The Flower Shop Across the Street

“How did all of you know?”

She had the grace to look a little guilty.

“I stood up at the reception,” she said. “At the Legion, when I thanked everybody. I said the flowers were the last ones Jolene Marsh would ever do at Petrie’s, and I said why. I had it from Kim’s mother. And I said you were at that church at six in the morning anyway, and never told me a word of it.” She lifted her chin. “There were two hundred and ten people in that hall. I may have said it loud.”

Then a woman halfway down the line, I will not say who, called out something sharp about Dale Petrie and what he could do with his eleven dollars.

I stepped out onto the sidewalk where they could all hear me.

“I thank every one of you for coming. I mean that. But I’ll ask one thing. Petrie’s did my wedding flowers. Evelyn Petrie taught me my trade. Her boy has a business to run and a note to pay, same as I do now. I won’t have a word said against that family in my shop. Not one.”

It got quiet.

“Now,” I said. “Who’s first?”

Jim Dahl waited his turn like anybody. When he got to the bench he took a folded paper out of his breast pocket.

“The Lindgren service is Tuesday at eleven. Casket spray, two standing pieces, and the family will be in to see you this afternoon.” He put the paper down on the oak. “You said Saturday.”

“I did say Saturday.”

“I can count,” he said.

Pastor Mark’s wife wanted to know if I would take the altar flowers at St. John’s beginning in July. The school secretary wanted to know what I charged for homecoming corsages, and I gave her the same price I would have given at the old bench, because it was the right price.

Then it was Harold Weiss.

Harold was eighty-eight. He had farmed north of town all his life. His wife, Marian, had died in March, and I had done her casket flowers myself.

He stood at my bench turning his cap around by the brim.

“I went over there first,” he said, and tipped his head toward the street. “Out of habit. Forty years of habit. The young lady was real polite. But I asked her for the usual and she didn’t know what I meant.”

I knew what he meant.

Every year on their anniversary, Harold bought Marian six pink carnations and one white one. Six for the children they raised. One for the baby they lost in 1959. He had never told me that. Marian had, years ago.

It was not written on any card in any file. It was only in my head.

I did not say a word. I went to the dairy case and took out six pink and one white, and I wrapped them in green tissue the way I always had, with the white one in the middle.

When I turned around that old man had tears running into his collar.

“She’ll like those,” he said.

“I know she will, Harold.”

He would not let me give them to him. He counted out the money on my new bench one bill at a time, and then he drove them out to the cemetery.

I sold out at twenty past eleven. Ray drove home and stripped the peony fence and I sold those too.