The Altar Flowers Too Country for Church

The Hoffmans had brought dried hydrangea. The Dreiling girls had brought a handful of garden mums in a mayonnaise jar with a bow tied on by a seven-year-old, a very crooked bow. Marjorie had brought bittersweet.

Everett had brought one single sunflower on a long stem in a peanut butter jar, and he stood it by the end of the rail, and it leaned.

“It looked like Kansas,” Elmer said. “It looked like it grew there.”

I said that sounded right.

We got to Maple Court at one-thirty, and the sky was so blue it hurt. The leaves on the maple in the parking lot had gone the color of a school bus, and the wind was moving them across the pavement like paper.

They were waiting at the door.

There were seventeen that day. Seventeen, with walkers and wheelchairs and the Ahlstrom great-grandmother on her granddaughter’s arm. Virgil was there with a bushel of something from his farm. Arvid Pfannenstiel was in his bathrobe, as usual, and he lifted one hand when he saw the truck, and I lifted mine back.

Margie held the door with her cane. Ardis rolled forward to meet me, and she did not ask me for anything, and I did not ask her. She put out her hand and I took it, and we went in together.

Lloyd Ames was sitting at the folding table in the chapel, already waiting, with his chin up. He held an orange mum in his fingers, very straight, the way he always held them. When I came in he looked at me, and he said, quietly and clearly, as if he had been practicing, “Gail.”

It was the first time he had said my name.

I set down the bucket. I let my hand rest for a moment on his shoulder, and then I took out my clippers.

“All right,” I said to the room. “Who’s ready to cut?”

Seventeen hands went up. Margie’s went up a half second late, because she was feeling for the table, and when she found it she laughed at herself.

Elmer stood in the doorway with the second bucket in his arms.

“Take your time,” he said. “I’ve got all afternoon.”

I thought about Kristin, too, and how she had walked out of that library with her coat in her lap. I did not wish her anything. I had stopped wishing at the point where I saw her face in the committee room.

I think she learned in that room what a number looks like when you say it out loud. I think that was enough teaching for one woman.

She sat in the front pew on Sundays, as she always had. We nodded to each other at the potluck. She had her chin up. That was all, and I thought that was probably as much as either of us could do.

At the folding table, Eunice was already rearranging the colors. Arvid was explaining how to cut a gladiolus. Margie had her face in a bucket of mums and was naming the smell.

I sat down in the plastic chair beside Ardis, and I took a stem in my hand.

“Cut it on a slant,” said Ardis, who has never in her life played an organ without watching somebody else’s fingers. “More surface for the water.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

I cut it on a slant.