The Bouquet That Came After the Funeral
Grandma held out her hand, and Lois took it. Then my grandmother did the thing I’d have bet money she wouldn’t. She stood up out of her chair, all five foot one of her, in her gray cardigan, and she put both arms around a woman she had never met. They stood that way a long time.
“Thank you,” Grandma said into her shoulder. “For giving him his Thursdays.”
“He gave them to me,” Lois said. “He just sat there and loved you, out loud, for three years. I never saw anyone do it so plainly.”
Before they left us alone that afternoon, Lois went to the easel tucked into the corner where the light fell. It was a cheap wooden easel with a splash of dried paint down one leg. On it was a half-finished painting.
It was the last one. I knew it before she said it.
The pitcher was only a pencil outline. But the flowers above it were done, bright and loose, yellow mums and bittersweet and a wild aster, and they were the best flowers on the wall by a mile. He had gotten them. Eighty-four years old, a bad heart, and on the Thursday before he died he had finally gotten them exactly right, and then run out of time to finish the pitcher.
“He said he’d do the pitcher on Saturday,” Lois said softly.
Bill Hanson picked up his cap from the table. He held it in two hands.
“Ruby, that room is yours until you say different. I don’t want a nickel. He’s paid through December, and after that I’m going to forget to send the bill. And there’s a Thursday-morning class at the senior center that just lost its best student. Lois would be glad to teach somebody who can’t draw a straight line.”
Grandma looked at the unfinished painting for a very long moment.
“I’m eighty-two years old,” she said. “My hands have arthritis.”
“So did Monet’s,” said Lois Kimball.
“Monet did not paint a pitcher.”
“Ruby,” said Lois gently. “Nobody’s painted that pitcher but him.”
My grandmother crossed the room. She picked up one of the brushes from the Folgers can, a fat round one, its bristles still stiff with a bit of yellow, and she turned it over in her hand. Then she looked at me.
“I can’t hold it steady.”
“Okay.”
“I’m going to need you.”
So I stood behind her with my hand around hers, and Lois showed us how to thin the yellow with a drop of water on a saucer, and how to lay the first stroke at the shoulder of the pitcher, where the light hit it, and pull down. The line came out wavy, like a stream. But it was yellow, and it was where it belonged. Then another stroke. Then another. In four minutes she had filled in the whole shape of the pitcher, and it was crooked, and the handle was too big, and a drop of yellow had run down onto the pencil line of the sill.
It leaned, just a little. Like a drunk.
She looked at it. And she started to laugh.
“Oh, Clarence,” she said, to the east window and the sunlight and the sparrow-colored sky. “Oh, you stubborn man. Look at what you’ve made me do.”