The Mums I Set on Every Porch

The Drive Home

I could have called somebody. I know that is the first thing you are thinking, because it is the first thing everybody thinks.

But there was nobody to call. The mums were not stolen.

I had loaded them into her van with my own two hands and let her drive off with them. I had handed them to her as a gift to the sale. She had handed them to a different sale.

There is no sheriff in Kansas who comes out over a disagreement between two old friends about whose fundraiser a hundred flowers belonged to. It was not a crime. It was a broken trust. There is no number you can dial for that.

I could have stood on the corner and told every customer the truth. That these were pantry mums, and this woman had taken them. I thought about it.

But half that corner was church people. Pril would have cried, and I would have been the bitter woman ruining a trip for children.

The story would have been about me by Sunday. You do not win that way in a town this size. You only get smaller.

My mother used to say the loudest person in a fight is usually the one who is losing it. I did not want to be loud. I wanted to be right, and I wanted the street to be warm come January.

So I drove home. My hands were steady on the wheel, and that surprised me.

I pulled into the drive on Sycamore and Dale was up on a ladder cleaning the gutters. He saw my face and came down.

I told him. He listened the whole way through without a word, which is how Dale is.

When I finished he said, “You want me to go have a talk with Gerald.”

“No,” I said. “This is not Gerald’s doing. It is Pril’s.”

“Then you want me to go get the money back off her.”

“No,” I said.

He stood there with the gutter trowel in his hand. “Then what do you want to do, Donnie.”

I looked past him at the cold frame he had built me against the garage. I thought about what was still inside it. And I knew exactly what I wanted to do.

The Reserve Bed

Here is the thing no one knew, not even Pril. I never grow one crop of mums. I grow two.

I learned that the hard way my third year. A July hailstorm shredded every plant I had two weeks before the sale, and I had nothing to bring.

Mums are fragile. A hard wind, an early frost, a dog in the bed, and your whole summer is gone.

So ever since, I root a second set of cuttings in July. I bring them along behind the first crop, three weeks slower, in the cold frame and in a shade bed behind the garage where nobody thinks to look.

The reserve bed. Dale called it my insurance.

Most years it never sold a single pot. Most years the first crop came through clean, and I gave the reserve plants away to the neighbors in November, or I wintered them over and sheared them for next year’s cuttings.

This year the reserve bed had better than a hundred plants in it. They were smaller than the first crop, three weeks behind in bloom, buds still tight and green.

I walked back there that afternoon and crouched down in the dirt among them. But they were coming. Another two weeks of sun and the right nights, and they would open.

I knelt in that shade bed a long time. The thing I felt was not anger, exactly.