The Flower Shop Across the Street
I had to look at the shoelaces for a minute.
“A dairy case runs colder and drier than a flower cooler,” I said, when I could. “I’d have to turn it up to thirty-eight and keep a pan of water in the bottom.”
“Then turn it up to thirty-eight and keep a pan of water in the bottom.”
We shook on it by the cobbler’s sink. He wrote the rent on a receipt pad, four hundred dollars, first month waived, and we both signed it, and that was the whole lease.
The next twelve days I have never worked so hard in my life.
I scrubbed that floor on my knees, just like Walt said. Ray scraped the old lettering off the window with a razor blade and washed the glass inside and out until it squeaked.
Ray will tell anybody who asks that a lineman is not an electrician. So he had his friend Dennis come put in a proper circuit for the cooler, and he and Dennis and Walt walked the creamery case across the alley on pipe rollers like they were moving a piano.
Then Ray built my bench.
He did not tell me he was doing it. One evening he had me stand at the kitchen counter as if I were working, and he knelt on the linoleum with his tape and measured from the floor to my elbow.
The bench at Petrie’s was thirty inches high. It had been built for Evelyn, who is five foot one. I am five foot seven. I had bent over that bench for thirty-one years and never once thought it could be any other way.
Ray built mine thirty-six inches high out of white oak he had been saving in the garage rafters for something that mattered.
When he and Dennis carried it in, I stood at it and laid my hands flat on the top.
I did not have to bend at all.
“Well?” he said.
I could not say anything. I just kept my hands on it.
“It’s only a bench, Jo.”
It was not only a bench, and he knew it.
In between, I did the paper. I filed for my sales tax permit with the state. I called our insurance agent about a liability policy. Then I called the wholesale house in the Cities that has run a truck through our town on Tuesdays and Fridays for as long as I can remember.
I did not call the shop’s salesman. I called the front office, like any stranger, and asked how to open an account.
They wanted my tax number and a check on delivery for the first ninety days. That was fair. My first order was two hundred and eighty dollars: roses, carnations, daisies, baby’s breath, leatherleaf, a case of foam. I wrote that check with my heart in my throat.
The rest was going to come out of our own yard. Ray’s mother planted forty feet of peonies along our fence in 1961, and that June they were falling over with bloom.
The phone was the last thing. A business line would take two weeks, so I printed a card for the window with the only number I had, our kitchen phone.
That number had not changed since Ray and I were married. For thirty-one years, whenever somebody died after the shop was closed, that was the phone that rang. Jim Dahl at the funeral home has known it by heart since before he had gray hair.