The Flower Shop Across the Street

I had a boutonniere in one hand and a strip of green tape between my teeth when Dale Petrie Jr. came into the back room with a sheet of paper.

It was a Thursday in June, a little after two. The Henderson wedding was Saturday. I had fourteen boutonnieres to wire, six bouquets to build, and two hundred stems of white stock drinking in buckets along the wall.

“Jolene, have you got a minute?”

“I’ve got my hands full, but my ears are free.”

He did not smile. He set the paper on my workbench, right on top of the Henderson order, and squared it with one finger.

It was a spreadsheet. I could see my own name on it, and a number beside my name, and a second number beside that one in red.

“I’ve been through the books with the bank,” he said. “Payroll is my biggest line after cost of goods. I have to bring wages in line with what a shop this size can carry.”

I took the tape out of my teeth.

“All right.”

“Starting Monday, the designer position pays eleven dollars an hour.”

I had been at nineteen fifty since his mother’s last raise, two years before she fell.

“I’m the designer position, Dale.”

“You are.”

“That is eight dollars and fifty cents an hour less.”

“I know what it is.”

On a full week it came to three hundred and forty dollars. Every week. Gone.

Out front I could hear Kim, the high school girl who worked afternoons, ringing up a sympathy card. The cooler compressor kicked on. A petal dropped off a rose onto the paper and I left it there.

“Is there any room in that number?” I said. It was the only question I asked him, and I asked it once.

“Eleven is still above what the state says I have to pay. And frankly, Jolene, at your age, you are lucky to have a job at all.”

I was fifty-eight years old. I had been at that bench for thirty-one years.

This was three summers ago now, and I can still tell you which bucket I was looking at when he said it. The white stock. Second from the door.

I want to be fair to him, because I have had three years to think about it. He was not shouting. He was not enjoying himself. He was a man of fifty-two who had come home from the Cities to take over his mother’s shop in the spring, and he had found a leaking roof, a worn-out cooler, and a note at the bank he had signed to fix them both. He was reading me a number off a page because the page was easier to look at than I was.

I wiped my hands on my apron.

“Thank you, Dale,” I said. “I appreciate you telling me straight.”

He blinked. I think he had been braced for tears. My mother raised me not to beg, and I was not going to start in a back room with tape on my fingers.

“The Henderson wedding will be done exactly the way Connie ordered it. You don’t need to worry about Saturday.”

“Good. That’s good.” He picked up his paper. The rose petal slid off onto the floor. “I knew you’d be sensible.”

He went back out front. I picked up the boutonniere and finished wrapping the stem, because Katie Henderson’s groom had done nothing to anybody.

A minute later Kim came and stood in the doorway. She was seventeen and her face was the color of the stock.