The Sunflowers Along Highway 34

I watched his arm start to sag a little and then come back up. Sag, and come back up. It had to be aching. He never put it down.

I thought, Lord, if nobody stops, I don’t know what I’ll say to him.

Then a little gray car slowed down, put on its blinker, and pulled all the way off onto the gravel shoulder.

Wyatt turned around and looked at me with the biggest grin I have ever seen on a human face.

The driver’s door opened, and a woman got out in a pair of blue scrubs. Forty or so, brown hair pulled back. She shaded her eyes and looked up at the flowers.

And I knew her. It took me a second, but I knew her.

Nora Delacy. I had been her school nurse for six years. When she was in second grade, she fell off the top of the monkey bars and split her chin open, and I held her hand and a towel to her face for forty minutes until her mother could get there from work.

She had four stitches. She had cried the whole time and then, at the end, she had hugged me around the neck and said I smelled like peppermints. I kept peppermints in my pocket for thirty years because of that.

“Mrs. Ulrich?” she said. “Is that you?”

“It’s me, Nora.”

She came over to the stand and stood there a minute, looking at all of it. The jars. The crooked boards. The sign with the painted-over S’s.

“I drive past here every morning on my way to my shift at the hospital,” she said. “I’ve been watching these come up all summer. I kept wondering who did it.”

“My grandson did it,” I said. “Wyatt. That’s him.”

Wyatt had come up out of the rows and was standing a few feet away, suddenly shy, still holding the stem.

Nora looked at him. “You grew all these?”

He nodded.

“How many are there?”

“Two hundred ninety-seven,” he said. “Three died in the hail.”

“Well,” she said. “I would like to buy the very first one. Is anybody else ahead of me?”

“No, ma’am,” he said. “You’re the first.”

She took out her wallet and gave him a five-dollar bill and told him to keep the change. He handed her the stem he’d been holding up all morning.

He’d been holding it up for an hour. The petals were a little wind-tousled. She took it like it was a dozen roses.

“Where did you get the idea?” she asked him.

He looked at me. I didn’t help him. I wanted him to tell it his own way.

“I planted sixty by the fence,” he said. “But they got sprayed. So Grandma gave me the whole yard.”

Nora looked at me over his head. She didn’t ask who sprayed them. She didn’t have to. Everybody in Akron knows whose ground is next to whose.

“Well,” she said to Wyatt. “I think the yard turned out better than the fence.”

She put the flower on her passenger seat and waved and drove off toward town. Wyatt stood at the end of the drive and watched her car until it went over the rise.

Then he came back and put the five-dollar bill in the coffee can. Not his piggy bank. The coffee can. He said that’s where it belonged.