Chapter Twelve
Dawn found them in her flower corner.
Diane sat among the salvaged buckets and rebuilt arrangements, her back against the cooler she'd managed to keep running through sheer stubbornness. Burial sat beside her, close enough that their shoulders touched, his grave-quiet eyes fixed on nothing in particular.
The compound was silent. The brothers had scattered to their beds hours ago, leaving the two of them alone in the one space that smelled like growing things instead of gun oil.
"Tell me about the parish," she said.
He was quiet for a long moment. The early light filtered through the garage windows, catching dust motes and the edges of petals.
"It's called St. Bernard," he said finally. "Down in the Delta, where the Mississippi floods every spring. The graveyards there are different—the water table's so high you can't dig deep without hitting mud, so they build the graves up. Tombs and mausoleums and vaults that sit above ground."
"But those flood too."
"Everything floods." His voice was soft.
"That's the thing about the Delta. The river takes what it wants and gives back what it doesn't. After every high water, the graves would wash out.
Bodies floating. Caskets broken open. Everything the families thought they'd buried coming back up to the surface. "
Diane's chest ached.
"I spent ten years putting them back down," he continued. "Reburying the same people, sometimes three or four times. Learning which soil held and which let go. Which caskets would stay sealed and which would split under pressure."
"That sounds like grief work."
"It was grief work. Every time I put someone back in the ground, their family had to come watch. Had to stand at a graveside they thought was finished and see me fill it in again." He paused. "Some of them thanked me. Some of them couldn't look at me. Some of them just... broke."
She reached for his hand. His fingers were cold despite the warm morning.
"There was a brother," he said quietly. "Club brother. Rode with the Destroyers for eight years before I joined. Name was Philip. Good man. Steady. The kind who'd give you the shirt off his back if you needed it."
"What happened to him?"
"He died." Burial's jaw tightened. "They found him in a ditch outside Clarksdale with two bullets in his chest. Sheriff said it was a robbery gone wrong. Said they'd investigate."
"But they didn't."
"They didn't." His voice went flat. "I dug his grave myself. Put him in the ground with my own hands because that's what I did—that's what I was good at. And the whole time, I kept thinking that Philip deserved better than a hole in the ground and a sheriff who couldn't be bothered."
Diane squeezed his hand.
"That's when I left the parish," he said. "Because some burials demand an answer. And if the law wasn't going to find one, I'd find it myself."
"Did you?"
"Eventually." A ghost of something dark crossed his face. "The Destroyers helped. Cottonmouth made sure Philip got justice, even if the sheriff never did."
They sat in silence for a moment, the weight of his story settling between them like soil settling over a grave.
"I took over a dead woman's lease," Diane said finally.
He turned to look at her.
"The shop. Leary's." She smiled, but it didn't reach her eyes. "The woman who ran it before me was named Mrs. Fontaine. Seventy-three years old, built the business from nothing, delivered flowers to every funeral and wedding in Greenville for forty years."
"What happened to her?"
"Cancer. Quick and ugly." Diane's voice softened. "She died owing three months' rent on the building. Her family couldn't pay, so they were just going to let the landlord take it. All those years of work, all those arrangements, all that beauty she'd built—gone."
"But you saved it."
"I talked the landlord into letting me work off the debt." She laughed, hollow. "Took me eighteen months of seventy-hour weeks, but I did it. And somewhere along the way, I stopped thinking of it as Mrs. Fontaine's shop and started thinking of it as mine."
Burial's thumb traced circles on her palm.
"Every arrangement I deliver is a small act of insistence," she said quietly.
"That's how I think of it. Greenville's dying.
Half the storefronts are boarded. The factories are gone.
The young people leave as soon as they're old enough to go.
But every time I bring flowers to a funeral or a wedding or a hospital room, I'm saying that something here is still alive.
Still worth celebrating. Still worth grieving. "
"That's not the same as what I do."
"Isn't it?" She turned to face him fully. "You put people in the ground because someone has to handle the after. I build arrangements from dying flowers because someone has to make the after beautiful. Same work. Same grief. Same insistence that the temporary things matter."
He was quiet, his eyes searching her face.
"I went to the back of every room because I believed everything ends," he said finally. "That's the gravedigger's truth—nothing lasts. The floods take it, the earth takes it, time takes it. Everything I ever built or loved or cared about was going to end up in the ground eventually."
"So you stopped caring?"
"I stopped leading." His voice cracked. "Because leading means caring about the outcome. Means grieving when it goes wrong. The rear guard doesn't have to care—he just has to watch."
Diane's heart ached.
"But caring about something that's going to die is the cruelest work there is," he whispered. "That's what I told myself. That's why I stayed at the back. Because if I never let anything matter, it couldn't hurt when it ended."
She reached for the nearest bucket and pulled out a single stem—a white rose, still tight in bud, maybe two days from full bloom.
"This flower is going to die in a week," she said. "Maybe less, depending on the water and the light. It's already been cut from the plant that grew it. It's already dying, right now, in my hand."
He looked at the rose.
"But I'm going to put it in an arrangement anyway," she continued. "Because for the next seven days, it's going to be beautiful. Someone's going to look at it and feel something—joy or grief or love or hope. It's going to matter, even though it's temporary. Especially because it's temporary."
She pressed the rose into his palm, curling his scarred fingers around the stem.
"That's what I build with," she said. "Dying things. Temporary things. Things that are already ending from the moment I cut them. And I build with them anyway, because temporary doesn't mean worthless. It means precious. It means now."
Burial stared at the rose in his hand.
"You're not cruel for caring about things that end," she said softly. "You're brave. Caring about temporary things—loving them fully, grieving them honestly, holding them close even though you know they'll go—that's the hardest work there is."
"The cruelest work."
"The most necessary work." She covered his hand with hers. "Because if nobody cares about the temporary things, then nothing matters. And if nothing matters, then what's the point of any of it?"
He was silent for a long moment.
The compound was waking up around them—engines in the distance, voices calling, the sounds of men preparing for another day of war. But in the flower corner, in the space that smelled like roses and possibility, everything was still.
"I've been burying things my whole life," Burial said finally. "Bodies, memories, feelings. Anything that might hurt if I let it matter."
"And now?"
"Now I'm sitting in a flower corner with a woman who builds beauty from dying things." His voice dropped. "And I'm thinking that maybe I buried the wrong parts of myself."
Diane felt tears prick at her eyes.
"You can dig them back up," she said. "That's the thing about burial—it doesn't have to be permanent. The floods taught you that. The dead come back up. The things you thought were gone forever resurface."
"Not always in good condition."
"No. But they come back." She squeezed his hand around the rose. "And someone has to be there to tend them when they do."
He lifted the rose to his face, breathing in its scent.
"Cut stems die in a week," he said quietly. "And you build with them anyway."
"I build with them because they're beautiful. Because they matter. Because someone is going to hold this arrangement at the worst moment of their life and feel, for just a second, like beauty still exists."
She leaned her head against his shoulder.
"If that's not proof that temporary things are worth making," she said, "I don't know what is."