The Bouquet That Came After the Funeral
In the summers when I was little, my mother sent me to Bellmont, Kansas, to stay with them for three weeks, and then six, and then, by the time I was twelve, the whole summer. A little white house on Sycamore Street with a porch swing and a garage that smelled like motor oil, and a kitchen where nothing was ever thrown out. That was where I learned the Saturday routine.
He would wake me at seven. We would walk to Hartley’s, the two of us, past the Rexall and the grain elevator. Miss Janice would already have the buckets out on the sidewalk. He never ordered ahead. He walked slowly down the line of buckets, hands behind his back like a man in a museum, and he picked.
“What are you looking for?” I asked him once. I think I was nine.
“Whatever looks like she’d say something about it.”
“What does she say?”
“Well.” He took out his pocketknife and trimmed the ends of the stems on a long slant, one at a time, right there on the sidewalk, because he said a flower cut at an angle can drink and one cut flat just sits there pretending. “She says, ‘Clarence Ackerman, what did you spend on these.’ And I say, ‘Not a dime more than they were worth.’ And she puts them in her mother’s pitcher. And that’s how we say we’re fine, Shelby. That’s how we say it every week.”
My grandmother’s mother’s pitcher was a squat, yellow-glazed thing with a chip on the lip and a crack in the handle that Grandpa had mended with epoxy in 1981. It sat on the kitchen windowsill. Every Saturday the old flowers went to the compost and the new flowers went in, and the pitcher never once sat empty for more than a night.
I was fourteen, I think, and mad about something, a boy or a grade or my mother, and I said to him on the porch swing that it was easy to bring flowers to somebody when you were in love. That anybody could do it when the feeling was there.
He didn’t argue. He pushed the swing slowly with one boot for a while.
“Love isn’t something you feel, honey,” he said. “Feeling’s the weather. Love is something you do. You get up, and you do it, and you do it again when you don’t feel like it, and you keep doing it until the doing is who you are. The feeling comes and goes. The Saturday comes every week.”
I rolled my eyes at him. I was fourteen. But it stuck to me anyway, like a burr.
So here is the kitchen, a week after his funeral.
Grandma had set the mums in the yellow pitcher without a word, because her hands knew what to do even if the rest of her didn’t. She filled it at the tap. She put it on the sill. Then she sat down at the table with the white envelope in front of her, and she did not open it.
“Do you want me to?” I asked.
“No.”
“Do you want to do it yourself?”