Chapter Nineteen
Beth
December came in hard and early that year, the kind of cold that makes the bell over the door sound brittle, and I spent the first week of it up to my elbows in noble fir and eucalyptus, because the thing nobody tells you about running a flower shop is that the worst season of your life still has a wreath order due Friday.
I was grateful for it. There is a particular mercy in work your hands know how to do without you. I could stand at the cedar table my father built and wire greenery into circles for six hours and not think about anything at all, and most days that was exactly as much thinking as I could afford.
The shop looked good. I'll say that much for myself.
I'd leaned all the way into the season—garlands looped along the cooler, a galvanized tub of paperwhites forcing on the windowsill, the chalkboard out front reading FRESH WREATHS—WHILE THEY LAST in my best loopy hand.
People came in cold and left warm, stamping snow off their boots, telling me it smelled like Christmas in here, and I let myself have that.
I had built this. Whatever else had come apart, this was still mine, and it was still good, and it had never once made me feel like I was too much.
Carmen came by Tuesdays with coffee and gossip, and it was through Carmen that I kept hearing it.
"He's different, you know," she said one of those Tuesdays.
She'd been turning her cup in her hands for a full minute before she said it, which is how I knew it was coming—she sets a thing down careful when she's not sure the table can hold it. I kept wiring fir into the frame and didn't look up.
"People say a lot of things."
"I'm not people. I'm your best friend, and I'm telling you what's in the air.
" She set the cup down. "Alonzo's not running around with Lola anymore.
Comes to the restaurant before dawn, leaves after dark, goes nowhere else.
Took your daddy fishing, of all things. His whole family's gone quiet and strange around the holidays in a way the whole street's noticed and can't explain. "
"The whole street noticed I was a crazy jealous shrew last fall, too." I snipped a stem clean. "Forgive me if I don't take the street's word for things."
"Beth—"
"Is it the same street, Carmen? The exact same mouths that spent a whole autumn deciding I was the unstable one?"
She had the grace to wince. "...It's the same street."
"Then you understand my position." I held the wreath up, turned it, found the gap, filled it.
Because that was the hard lesson I'd actually learned this year, the one that cost me the most: a man's reputation in this town gets built by people who weren't in the room.
I'd watched that same gossip mill that now murmured changed man spend three months turning me into the jealous fiancée, the girl who'd lost her sweetness, and I was not about to start trusting it just because it had finally swung a direction I liked.
The mill doesn't get more honest when it flatters you. It just gets quieter.
"And what does your own counsel say?" Carmen asked. Gentler now.
I thought about lying to her. You can't, really. She's known me since we were eleven and she can smell it.
"It says anybody can behave for a few weeks when they're scared of losing something."
There was a colder version of that I didn't say to her—the one I only let myself look at late at night under Nana Ruth's throw, where it was quieter and there was nobody to keep a brave face for.
That a man who's careful for one frightened winter tells you exactly nothing about the man he goes back to being the day he feels safe again.
That anybody on God's earth can be sorry in the wreckage.
I'd been almost-married to a man who was wonderful in the wreckage—tender, present, all the way there, every single time the sky was falling.
It was the ordinary Tuesdays he'd failed me on, the quiet ones, the ones where showing up didn't come with a flood or a crisis or an audience.
Those were the only ones that had ever counted, and those were the only ones I had no evidence about.
"So a changed man who's been changed for one cold winter," I told Carmen instead, "tells me nothing yet. Ask me in a year."
"That's grim."
"That's earned." I softened it with a look. "Drink your coffee. And tell Sherry Dukes if she puts one more word about me in that Facebook group, I'm charging her double for funeral sprays till the day she dies."
Carmen laughed, which was the point, and the bell went and a customer came in stamping snow off her boots, and that was the end of it.
But she didn't argue with me. Carmen, who argues with everything. She just let ask me in a year sit there and drank her coffee. I noticed that, and I didn't let myself make anything of it, and I rang up a poinsettia, and I worked, and I let the rest of it be air, and I did not let it in.
? ? ?
The clinic was the one place I let myself stop bracing.
I'd kept going back—Thursdays mostly, an hour after close, sometimes a Sunday.
The orphan kittens were weaned now and getting adopted out one by one, fat and ridiculous and ready for somebody's lap, and there were always new ones, because there are always new small broken things in the world that need a warm room and somebody patient with a bottle.
There's a kind of healing that doesn't ask anything of you, that just hands you something small and warm and lets you be useful to it for an hour. I'd needed that more than I'd known.
Caleb was usually there, sleeves shoved up, that easy way he had of being a person who never needed a single thing from me. That Thursday a half-grown tabby fell asleep in the crook of my arm and flatly refused to be moved.
"You could just take her, you know," Caleb said, not looking up from the supply log.
"I'm gone dawn to dark."
"She'd sleep all day anyway. Cats are basically furniture that judges you."
"It wouldn't be fair." I ran a thumb over the tabby's ear. "Leaving a little thing alone all day, waiting on me. I know what that's like. I wouldn't do it to her."
