The Paper Flower He Carried Across the Room
“Hey. It’s me. I went to the tea today. I screwed up bad. I said something about Kelsey I had no right to say, and she was nothing but good to me. I fixed it with the teacher. I wanted you to hear it from me.”
“He made me a flower. He made one for each of us.” A long pause. “You married a good one, Cody. Okay. Bye.”
Cody put the phone down on the table between us.
“I’m going to call her tomorrow,” he said. “She owned it, and that counts. But if she ever does that in front of him again, she and I sit down and work out school things in writing. Who comes to what.”
“That’s fair,” I said.
“And I’m going to tell her T-ball starts June second,” he said. “Tuesday and Thursday nights at the park by the water tower. There’s bleachers. Lots of room on the bleachers.”
I looked at him for a long time. Then I got up and went around the table and put my arms around his neck from behind, the way I have not done since we were first married, and smelled the rain in his hair.
“You’re a decent man, Cody Haugen,” I said.
“I’m a tired man,” he said. “Is there more hot dish?”
My mother called the next morning. Darlene Brekke, sixty-one, retired from thirty years in the school kitchen at Prairie View, and the person who taught me everything I know about keeping my mouth shut at the right time.
Word had gotten to her before I did. Of course it had. One of the other moms at the tea was her neighbor’s daughter-in-law.
“I heard you sat on the floor,” she said.
“I did.”
“In your work clothes.”
“Yep.”
There was a long pause. Then my mother said, in the voice she used to use when I had done something right and she did not want me to get a big head about it: “Good girl.”
I told her about the second flower. She was quiet on the other end for so long that I thought the call had dropped.
“You know,” she said finally, “I was raised half by my Aunt Lorraine. You knew that. When Mother was working nights at the hospital all those years, Lorraine got me up and braided my hair and came to my concerts. And Mother came when she could.”
“I know, Mom.”
“There was never one day,” she said, “that I wished I had fewer of them. Not one. A kid can’t have too many people who show up. That’s the only thing I know for sure about raising anybody.”
I had heard about Aunt Lorraine my whole life. I had never once heard my mother say that.
“Wyatt’s a lucky boy,” she said. “Now go do something with your Saturday besides cry on the phone to your mother.”
The pink tissue-paper flower lives in my wallet now.
I flattened it very carefully that first night, one pleat at a time. I clipped the pipe cleaner short with Cody’s linemen’s pliers and wrapped the sharp end in medical tape from work.
It sits behind my driver’s license, where I see it every time I pay for gas. Every time I buy groceries. Every time somebody at the pharmacy asks for my ID.
Sometimes, on bad days at work, I take it out in the break room and unfold one corner. I look at the place where Wyatt pulled the tissue paper out fat on one side and flat on the other, because he got tired halfway through.