The Altar Flowers Too Country for Church

“The florist delivered yesterday,” she went on. “It’s all set. But it was so thoughtful of you to bring them.”

Behind her Everett Ahlstrom stood at the door in his usher’s name tag, handing out bulletins. Everett had been the head usher for twenty-two years. For twenty-two years he had watched me come through that door with buckets. He held a bulletin out to nobody now. I could see him looking at my hands and then at his own.

I picked up my third bucket.

Then my fourth. Then my fifth, which meant I had to set two down and go back, and I did it slowly, with my face pleasant, because I was not going to be the woman who hurried.

I took them out one bucket at a time, down the middle of the line of people, past the guest book and the coat rack and the rack of bulletins, and out through the heavy doors and down the stone steps.

Maybe forty pounds of water and stems, in five trips, in front of the whole church.

Nobody said a word. A baby fussed somewhere. The organ started up inside, soft, an old hymn I couldn’t name.

Elmer was standing by the truck with the tailgate already down. He didn’t ask me what happened. He had seen all of it through the open doors. He lifted each bucket from my hands and set it in the bed, and when the last one was in, he took the wet towel and tucked it around them as though they were a sleeping child.

Then he went back to the cab and waited.

I will tell you what I felt. I was not angry yet. I felt something more like a bone going soft. Thirty years, and I had been told in two sentences and a smile that it was too country.

“Where to?” Elmer said finally.

I thought about home, where the buckets would wilt in the heat. I thought about the compost pile. And then I thought of Maple Court Care Center, the low brick building on the north edge of town, where I had carried the leftover altar flowers maybe once a month for years.

“Drive me to Maple Court,” I said.

Judith Whitlock, the activities director, met us at the side door in her Sunday jeans. She is a big, tired, kind woman who has worked there twenty years and looks at every resident as though she were counting them in her head.

“Gail? It’s Sunday. I wasn’t expecting you.”

“I’ve got five buckets of flowers and nowhere to put them.”

She looked at the truck, then at the buckets, and I watched her decide not to ask.

“The chapel’s empty on Sundays,” she said. “Church folks only come Wednesday. Pull a table up. I’ll find you some scissors that aren’t dull.”

The chapel was a small room with a low ceiling and a window that faced the parking lot. There were twelve plastic chairs and a piano nobody played. I set the buckets on a folding table by the window.

I had no vases. Judith brought me four coffee cans and a handful of canning jars from the kitchen. She stood in the doorway and then went down the hall.

Three came the first week.

Margie Teasdale was the first. She is ninety-one and has macular degeneration so far along that she cannot see her own hands, and she was wheeled in by an aide who was clearly just looking for somewhere to park her.