He looked up at that. Had the good sense not to make anything of it.
"Suit yourself, Thompson. Offer stands." Back to the log.
"Hand her over when you're done being a mattress.
And keep her off the dewormer chart—she walked through it twice last week and I about had a heart attack thinking she'd gotten into something. "
"You worry about these cats more than most people worry about their kids."
"These cats have never once disappointed me," he said. "Can't say that about most people."
I laughed, and the tabby cracked one offended eye and went back to sleep, and we let it go.
We almost never talked about Alonzo. We talked about his grandfather's house on Cedar Lane, which he was bringing back to life one stubborn room at a time, and the porch boxes I'd promised him come spring, and nothing in particular, which is the most restful conversation there is.
He never pushed. He never once pushed, about anything, and it was such a strange and welcome thing—being around a man who didn't push—that sometimes I caught myself just breathing easy, like I'd set down something I'd forgotten I was carrying.
I want to be clear about what that was, because the town certainly wasn't. It was not a spark. It was a woodstove in January. You don't fall in love with a woodstove. You just stop being cold for a while, and you're grateful, and you go home.
I went home. Caleb walked me to my truck like he always did, hands in his pockets, snow coming down. "Night, Beth." "Night." That was the whole of it, and the town could choke on its own gossip for all I cared.
? ? ?
He came into the shop on a Thursday, the dead hour after lunch when the light goes thin.
The bell rang and I looked up from the cooler and my whole body did the thing I hated—the old animal lurch—before my head caught up and reminded it that we didn't do that anymore.
Alonzo stopped just inside the door. He'd lost weight; I could see it in his jaw. Snow melting on his shoulders. And he kept his hands visible at his sides in a way I didn't understand until I did, and it nearly undid me, because he'd learned that from my father.
"Beth. I came in as a customer. That's all." He swallowed. "I can go to Marigold Lane if you'd rather. I'll understand."
"What do you need."
"Flowers. For the restaurant—the tables.
" He breathed. "We've been getting the little arrangements from a supplier out on Route 9 for years.
They're fine. But I'd rather the money went to your shop.
Standing order, every week. Full price. No discount, nothing—I just want it to be yours instead of somebody else's. "
I stood there with a bucket of ranunculus going cold against my apron and understood exactly what he was doing, and I hated how it landed, because it was so precisely the thing.
Not roses on my doorstep. Not a speech aimed at my heart.
Money in my till, every week, no strings, a quiet steady choosing of my shop over the easy one out on Route 9.
The smallest possible thing, and the exact shape of everything he'd never done in two years—because the failures had never been the dramatic kind either.
They'd been the small steady kind, the choosing of the easier thing, over and over, until it added up to a life I'd disappeared inside of.
He'd found the one gesture that spoke in the same language as the wound.
I don't think he even knew he'd done it.
"I'm a business," I said. "I don't turn away an order because of who's holding the checkbook. I'll do your tables."
"Thank you."
"It's not a thank-you. It's a transaction." I pulled a pad toward me. "Weekly. What's your budget."
We did the order like that—clipped, professional, him answering my questions about color and longevity, me writing it down. And it was almost fine. And then, while I was tallying, not looking at me, quiet:
"I should have been at your dad's birthday."
My pen stopped.
"That night in the spring. When I left him sitting there to go bail out a flood that wasn't even—" He caught himself.
"I've thought about it a lot. It was your father.
The first thing you ever really asked me to show up for, and I chose wrong, and I knew it was wrong while I was doing it.
I did it anyway because being needed somewhere else was easier than just—being there.
Quiet. With no crisis to be the hero of.
" He stopped. "Anyway. I'm sorry. That's all.
I'm not saying it to get anything. I'm not saying you should take me back.
I just needed you to know that I know exactly what I did.
It wasn't a misunderstanding. I did it."
The shop went very quiet. The forced paperwhites on the sill. The hum of the cooler. The snow coming down soft past the glass.
I'd imagined a hundred apologies from him in the bad weeks, and every one of them had been about him—his sorrow, his hurt, how much he was suffering, how I had to understand.
This one didn't ask me for a single thing.
It set the truth on the table and stepped back from it, and that was so unlike the man I'd left in a parking lot that for a second I didn't know where to put it.
"Your order'll be ready Tuesday," I said. "Pick it up or I'll deliver. Delivery's extra."
Something crossed his face. Not hurt. Acceptance. He nodded. "Tuesday. I'll come get it." He laid a folded bill on the counter for the deposit, more than enough, didn't make it weird, and left, the bell going brittle behind him.
I stood there a long time after the door shut.
Then I picked up the ranunculus and finished the arrangement I'd been building, because my hands knew how. The wall had flexed—I'd felt it give, a hairline, a half inch, the first give in months.
But it had held. I made myself notice that, wiring in the last stem. It had held, and the snow kept coming, and I had a wreath order due Friday. Some things you can count on. The wall, and the work, and the cold. I held onto all three and I kept my hands moving.