The Bouquet That Came After the Funeral
“Grandma.” I knelt next to her chair. “He ironed your funeral dress himself the morning of Jim Dorsey’s service, because your hands hurt. He cut your toenails when your back went out. He is the last man in the state of Kansas who would have anything to hide.”
“Then why did he hide it?” she said, very quietly. “Fifty-seven years, and I thought I had read every page of that man.”
I had no answer. So I did the only thing I could think of. I took her hand off the table, the one with the thin gold band worn nearly through, and I said, “Open it, or let me, and then we’ll know.”
She picked up the envelope. She worked her thumbnail under the tape, and it was the slowest thing I have ever seen a person do.
Inside was a single sheet of lined paper folded in thirds, and a plain door key. The paper had a street address on it and nothing else but four lines.
Ruby. Don’t be afraid. Take Shelby with you, and take your time. Drive slow. It’s the only secret I ever kept from you and I kept it so I could give it to you.
She read it. Then she read it again. Then she handed it to me, and I saw that her whole body had gone still, like a field after a hard rain.
“I don’t know this address,” she said.
I read it aloud. 118 and a half Cutler Street.
“Cutler Street is the alley behind Main,” she said. “The delivery alley. Where the trash trucks go.” She looked at the key. “There is nothing on Cutler Street but the back doors of the stores.”
“Then somebody’s back door,” I said, and I stood up, and I got her purse off the hook, and I got her good shoes from the closet.
“Shelby, I’m not ready.”
“I know,” I said. “You never are, with him. He always brought the flowers before you were.”
That got a sound out of her that was halfway between a laugh and something else.
Bellmont is not a big town. It has one stoplight, which blinks yellow after nine, two churches that will not admit to being rivals, a hardware store, a pharmacy, a florist, and a Casey’s out on the highway. You can cross it in six minutes. We took eleven, because Grandma made me go the long way around, past the church and the school, at twenty miles an hour, the way the note had said.
She talked the whole way.
I don’t think she knew she was doing it. She told me about the first Saturday, in 1969, when she was twenty-five and working the lunch counter at the Rexall. A skinny man with ears like the handles on a sugar bowl sat down, ordered a cherry Coke and did not drink it. When she finally asked if he wanted anything else, he put a bunch of drugstore daisies on the counter, still in the cellophane with the price sticker on, and said, “I don’t know how to do this. I thought I’d practice on the daisies.”
“What did you say?” I asked, because I had heard this story forty times and I wanted to hear it a forty-first.
“I said, ‘You’re not practicing. That’s a bunch of daisies and you’ve paid for them.’ And he said, ‘Well, then I’d better come back next week and do it right.'” She laughed, a wet crackly laugh. “And he did. And he never once did it wrong. Isn’t that something. A man who gets it right fifty-seven years, and I’m afraid of an envelope.”