Chapter Four #2
Eventually I get up. I make coffee. Lisa is gone — she has a study group on Saturdays that meets at the library at nine.
Dee's door is open and her bed is unmade, which means Kevin picked her up at some point in the night and she's at his place now.
I drink my coffee at the kitchen counter and watch the snow that started overnight pile against the bottom of the window.
I shower, dress, and let myself out of the apartment.
The hallway is cold. The stairs are cold. The walk across the parking lot is cold. The Granada is parked under a low drift of new snow and I scrape the windshield with the plastic scraper I keep wedged behind the driver's seat. The work warms my hands inside the gloves.
I unlock the driver's side door and get in.
There's a flower on the passenger seat.
I stop with one foot still on the ground.
It's small. The branch is bare and dark and the flowers along it are yellow, a clean bright yellow that doesn't belong in a parked car in Nebraska in December. Five-petaled. Open. Three of them along a single thin twig. The branch lies on the seat as if it's been set down with care.
I look at the door I just unlocked. The passenger door. The windows, intact. The dashboard. The back seat. The floor.
The car is exactly the way I left it last night.
The cup from the gas station is in the cupholder.
The map of Omaha is folded on the dashboard.
My old scarf is bunched in the corner of the back seat.
There's no sign that anyone has been in here.
There are no footprints in the snow around the car except mine.
I sit down slowly. I close the door. I sit in the cold car and look at the flower.
It just sits there. Yellow on the gray vinyl of the seat.
I reach out and touch it. The petals are real. They give slightly under my finger and spring back. The wood of the twig is smooth and the tiny leaves at the joint are tight green buds.
I pick it up.
I don't know what kind of flower it is. I'm not the kind of person who could name three flowers on a good day. But I know it doesn't bloom in Nebraska in winter. I know it doesn't bloom on a passenger seat in a locked car.
The shape of it in my hand is delicate. The yellow is impossibly bright against the dark of my glove.
I sit in the car looking at the flower in my hand.
I should call someone. I should tell someone.
The thought arrives and lands and then sits there with nowhere to go.
Tell who. Tell what. Officer, someone left a flower in my locked car.
There's no sign of forced entry. They didn't take anything.
They left me a flower. I can hear the response in my head before I can finish imagining the call.
They'd tell me to lock my doors better. They'd suggest I check with friends or family.
They'd close the file the moment I hung up.
I look at the flower again.
It's beautiful.
That's what that stops me. I'm sitting in my car with a flower in my hand that no one should have been able to put there and I'm thinking about how beautiful it is.
I drive to work.
I keep the flower on the passenger seat. I don't put it in my bag or hide it. I drive the same route I always drive and I park in the back lot and I get out and I carefully lift the flower from the seat and I carry it into the food court with me.
Tammy is already there. She's restocking napkins at the front counter and humming along to whatever song is playing through the ceiling speakers, which is something she only does on Saturdays when Marcus is with his father and she doesn't have to think about anything other than work for the next eight hours.
She looks up when I come in. Her eyes go to the flower in my hand.
"What's that?"
I set my bag down behind the counter and hold the flower up to her.
"It was in my car."
She stares at it. Then she stares at me.
"In your car."
"On the passenger seat this morning. When I went out to drive here."
"Jenny."
"My car was locked."
She sets the stack of napkins down on the counter and walks around the side and takes the flower carefully from my hand. She turns it over. She holds it up to the light.
"It was in your locked car."
"Yes."
"And there was no one around."
"No one."
"And you didn't put it there last night and forget."
"Tammy."
"I had to ask." She's still looking at the flower. Her mouth has gone soft in the way it does when she's trying not to smile. "Honey."
"What."
"You have a secret admirer."
"I have a — Tammy."
"You have a secret admirer." She's grinning now. She can't help it. "Someone has been leaving you presents."
"Someone broke into my car."
"Someone left a flower in your car. There's a difference and we both know it." She hands the flower back to me. "Do you know what kind it is?"
"I have no idea."
"It's winter jasmine."
I blink at her. "How do you know that?"
"My grandmother had it on her porch in Tulsa. She kept it in pots all year." Tammy's smile hasn't gone away. "It isn't supposed to grow up here. Not outside, anyway. Someone got that out of a greenhouse, maybe? Or a florist?" She tilts her head. "Or maybe someone's grandma."
I look at the flower.
"It's beautiful," I say. It's the only thing I can think to say.
"Yes." Tammy reaches out and tucks a piece of my hair behind my ear, which is a thing she's never done before but which she does now in a quiet, almost-maternal way that I don't know how to respond to. "It is."
She goes back to her napkins.
I find an empty paper cup in the back and fill it with water and put the flower in it. I set the cup on the shelf above the prep counter where I'll be able to see it during my shift.
It glows there, bright yellow against the white of the wall.
I work the grill, take orders, make change. I think about the flower the entire time.
Around three in the afternoon, between rushes, Tammy comes up beside me with two cups of coffee and hands me one.
"Did I tell you?" she says. "Craig hasn't come back to work. He missed yesterday and today both."
"He's probably sick."
"Mm." Tammy sips her coffee. "Probably." She glances at me sideways. "Don't tell me you missed him."
"I didn't miss him."
"Good. You shouldn't be missing him."
She bumps me with her hip on her way back to the register. I look up at the flower on the shelf. The bright yellow against the white wall. Something that no one should have been able to put on my passenger seat.
I think about the stone on my nightstand.
Two gifts, now. Two gifts and no one to explain either of them.
I work the grill. The food court fills again. The afternoon goes on.