The Flower Shop Across the Street
I left the order book open on the counter to that week. I left the card file where it had sat since before I came, a gray metal box with every family in the county in it: who is allergic to lilies, whose mother hated red, which husband needs reminding on the twelfth of October.
I hung the shop apron on its hook. I put on my own, the green one Ray’s mother sewed.
When Dale came in at ten to nine I had the key off my ring and lying on the yellow pad.
“What’s this?”
“That’s my key. Everything through the twenty-first is written out there. The Olson spray is roughed in and it’s in the cooler, bottom left.”
“You’re quitting.”
“I’m thanking you for thirty-one years of work, Dale, and I’m going home.”
“Over a wage adjustment.” He set his coffee down. “Jolene, be reasonable. Where are you going to go?”
I did not answer that.
“If you need me through the Olson funeral, I’ll stay through Wednesday. At the old rate, for three days. I wouldn’t leave a family short.”
“No need. I’ve got a girl out of Mankato who took a design course. She can start tomorrow. At eleven.”
So that was how long he had been planning it.
“Then you’re covered,” I said. “Tell your mother I said hello when you see her.”
I picked up my clippers and my knife. That is every single thing I carried out of that shop.
Main Street in our town is two blocks long and wide enough to turn a hay wagon around. Kimmel Hardware is straight across from Petrie’s. The old shoe store is hitched onto the side of it.
Walt Kimmel was on a stepladder hanging fly strips. He is a big slow man about seventy who has known me since I was a girl buying paint for my 4-H projects.
“Morning, Jolene. You’re on the wrong side of the street for a Monday.”
“Walt, what do you want for the shoe store?”
He came down the ladder. He looked through his front window at Petrie’s, then at the knife and clippers in my hand, and I watched him put it together. He did not ask me a single question about it. I have always been grateful for that.
He scratched his neck.
“Four hundred a month. Heat’s in with it, because it runs off my boiler anyhow. You pay your own lights and water.”
Four hundred dollars. I had been ready to hear six.
“And the first month’s nothing,” he said.
“Walt, I’m not asking for charity.”
“It isn’t charity. That place has six years of dust in it and you’ll spend the first month on your knees with a scrub brush. I’m not going to charge a woman rent to clean my building.” He took a ring of keys off the nail behind the register. “Come look before you say yes. The floor’s good. The sink in back is an old cobbler’s sink, deep as a bathtub.”
There was a rack of shoelaces still on the wall and a calendar from six Januarys back. But the tin ceiling was whole and the floor was maple under the grime.
“You’ll want a cooler,” Walt said.
“I’ll want one. I can’t buy one yet. A used one runs three thousand dollars and I’ve got twenty-six hundred to my name for the whole business.”
“You remember when the creamery closed? I bought the two-door glass case out of their front store at the auction. It’s been in my back room nine years under a tarp.” He shrugged. “It ran when I unplugged it. You can have the loan of it as long as you want.”