The Flower Shop Across the Street
“What do I owe you?”
“Fifteen dollars.”
She opened her pocketbook and took out a ten and a five and laid them on the bench. Cash. She waited while I wrote out the receipt.
Then she looked around the counter.
“Where’s your book?”
“My book?”
“Your guest book. Don’t tell me I never taught you that. You open a shop, you put out a book. I put mine out the first morning in 1968 and I didn’t get a name in it until two in the afternoon and I cried in the back room till noon. Where is it?”
I got it out from under the counter. It was still in the drugstore sack.
She clicked her tongue at me. She took it out, opened it to the first page, smoothed it flat with the side of her hand, and held out her fingers for a pen.
She wrote slowly. Her hand was not what it had been.
When she was done she turned it around so I could read it.
Evelyn Petrie. Customer.
And underneath, smaller:
Hired her in 1992. Smartest thing I ever did.
I did not manage any shop voice at all after that. I came around the bench and bent down and put my arms around her, carefully, on account of the hip, and she patted my back the way you pat a child.
“There now,” she said. “There now. You’ll get the page wet.”
When she was ready, she had me carry the bowl out to the van. Then she set her walker toward the street.
“Walk me to the curb. I’m going to go see my boy.”
I walked her to the curb. The driver took her arm from there. I watched her cross Main Street on that walker, a few inches at a time, with a farm truck stopped in each direction waiting on her, and I watched her go in under the gold lettering with her own name on it.
I did not follow and I did not watch the window. Whatever was said in there belonged to the two of them.
The summer went the way a first summer goes. Some weeks I cleared four hundred dollars and some weeks I cleared sixty. But St. John’s came in July, and St. Mary’s and the Methodists came after, and Jim Dahl called my kitchen phone whenever the families asked for me, which was most of the time.
I never called one of those people first. They knew where I was. They knew the number.
The sign painter came. It says Jolene’s Flowers, in green, and nothing else.
Dale came in August.
It was a Monday, late, a hot afternoon with the door propped open. I looked up from a wedding order and he was standing just inside it with his hands in his pockets. He had lost weight.
“Have you got a minute?”
“My hands are full, but my ears are free.”
“The girl from Mankato lasted five weeks,” he said. “She could do a vase arrangement. She’d never made a casket spray in her life.”
“I’m all right on the gifts and the cards and the houseplants. The wire orders pay. But families still call Petrie’s when somebody dies. Fifty-five years of habit. And I have nobody who can fill it.” He took his hands out of his pockets. “I came to ask what you’d charge to do my funeral work.”
I will tell you what went through me. I thought about the white stock, second bucket from the door. I thought about three hundred and forty dollars a week.