The Bouquet That Came After the Funeral

Inside was one more painting, much better than the rest. Anyone could see he’d saved his best for last, or maybe worked on it a long while. It showed the yellow pitcher in the window of our kitchen, the real one, with the sun on its shoulder, and in it all the colors of a Saturday: the mums, the bittersweet, a handful of wild asters he must have picked on the fence row. A small blue sparrow sat on the sill. He’d put a sparrow in. He had never once told her he’d seen one on that sill every Saturday of his life.

Folded under it was a sheet of paper in his hand. I’m going to put it here exactly, because she let me copy it afterward, and because it is the reason I’m telling you any of this.

Dear Ruby,

If you are reading this I did not get to tell you in person, and I am sorry for that. I wanted to do it myself. I wanted to watch your face.

Three years ago at the doctor’s office, sitting in the waiting room with the old magazines, I did a sum. I figured I had maybe four hundred Saturdays left if I was lucky. And I figured that fifty-some years of flowers is fifty-some years of flowers that went in the compost. Every one of them was dead by Friday. I didn’t mind. That was what flowers were for. But I got to thinking about the day I’d not be there to bring them, and the pitcher sitting empty on the sill, and you looking at it.

I wanted to give you flowers that would never wilt.

I can’t paint. You’ve seen. Mrs. Kimball says I have the hands of a man hanging drywall. But I thought if I did one a week, and kept at it, I might be able to leave you a bunch of Saturdays that stay. They are not good. Some of them are. Come here when you miss me and the pitcher is empty. The rent is paid through December. After that, I told Hanson you’d decide.

You asked me once what I’d do over. I said nothing. That was a lie. I’d have started painting at twenty-five. I’d have gotten you a whole house full of them.

You were the best thing I ever did.

Love is something you do, and I did it every Saturday I could. I’ll do it again the first Saturday I get to, wherever they’ve got flowers.

Clarence

I had to stop reading after that. I could not see the page.

My grandmother didn’t say anything for a long time. She sat with the letter in one hand and the sparrow in the other, and the sun moved a few inches along the floor. A truck went by in the alley.

“Four hundred Saturdays,” she said at last. “He counted.”

“Yes.”

“He knew, and he didn’t say.”

“He told you about the heart, Grandma. You knew it was bad.”

“I knew it was bad.” She nodded slowly. “I didn’t know he was counting. I didn’t know he’d gone to work.” She looked at the hundred and thirty-seven small paintings swaying on their lines, and she said, in a voice like paper, “He spent his last three years making me something that would last. And I spent them worrying about where he went on Thursdays.”

“You didn’t know.”

“I should have known.” She wiped her face with the back of her hand. “I did know. I just let myself be scared, because it’s easier than being grateful. That’s all it is. It’s easier.”