The Bouquet That Came After the Funeral
“I don’t want to do it at all.” She said it very evenly. She had run the front office at Bellmont Elementary for thirty-one years, and when she was frightened she spoke the way she spoke to a boy sent to the principal. “Shelby, your grandfather did not write me letters. In fifty-seven years he wrote me four. I have all four in the cedar chest. I know when Clarence Ackerman puts something in writing. It’s when it’s too heavy to say.”
“It could be something sweet.”
“It could be.” She turned the envelope over. It was sealed, and not with spit but with a strip of Scotch tape over the flap, the way he sealed everything. “Or it could be something I have to be a different woman to read.”
I did not understand her. Not yet.
Because I’m the practical one in our family, I did the sensible thing first, and I want to say that out loud, because I know somebody reading this is already thinking it. I called Hartley’s. I put it on speaker so Grandma could hear.
Miss Janice answered on the second ring, sounding like she had been crying and then stopped to go put on lipstick. She was about seventy, a short woman with a gray bob who had run that shop since her father died. “Oh, honey. Is she all right? I wanted to call. I couldn’t decide whether it’d be a kindness or a cruelty.”
“Janice,” Grandma said. “What was in the order?”
A long pause on the line.
“Ruby, he came in the middle of August. He sat in my little office in back where I do the books. He wrote a check for the flowers and a second one for the delivery, and he asked me to hold it until the Saturday after, if the day came.” Her voice broke a little. “He made me swear on my mother’s name that I wouldn’t say anything about the envelope. I asked him what was in it, and he said, ‘Janice, it’s the best thing I ever did and she’s going to want to kill me for the secret.'”
Grandma shut her eyes.
“That’s all I know. I swear it. He just smiled, you know that smile, and said not to let the boy leave without the card in the middle.”
When I hung up, my grandmother was looking at the yellow pitcher on the sill, and she said the thing I had not expected.
“Where did he go on Tuesdays and Thursdays, Shelby?”
I almost said coffee. Then I saw her face.
“Thursdays.” She was talking more to the window than to me. “For three years he has gone out on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. The men’s coffee at the elevator, he said. But Jim Dorsey’s widow told me at the funeral, standing right there in the fellowship hall with her plate of ham, that the elevator coffee stopped meeting two years ago. When Jim got sick. And I said, well, Clarence kept going, and she looked at me.” My grandmother put her hand flat on the table. “She looked at me the way you look at a person who does not know.”
“That doesn’t mean anything.”
“And last year, when I did the household books, I found a twelve-dollar difference every single week that I couldn’t account for. For three years. I let it go. I thought, he’s saving for the anniversary. I thought, let him have it.”