The Altar Flowers Too Country for Church

When she left, she touched my sleeve. That was all.

By then, the first hard frost was due, and I was looking at it with dread, because frost takes the zinnias in one night.

It came on the twenty-second. I walked out in the morning to a garden full of black stalks, every petal gone to wet brown paper. I stood in it for a while in my boots.

But I had mums. I had asters, and the sedum, and the dried celosia, and the long wheaty grasses, and bittersweet on the fence line, and the last of the late marigolds I had covered with a sheet.

I had enough. I cut again that Saturday, and Elmer hauled the buckets again on Sunday, and they were waiting at the door again.

They were always waiting at the door. That is the thing I cannot get over, even now. It was a thing that happened every single week, and every single week it surprised me.

Now I have to tell you what happened at the church, which I did not cause, and did not plan, and want to be clear that I did not so much as whisper about to anyone.

I am the secretary of the Hadley Methodist finance committee. Have been for nine years. I take the minutes, and I sit near the end of the table, and I do not speak unless somebody asks me a question, because the committee already has a good chairman in Everett Ahlstrom and a good treasurer in Phyllis Hartzell, and the minutes are my work.

The committee met on the last Tuesday in October, in the library, with the radiator clanking. There were seven of us at the table, plus Pastor Dave, who sits in on every meeting, and Kristin, who does not usually come but had come that night because the agenda had her name on it. Phyllis had put it there.

I had seen the agenda the week before, and I had said nothing.

Phyllis Hartzell is a retired bank teller with sixty-one years of clear habits. She does not waste a word, and she reads a ledger the way some people read scripture. She opened the folder in front of her and took out a stapled sheet, and she cleared her throat.

“I have a question about a line in the worship budget,” she said. “It’s a new one. It says ‘altar flowers, Prairie Petal Floral, Salina.’ The first invoice was September fifth. There have been seven since. A hundred fifty dollars each. Twelve hundred dollars, paid out of the worship fund as of last Sunday.”

Everett had a pen in his hand. He set it down.

“Twelve hundred dollars,” he said. “For flowers.”

“That’s what the invoices say.”

“Who approved that?”

Nobody answered. I wrote the question in the minutes, word for word, because that is my job.

“Phyllis,” Pastor Dave said slowly, “I’m sorry, I’m not sure what you’re referring to.”

Phyllis looked at Kristin.

It was a very small moment. Maybe three seconds. Kristin had been sitting very straight with her hands folded on her bag. I saw something cross her face, quick as a bird past a window, and she lifted her chin.