The Altar Flowers Too Country for Church

Margie turned her face toward the window. Then she turned it toward the table. Then she said, in a voice like a screen door, “What is that smell?”

“Flowers,” I said. “From my garden.”

“Hold one under my nose.”

I held a cosmos stem under her nose, and she closed her eyes.

“That’s a ditch-bank cosmos,” she said. “I’d know it anywhere. Pink with the little yellow eye. My husband mowed them down every August and I’d cry about it.”

She named four more by smell. Marigold. Zinnia. Sunflower, which she said smelled like warm hay. And the celosia, which she said smelled like nothing at all, but she knew by the feel of the velvet.

The second to come in was a retired farmer named Lloyd Ames, who had suffered a stroke in the spring and had said nothing to anybody in a month. The aide told me that quietly afterward. He sat down in one of the plastic chairs with his chin on his chest.

I put a zinnia in his hand. A tall orange one.

He held it up between two fingers, in front of his face, very steady, the way you would hold a candle in a dark church.

He did not say anything. But he did not put it down for the whole hour.

The third was a woman named Eunice who just wanted to know if there was coffee. There was not. She stayed anyway.

I cut stems and trimmed the leaves and stood them in coffee cans. Margie arranged by touch, her hands moving over each stem. Lloyd, finally, took a second zinnia and set it in a jar, and then a third, and by the end of the hour he had a jar of seven that stood up straight. Eunice told me the colors weren’t right and rearranged them.

When we finished, Judith came in and looked at the table and did not say anything. She put a hand on the back of Margie’s chair.

“Put those in their rooms?” she asked me.

“They’re theirs,” I said.

Elmer wheeled in the buckets in two trips and said nothing about any of it, but on the drive home he reached over and laid his hand over mine on my knee and left it there all the way to Cutler Road.

I want to say something about Kristin, because it would be easy to make her a villain in the plain sense of the word, and I don’t believe she was one. I believe she was a young woman who had been told she was not enough.

I learned the rest later. She had grown up in Overland Park and gone to a big, polished church where the pastor’s wife was expected to look a certain way and the sanctuary was expected to match.

Her mother’s church had a florist on retainer. When Dave took the call to Hadley, she told me later at a potluck, her sister had said, “Kansas. Good luck with the cow people.” She had decided she would not be that, and she had decided she would not let the church be that.

None of that excuses it. Thirty years is thirty years, and she did not ask me once before she hired a stranger in Salina. She did not call me. She did not even call the board, as I would learn. But I have found that you can understand a person and still not be required to step aside for her.