The rain against the glass of the shop front didn’t sound like a regular spring shower. It had that heavy, flat rhythm that usually meant traffic down on Route 4 was backed up to the bypass, water sitting two inches deep in the ruts by the Sunoco station. I was in the back room behind the cooler, stripping thorns off a fresh crate of standard red carnations that I had bought wholesale because they were cheap and weddings were slow that month, when the front door chime gave that quick, tinny ring that always made me drop whatever stem I was holding.
I didn’t rush out right away because my knees had been giving me trouble since the humidity shifted on Sunday night, and besides, anybody who wanted funeral grease or anniversary pinks could wait thirty seconds for me to wipe the mulch off my palms.
When I pushed through the plastic strip curtain into the main display area, the two of them were standing right by the counter where I keep the ribbon spools and the ledger book. They looked like they had walked from the bus stop three miles up the highway because their canvas jackets were soaked dark across the shoulders and their sneakers were leaving wet, gray prints on my freshly mopped linoleum. The older one couldn’t have been more than sixteen, maybe seventeen, with that tall, gawky frame boys get right before their adult shoulders fill out, and he was holding his hands jammed deep into his pockets like he was trying to keep them from shaking.
The younger one was smaller, maybe twelve, with hair that looked like he had run a comb through it in the dark and missed half of it. He was staring at the glass display case where I had a couple of faded silk arrangements sitting out to collect dust because nobody buys silk in May if they can help it.
The older boy cleared his throat twice before he spoke, his voice cracking halfway up the register the way teenage boys’ voices do when they are trying very hard to sound like men. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, damp ball of cotton fabric and crumpled paper, laid it flat on the scarred wood of the counter, and smoothed it out with a palm that looked too red from the cold. It was a collection of folded ones and fives, a ten with a grease stain near the corner, and a heavy pile of quarters and dimes that rolled slightly toward the edge before the boy trapped them with his thumb. “Our mom passed away Monday,” he said, and the way he said it was so flat and level that it made the skin on my arms prickle. “The funeral’s tomorrow morning. We want to buy her flowers. We have thirty-eight dollars.”
I looked down at the money and then back up at their faces, and I didn’t need to check my order book to know what thirty-eight dollars bought in a flower shop in Dayton. It bought a small, pathetic cluster of carnations wrapped in green tissue paper with a plastic fern leaf tucked in the back, the kind of thing you hand over at a hospital desk when you visit someone with a bad gallbladder. It certainly didn’t buy a casket spray. A basic half-couch spray with decent filler greens and a few standard mums started at one hundred and fifty, and if you wanted anything that didn’t look like it came from the gas station cooler, you were looking at three or four hundred before tax and delivery. I opened my mouth to tell them the standard line, the one about how I could bundle up some nice daisies or call the local charity fund, but then the younger boy looked up at me with these wide, dark eyes that looked exactly like his mother’s must have when she was twelve years old, and he whispered something that stopped my tongue cold. “Her favorite color was purple,” he said. “She always wore purple sweaters when she worked in the garden.”
I stood there behind the counter with my apron smelling of stale rosewater and old dirt, and I thought about my own ledger book sitting right under my left elbow. The month had been short on corporate accounts because the insurance office down the street switched to artificial plants to save on overhead, and my power bill for the walk-in cooler was sitting on the fridge at home with a red final-notice sticker pasted across the stub. In business, you have to watch your bottom line or you don’t stay in business very long, and my dad always told me that sentiment doesn’t pay the wholesale bill from the greenhouse in Springfield. But looking at the two of them standing there in their wet jackets, with their mother’s name still fresh on the county death registry and thirty-eight crumpled dollars spread out like an offering, I knew damn well that the price tag was going to have to go in the trash. I reached out, scooped up the coins and the damp bills without counting them, and dropped them into the metal cash drawer where they didn’t even make a satisfying chime.
