The Altar Flowers Too Country for Church

Kristin Hale said it across the altar guild table on a Wednesday night in late August, with nine of us sitting there holding coffee cups and a plate of Phyllis Hartzell’s lemon bars going soft in the fellowship hall heat.

“Gail, your arrangements are a little too country for the families we’re hoping to reach.”

She said it kindly. That was the worst part. She said it the way you tell someone there is spinach in her teeth, with her head tipped and her hands folded, as if she were doing me a favor.

Then she slid a paper across the table. It was a quote from a florist in Salina, forty minutes away. White lilies, eucalyptus, a tall glass cylinder, delivered every Saturday. One hundred fifty dollars a week, starting the first Sunday of September.

I looked at that number longer than I looked at anything else on that table. I did the multiplication without meaning to. Fifty-two Sundays. Seven thousand eight hundred dollars a year, for flowers I had been bringing for free since 1996.

Nobody spoke. Marjorie Olsen studied the bottom of her cup. Phyllis looked up at the ceiling tiles as if one of them might fall. Somebody’s chair creaked. Out in the kitchen the old refrigerator kicked on and hummed.

“All right,” I said.

That was all I said. I want to be honest about that, because I have gone over that moment many times since, and I have never found a better sentence, only a louder one.

“We’ll start fresh,” Kristin said, brightening. “Fresh feels right, doesn’t it? Pastor Dave and I have both noticed that the sanctuary could use a little more polish. First impressions matter so much with young families.”

I stacked my cup on the others and carried them to the kitchen sink. I washed every one, because that is what I do after altar guild, and nobody had told me to stop.

Elmer was in his recliner when I got home, the ball game muted, a crossword folded on his knee. He was seventy and had retired from the co-op elevator in Hadley six years before. He has the kind of forearms you get from thirty-eight years of throwing grain sample probes into truck beds, and a face that gives away nothing until it gives away everything.

I told him in the kitchen, one sentence at a time, while I heated his supper. He set his fork down after the second sentence and did not pick it up again.

“Say the word,” he said, “and I’ll go say it for you.”

“No.”

“Gail.”

“No, Elmer.”

“She said thirty years of your work was country.”

“She did.”

“Then why in the world are you letting her?”

I stood at the stove with the spoon in my hand and tried to give him the real answer, which was not a simple one.

“Because the flowers were never mine to argue over,” I said. “They were a gift. The minute I fight for them, they turn into something I’m owed. I don’t want to give a gift that way.

And Dave has been in Hadley six weeks. His first fall in a new church. I won’t be the reason it starts with a fight about vases.”

Elmer looked at me for a long time.

“That’s a pretty speech,” he said. “I still want to drive over there and say it for you.”

“I know you do.”