The Bouquet That Came After the Funeral
The delivery boy stood on my grandmother’s porch holding yellow mums like they might go off in his hands.
“Mrs. Ackerman?” he said. “Delivery from Hartley’s.”
Grandma stood in the doorway in her gray church cardigan. She had not taken it off since the funeral, not really. She slept in it twice that week and I let her. She looked at the flowers, and then she looked at the green polo shirt with the name of the shop stitched over the pocket, and she did not move.
“Who sent those?” she asked.
“Mr. Ackerman, ma’am.” The boy’s ears went red the second the words were out. “Clarence Ackerman. He paid ahead. Back in August. The card says to bring them the Saturday after, and I just, I didn’t know until I got here that, I mean. I’m real sorry.”
It was Saturday. Of course it was.
I stood behind her in the hall with a dish towel in my hand, because I had been drying her coffee cups when the doorbell rang, and I remember thinking the stupidest thing. I thought: he’s late. Grandpa always came before nine, and the clock on the wall said ten past ten.
Then I remembered we had buried him eight days ago, and my knees went soft.
“Take them, Grandma,” I said quietly. “It’s okay.”
She took them. She held the mums against her chest with both arms, the way you would hold a baby you were not sure was yours yet. Yellow and rust-colored mums, and a few stalks of bittersweet, the orange berries popping out of their husks, the sort of thing he cut from the fence row behind the Methodist church. Nothing fancy. He never once bought her anything fancy. Every stem had been cut on a long slant. He had shown Janice how, years ago, standing on her sidewalk with his pocketknife.
And tucked down among the stems, held there with a rubber band, was a white envelope. On the front, in blue ballpoint, in the slanted hand I would have known anywhere, was one word.
Ruby.
The boy was already backing down the porch steps. “He told Miss Janice to put it in the middle, so you wouldn’t lose it in the paper,” he said, and then he went and sat in his van with his hands over his face for a full minute before he drove away. He was maybe nineteen. Nobody had told him what kind of delivery he was getting.
My name is Shelby Ackerman. I was thirty years old that October, a dental hygienist in Wichita who had driven two hours home on a Tuesday and had not driven back yet. Ruby Ackerman is my grandmother. She was eighty-two. Clarence Ackerman was my grandfather, and he was eighty-four when his heart quit in the recliner during the third quarter of a Chiefs game, with a cup of decaf going cold on the armrest and the remote still in his hand.
This is the story of what was inside that envelope. It took the two of us about four hours to find out.
I need to tell you about the Saturdays first.
Every Saturday of their marriage, my grandfather brought my grandmother flowers. Fifty-seven years. Not an anniversary or a birthday, nothing like that. Every single Saturday, and he did not miss one. Not when he had pneumonia in 1994, when Grandma held the phone out the window so Mr. Hartley could hear him wheeze an order down to the shop. Not the Saturday of the ice storm in 2007, when he walked eleven blocks to Hartley’s in his boots and walked back with a paper cone of carnations inside his coat.