“What’s your names?” I asked, reaching for my pad of yellow carbon paper even though I wasn’t going to write anything down. The older one told me he was Leo and his brother was Toby, and that they lived over off Miller Street in one of those small, identical brick duplexes where the back porches always smelled of charcoal lighter fluid and wet grass. They told me Clara had been sick for about three weeks, just a cough at first that she tried to shake off with ginger tea and work shifts at the community center, until her chest got too heavy for her to lift herself out of bed on Sunday night. By Monday afternoon she was gone, and the county coroner had come and gone before they even had time to figure out who to call. They had a grandmother down in Kentucky who sent fifty dollars for groceries and told them to talk to the preacher, but the preacher said the church relief fund was empty until the first of the month. They had scraped every piggy bank and old coffee tin in the house to get that thirty-eight dollars together, and they had walked all the way down the service road because neither of them had a license and the bus only ran on the odd hours.
“You boys go on home,” I told them, leaning my forearms against the counter and looking right into Leo’s stubborn eyes. “Get out of those wet clothes before you catch whatever’s going around this town. The flowers will be at the chapel on Fourth Street before the service starts tomorrow at ten. Tell the director they’re from Clara’s boys.” Toby looked like he wanted to ask how thirty-eight dollars could possibly cover what he had seen in the catalogs, but Leo grabbed his elbow, gave me a short, stiff nod that was half a bow, and turned him toward the door. The chime rang out again into the rain, and then there was just the steady, drumming sound of the water hitting the asphalt outside and the low, heavy hum of the compressor in the walk-in cooler behind me.
I locked the front deadbolt at six o’clock that evening, flipped the neon sign to dark, and pulled the yellow plastic blinds down over the glass so the neighborhood kids wouldn’t bang on the door asking for leftover carnation stems. The shop was quiet then, the kind of heavy, dusty quiet that only settles into a small retail space after the foot traffic has stopped and the receipts have been counted. I walked back into the cooler and turned on the overhead fluorescent tube that flickered twice before settling into a harsh, greenish buzz. My hands moved on their own muscle memory, pulling down buckets that I usually saved for the high-end Saturday brides who wanted imported stems from California and South America. I dragged out three bunches of deep purple hydrangeas that had arrived on Friday and were just starting to show the rich, velvety edges of maturity, along with two dozen lavender roses that smelled like pepper and sweet grass. I found a carton of pale lilac spray orchids tucked behind the white lilies and pulled them down too, working methodically with my floral shears and green waterproof tape, stripping the stems until my fingers were stained green with plant sap.
Building a casket spray is different from making a bouquet for a vase because it has to look right from every angle while lying flat, supporting its own weight without a glass wall to prop it up. I built the frame out of heavy chicken wire and wet floral foam soaked in plant food, pressing the stems in one by one until the bulk of the arrangement took on a deep, rolling shape like a hill covered in wild heather. It took me nearly two hours, and my lower back started that familiar, dull ache that usually meant I had been standing on the concrete floor too long without my rubber insoles. By eight-thirty, the shop smelled like a greenhouse after a summer storm, heavy with the damp, earthy scent of crushed eucalyptus and bruised rose petals. It wasn’t a standard community donation piece; it was something that looked like it belonged in a cathedral, easily worth four hundred dollars if you counted the labor and the wholesale value of the stems alone.
I wrapped the base in thick green foil, pinned a blank white card to the ribbon without writing a name on it, and lifted the whole heavy thing into the back seat of my old Subaru, wedging it carefully between a box of empty vases and a spare tire so it wouldn’t slide when I took the turn by the rail yard.
The Tuesday morning air was cold and smelled of wet coal smoke from the old furnace at the brickyard down by the river. I pulled into the gravel lot of the small neighborhood funeral home on Fourth Street at 8:45, long before the mourners were scheduled to arrive, and carried the heavy spray up the concrete steps with the foam soaking through the hem of my coat. The building was quiet, smelling faintly of old carpet and floor wax, and the director, a bald man named Arthur who had buried my own father five years ago, met me in the hallway with a clipboard in his hand. He looked at the massive arrangement of purple hydrangeas and orchids in my arms, raised his eyebrows over his half-moon glasses, and looked down at the invoice clipboard as if he were trying to find a matching order number that didn’t exist. “We didn’t have an order for a full-couch piece from this vendor, Martha,” he said, his voice dropping into that low, professional register funeral directors use when they are trying to be discreet. “The family indicated a very modest service. Just a few potted plants from the neighbors.”
