The Bouquet That Came After the Funeral
“You’re not afraid of the envelope.”
“No.” She looked out at the shops going by. The pharmacy. The bank with its clock that had been four minutes slow since I was a girl. “I’m afraid I’m going to find out he was just a person, Shelby. With things in his head I never got to see. And that I’ll never get to ask.”
I pulled into the alley behind Main Street. It was gravel and potholes and a row of dumpsters, and the back doors of the stores each had a number stenciled on them in faded paint. The sun was out and the sky was the high pale blue of Kansas in October. A cat watched us from a stack of pallets.
Nine-twelve. Hundred and four. A hundred and eight. Then a big brick wall with a faded painted advertisement for Hanson Hardware & Seed, and beside it a narrow wooden stair clinging to the building, painted gray, that went up to a door on the second floor. A tin number was nailed beside it. It said 118½.
I turned the engine off. We sat there.
“I’ve bought nails in that store my whole life,” Grandma whispered. “I’ve walked past this stair a thousand times. I always thought it was a fire escape.”
I came around and opened her door. She took my arm. At the top there was a small landing with a pot of dead geraniums on it, and a plain door with a frosted glass window.
She held out the key, and I took it from her and put it in the lock.
The door opened.
The first thing I smelled was paint. It was not the heavy smell of house paint, but a thin, wet smell, like a creek bed, with something sweet in it. The second thing was the light. The room was one room, maybe twelve by sixteen, with a high ceiling and a tall window facing east, and the sun came through that window and poured across the wooden floor like it had been waiting.
The third thing, I couldn’t take in at first, because it was everywhere.
Paintings.
They hung on clotheslines strung from wall to wall, three rows of it, pinned with wooden clothespins. They were taped in rows on the plaster. They were tucked in stacks in the corners and laid flat in a long Folgers can and propped on the radiator. They were all the same size, five inches by seven, on thick cream paper, and every single one of them was a vase of flowers.
The same vase.
I took two steps in and my grandmother’s hand clamped on my arm.
On a card table by the window, under the sun, stood a squat, yellow-glazed pitcher with a chip on the lip and a crack mended in the handle.
“That’s mine,” she whispered. “That’s, no. That’s not mine. Mine’s on the sill.” She went toward it like a woman walking in her sleep. She touched the handle. “It’s a twin. Where would he find a twin?”
I picked up a little tag taped to the bottom, written in his hand. Antique mall, Joplin. $9. Had to buy a chip tool. I started laughing, and then I was crying, because I could see it, the whole thing. My grandfather, eighty-one years old, driving an hour and a half to Missouri on a Tuesday to hunt through a shelf of junk for a yellow pitcher that matched, and then standing in the aisle with a chisel and a bottle of epoxy and a pair of reading glasses, putting the chip in.