not one word about eleven dollars or my age, to her or to anybody in that church. I carried the last of the buckets out to the van, drove the centerpieces to the Legion hall, set twenty-two tables, and went home and took my shoes off.
I did not stay for the reception. I never did. The flowers are supposed to be there and the florist is not.
What I did not know was that Kim had gone home Thursday and told her mother every word. And Kim’s mother had sat two chairs down from Connie Henderson at the hairdresser’s on Friday.
Sunday afternoon I drove out to Prairie View like always.
Evelyn was in the sunroom with an afghan over her knees and her walker parked beside the chair. She had been off the wheelchair three weeks and was proud of it.
“There she is. How was the Henderson girl?”
“Pretty as any we ever did. Peonies and stock. I put Connie’s veil lace in the handle.”
“Oh, that’s a nice touch.” She patted my hand. Hers was light as a leaf. “And how is my boy doing down there?”
“He’s working hard, Evelyn. He’s got that roof on his mind.”
Both things were true.
She looked at me a second longer than she needed to. Evelyn Petrie ran a business on Main Street for fifty-five years. She could read a face like a ledger.
But she only said, “He was always a worrier. His father was the same.”
I kissed her forehead when I left. I sat in the truck in the parking lot a good ten minutes before I could turn the key.
Monday I was at the shop at eight, an hour before we opened.
I wrote out every standing order for the next two weeks on a yellow pad, in block letters, so a stranger could follow it. The Methodist altar flowers. Mrs. Olson’s funeral on Wednesday.