“There wasn’t an order, Arthur,” I said, setting the heavy arrangement down on the side table near the closed oak doors of chapel room three so I could shake the water off my coat sleeves. “Just put it on the box when they wheel it in. And don’t put a bill in the mail for it either, because it’s already paid for in full.” Arthur looked at me for a long moment, his eyes lingering on the damp patches of rain on my shoulders and the green plant stains across the front of my apron, and then a slow, tired kind of understanding settled into the lines around his mouth. He didn’t ask how much money had changed hands or why a florist who complained about her electric bill was giving away four hundred dollars’ worth of imported stock on a rainy Tuesday. He just nodded once, reached out a hand to steady the corner of the heavy foam block, and said, “Leo and Toby are already inside. Their aunt drove up from Bowling Green late last night, but she didn’t bring much besides a couple of suitcases.”
I didn’t go into the chapel. I left the arrangement right there in Arthur’s capable hands, turned around, and walked back out into the damp morning air, getting back into my Subaru with the heater rattling like a tin can full of nails. I drove back to the shop, unlocked the front door at nine, and spent the rest of the morning sweeping up the broken leaves from the floor and answering three separate phone calls about balloon deliveries for a sweet sixteen party across town. The ledger book sat on the counter where I had left it, open to a blank page with no entry for the spray, and for the first time in six years of running the place, I didn’t feel that usual tight knot in my chest when I looked at the columns of numbers that didn’t quite add up. I knew I would have to cut my order for next week’s carnations in half, and I would probably have to tell the utility company that the check would clear two days late, but the shop felt different that morning, lighter somehow, like the air inside had finally been changed out after a long winter of keeping the windows shut tight.
The community in a town like Dayton doesn’t move fast, but it has a long memory for small things that happen behind closed doors. By the end of the week, Arthur must have mentioned something to the local minister or the lady who ran the community center where Clara used to spend her Saturdays organizing the winter coat drive. People started dropping by the shop not for weddings or big anniversaries, but just to buy a single potted geranium or a small bunch of yellow daisies, and they stayed to talk about Clara and how she had spent ten years knitting woolen scarves for the kids who got off the late bus with holes in their sleeves. One woman I barely knew, a Mrs. Gable who lived two doors down from the family on Miller Street, came in on Friday afternoon and bought out my entire stock of hanging ivy baskets without even asking the price, telling me while she counted out the twenties that someone needed to keep those boys in fresh soil while they figured out what high school was going to do with Leo’s schedule next fall.
It was almost three weeks later, on a Thursday afternoon when the sun was finally warm enough to leave the front door propped open with a brick, that the bell rang and the two boys came back in. They weren’t wearing their wet jackets this time, and Toby looked a little taller or maybe just straighter in the shoulders, wearing a clean blue polo shirt that looked like it had belonged to someone else first. They walked straight to the counter without looking at the silk arrangements in the display case, and Leo reached into his pocket, not for money this time, but for a heavy, folded piece of lined notebook paper that had been creased and uncreased so many times the blue lines were starting to blur into white fuzz. He laid it down on the wood right where the thirty-eight dollars had been, gave me that same stiff, awkward nod, and started backing toward the door before I could even ask how their grandmother was settling into the duplex.
“You keep that,” Leo muttered, his eyes fixed on the floor near the door handle. “Toby wrote most of it. But we both wanted you to have it.” Before I could say anything back, the door chime rattled again and they were gone, walking quickly down the concrete sidewalk toward the bus stop with their hands back in their pockets. I picked up the paper, unfolded it very carefully with my thumb, and smoothed it flat against the counter. It was written in that heavy, uneven teenage handwriting where the ballpoint pen had pressed so hard into the paper that the words stood out in sharp relief on the other side. It didn’t have a greeting or a signature at the bottom, just a few short sentences that said everything they needed to say without any extra words getting in the way. *Dear Miss, thank you for making our mom’s casket look like a royal garden.
We didn’t have enough money, but you gave her the purple flowers anyway. Everyone at the church said they were the most beautiful ones there, and we knew she was smiling because she loved the purple ones best.* I folded the note back up along the original creases, walked into the small back office behind the cooler, and tucked it right under the corner of the glass desk pad where I could see it every time I sat down to write out the wholesale checks. The shop was quiet again, the afternoon light cutting a long, dusty yellow stripe across the linoleum floor, and for the first time in as long as I could remember, I didn’t care one bit about the bottom line.
