The Altar Flowers Too Country for Church

The second Sunday I did not take the buckets to church at all. I cut them Saturday, and on Sunday after the service Elmer and I drove straight to Maple Court. I did not want to pass the altar.

I did not want to look at the glass cylinder and its lilies, which by then were dropping pollen on the cloth.

Six residents came.

Judith had to borrow chairs from the dining room. A man named Arvid Pfannenstiel came in a bathrobe and slippers, with an aide behind him, and said he used to raise gladiolus for the county fair.

He told me for forty minutes how to cut a glad. He had won eleven blue ribbons. He wanted to know if I had ever entered.

“No,” I said. “I never did.”

“Why not?”

“I was always busy bringing them to church.”

He nodded slowly as if that were an answer and a rebuke both.

We used the coffee cans again. Eunice had brought her own pickle jar from her room, with a scrap of ribbon tied around it. Lloyd arranged his own jar again, and this time he said a word. It was only “Orange,” quiet as a breath, and the aide looked at me with her eyebrows halfway up her forehead.

I said, “Yes, Lloyd. Orange.”

He said it again.

I carried that single word around in my chest for the rest of the day like something hot in my hand.

I should tell you what I had been doing for years, because it turns out to matter.

When I cut flowers for the altar, I always cut extra. Always. And after the service on Sundays, when the sanctuary emptied, I would take the arrangement apart and sort the stems into jars and carry them to the shut-ins.

Three or four houses in town. Then, once a month or so, Maple Court. Mrs. Dreiling on Elm Street had gotten my zinnias every Sunday for eleven years before she moved to her daughter’s in Wichita.

Nobody ever put it in a bulletin. That was never the point.

When I stopped bringing flowers to the altar, I stopped everything. The florist’s arrangements came wired into green foam, and on Monday morning the custodian threw them out. Nobody carried a single stem to anyone. I did not know that yet, but I would find out.

By the third Sunday, I had stopped being surprised at the feeling in my own body, which was lighter than it had been in weeks.

We pulled into the Maple Court lot at one-thirty. Elmer shut off the engine and sat there with his hands on the wheel.

“Gail,” he said. “Look at the door.”

I looked.

They were waiting. Ten of them, lined up along the sidewalk and under the awning. Walkers, wheelchairs, one man in a bathrobe, two women with their purses in their laps as though waiting for a bus. Judith stood behind them with her arms folded, grinning like a woman who has cheated at cards.

They were there before we had the tailgate down.

I got out of the truck. My knees did something unreliable.