The Mums I Set on Every Porch

He got halfway across the porch before he saw it. Then he stopped.

He stood over that gold mum a long moment. He set his coffee down on the rail.

And then that old man lowered himself down onto his own top step, slow, one hand on the post. He sat down next to the flower like it was company come to visit.

He sat there with it all morning. I am not going to pretend I did not cry at my own kitchen sink, because I did.

He sat on that step in the thin sun with his hand resting on the rim of the pot. Once I saw him lean down close to it, like a man talking low to somebody.

And I knew, the way you know things about a person you have watched be lonely. He was telling Ida about it.

That somebody had left flowers on his porch and he did not know who. And for one morning the empty house behind him was not the whole of his life.

That was the moment the whole thing was worth it. Not the street. Not Pril. That old man and his cup of coffee and his hand on a flower I grew.

Who Did This

They figured it out by noon. A street is a small place.

Somebody had seen the wagon tracks in the dew, leading up every walk and back down to my drive. Somebody knew I grew mums.

Mrs. Hartley came across first, still in her housecoat. She did not ask me if I did it.

She just took both my hands in hers on my own porch and held them, and did not say anything at all. That was better than anything she could have said.

Her husband had passed in February. I had carried a casserole over back then, and then, the way you do, I had let the weeks get away from me.

The flower on her rail said what I had never come back around to say in person. She knew it, and I knew it, and that was why she only held my hands.

The Kolaceks tried to pay me and I would not take it. The Hendricks boy offered to clean my gutters all winter.

That one I let him, because a man needs to give something back, and Dale’s knees are worse than mine.

By the middle of the afternoon there were people on my porch I had not spoken to in a year. They stood around with their flowers, and the strange thing was that nobody made it loud.

It was a quiet kind of happy. It went up and down the street like warmth moving through a house.

And of course by then everybody also knew the other half. You cannot do a thing like that in a town this size without people asking the one question, which is why.

Why would a woman grow two hundred mums in one summer and give half of them away at four in the morning.

The answer led straight back to a church corner on Elm and Third two weeks before. To the hundred pots that had gone there instead of to the pantry. And to whose van had carried them.

I never told that story. I want that on the record. I did not have to.

The street told it to itself, and it told it without my help. There was nothing Pril could have said to stop it, because every word of it was true.

By suppertime I almost felt sorry for her. Almost.