The Bouquet That Came After the Funeral
And then she signed it. In the bottom corner, in pencil, she wrote the date and a note, because she had read every note he’d ever put on that wall. She wrote:
Week 1. Bad. Do it again.
I have it on my refrigerator now. It is the only thing I own that I would run back into a fire for.
We took the paintings home that evening in shoeboxes, with Bill Hanson carrying the heaviest, and Lois carrying the tin. My grandmother would not hang them on the wall; she said that was like keeping the rain in the house. She had Bill’s nephew build a long rack in the dining room, like a clothesline, and she changes which row faces the window every Saturday.
Word got around, the way it does in a town where the stoplight blinks yellow. The pastor asked to borrow them for one Sunday in the fellowship hall, the twenty-second of November, the day of her anniversary. She said yes, on one condition: nobody was to say a word about how good they were.
“They aren’t,” she told the pastor. “They’re a record of a man trying. That’s better.”
A hundred and ten people came through the fellowship hall that afternoon, which for Bellmont is a turnout like a state fair. The Dorsey widow stood in front of Week 22 and didn’t say anything at all. The delivery boy from Hartley’s came in his church clothes, with Janice beside him, and shook my grandmother’s hand with both of his. “Mrs. Ackerman, I’m so sorry I cried on your porch.”
“Jeff,” she said, because by then she knew his name, “you were the kindest delivery I ever had.”
The pastor said grace over the cake. Lois played a hymn, badly, on the upright piano. Somebody’s little boy found the pitcher on the table, the twin, which she had brought for the afternoon, and asked if it was for water.
“No, honey,” my grandmother said. “That’s for Saturdays.”
She goes to the senior center on Thursday mornings now. She has the second-worst hands in the class, she says, behind a retired mail carrier named Floyd who paints everything the color of a gravel road. She’s up to Week 14. She says she’s better than Clarence was at fourteen, which I have checked and which is true, but only by a sparrow.
And on Saturday mornings I drive in.
I have not missed one since that October. I take the highway out of Wichita at six, and I stop at Hartley’s at a quarter to eight, and Miss Janice has the buckets out. I walk down the line with my hands behind my back. I’ve learned to look for whatever looks like she’d say something about it. I trim the stems on a slant with the pocketknife my grandfather left me, right there on the sidewalk, because a flower cut at an angle can drink.
And then I carry them up the porch steps, and she meets me at the door, and she says, “Shelby Ackerman, what did you spend on these?”
And I say, “Not a dime more than they were worth.”
She puts them in her mother’s pitcher. The old flowers go to the compost. And the other pitcher, the twin, sits on the card table up on Cutler Street with the sun on its shoulder, waiting for whoever wants to paint it next.
I carry the flowers past her into the kitchen. On the sill, the yellow pitcher is already filled with water, ready.