The Bouquet That Came After the Funeral

“He was out here,” Grandma said, looking around at the paintings. “He was out here the whole time.”

She walked to the nearest clothesline. She stood in front of the very first painting, clipped at the left-hand end, and I came and stood beside her.

It was terrible.

I want to be honest. It was a beautiful kind of terrible. The pitcher leaned like a drunk. The flowers were seven purple blobs, and a green thing that I think was meant to be a leaf and looked like a pickle. The yellow had run into the blue and made a color like swamp water. Down in the corner, small and careful, was a date, and under it, in pencil: Week 1. Bad. Do it again.

“It’s a bowling pin,” Grandma said. Her voice was thick. “Clarence Ackerman, that’s a bowling pin.”

And then she was laughing so hard she had to hold on to the line, and the line swayed, and every painting in the room swayed with it.

We walked the whole line, left to right, and I learned to read my grandfather’s life that way. Every corner was marked with the Saturday and a little note in pencil. Week 4: The flowers are not supposed to be purple. Week 9: Lois says squint. Week 17: Got the handle right. Week 22: Ruby’s zinnias, August. Hers were orange. Week 31: Dropped the jar. Wept. By the middle of the second row the flowers were flowers. The light came off the yellow glaze in a clean white stroke, so exactly like the way the sun came off the real pitcher on her windowsill that I put my hand over my mouth.

There were a hundred and thirty-seven of them. I counted. He had been at it for three years, and he had thrown out the worst ones, I found out later, in a big green trash bag, and he’d been sorry afterward.

“The extra twelve dollars,” Grandma said. She was holding a dead-simple painting of orange zinnias, from a Saturday in July. “He bought two bunches. Every week. One for me and one for the pitcher out here. So he could paint what he’d just given me. So I’d be painted in a way, in what I was getting that morning.” She was crying openly now. “Oh, you old fool. You could have just asked me to sit for you.”

“Maybe he wanted it to be a surprise,” I said.

“Maybe he wanted it to be good first.”

On the card table, next to the twin pitcher, was a flat tin box that had once held Danish butter cookies. Its lid had a note taped to it in his careful block letters, the way he labeled jars in the garage. I read it before I even touched it.

For Ruby. When she finds it. Not before.

Grandma sat down in the folding chair by the table, because her legs gave out, and I put the tin in her lap. She pried the lid off with her thumbnails.