The Flower Shop Across the Street
When I locked the door that night there was three hundred and ninety-one dollars in the cigar box and eleven orders written on the back of Walt’s receipt pad.
Across the street, the light in Petrie’s was still on. I could see Dale at the counter by himself, with his paper in front of him.
I was not glad to see it. I will say that plainly. I had thought I might be, and I was not.
She came on Wednesday.
Wednesday is the day the Prairie View van brings the residents downtown, to the bank and the drugstore. I was at the bench working on the Methodist altar piece when it pulled up to the curb.
It did not stop in front of Petrie’s. It stopped in front of me.
The driver got out and came around and unfolded a walker. Then he reached up and helped a small woman in a blue cardigan down onto the sidewalk.
Evelyn.
I had not told her. Somebody at the home had, an aide or a visitor from church, and I did not know which of us she had come to scold.
I got the door open before she reached it.
“Evelyn, you shouldn’t be on that hip.”
“I’ll decide what I should be on.” She was breathing hard. She set the walker over my threshold, then one foot, then the other. It took her a long time and I did not help, because she did not want help.
She looked at the tin ceiling and the creamery case with its pan of water in the bottom, and then she pushed the walker over to the bench and put her palm flat on the oak, exactly the way I had.
“Ray built this.”
“Yes.”
“It’s the right height for you.” She shook her head. “I had you bent over mine for thirty-one years. Never crossed my mind. You never said.”
“It never crossed mine either.”
She turned around, slowly, the way you turn on a walker, a few inches at a time.
“You sat in that sunroom three Sundays running and told me my boy was working hard.”
“He was working hard.”
“Jolene.”
“I wasn’t going to carry it to you, Evelyn. You’re his mother. I wasn’t going to put you between us.”
Her chin trembled, once, and then it stopped.
“He is my son and I love him,” she said. “I left him a roof that leaked and a cooler that should have been replaced twenty years ago, and he signed a note to fix what I let go. That part is on me. What he said to you is on him, and he and I will talk about that in private, the way family does. I’ll not say a word against him on this street.”
“Nobody will in here. I’ve seen to it.”
“I heard that too.” She looked at me. Her eyes were wet and very clear. “That’s how I know who I trained.”
“Now,” she said, in her shop voice, the one that had sent me scurrying when I was twenty-seven. “I’m a customer. I want something for my table in the dining room out there. Low, so I can see who I’m eating with. No lilies, Dorothy sneezes. And I want one every Friday until I tell you different.”
“Evelyn, I’m not going to charge you.”
“You will charge me what you charge everybody or I will take my business across the street.”
So I made it while she watched from Ray’s stool. Pink spray roses, white daisies, a little blue statice, in a low glass bowl. She told me twice to turn it and she was right both times.