5. Laurelle
LAURELLE
Isee them through the shop window.
Dean is crossing the courtyard with a woman I’ve never met, heading toward Lea’s coffee shop. She’s animated, talking with her hands, gesturing at the old stone buildings like she’s seeing them for the first time.
Dean is walking beside her carrying her purse and nodding in the right places, and when they reach the coffee shop, he holds the door and pulls out her chair before she’s finished her sentence.
She settles into it without breaking her thought, like a man pulling out her chair is so expected it doesn’t register as a gesture.
His mother. The birthday was Friday. She must have come up for the weekend.
I watch through the glass the way I’ve watched him for days now, from inside my shop with living things around me and distance between us.
But the distance feels different this morning.
Yesterday, he was in the bay with his hands on me and his mouth against my ear, and I woke up this morning still feeling the weight of his arms and the steadiness of his breathing against my back.
His name was the first thing in my head before I even opened my eyes, and nothing about that felt optional.
They’re at the table for twenty minutes before Dean looks up and sees me watching. He lifts his hand—a small wave—and then he leans toward his mother and says something. She turns in her chair and looks at my shop, then smiles. Dean stands, and they’re both coming across the courtyard.
I wipe my hands on my apron and meet them at the door.
“Laurelle, this is my mother, Karen. Mom, this is Laurelle. She made your arrangement.”
Karen takes both of my hands in hers, which I wasn’t expecting. Her grip is warm and firm, and she smells like the kind of lotion that comes in a pink tube.
“Those flowers were the most beautiful thing I’ve ever received,” she says. “I told Dean, you have to take me to meet this woman. The ranunculus alone. I’ve never seen that shade of purple outside of my own garden.”
“Your son told me about your zinnias,” I say. “I wanted the arrangement to feel like something you’d grow yourself.”
“Well, you nailed it.” She squeezes my hands and lets go, then turns to look around the shop. “Oh, this is lovely. Dean, isn’t this lovely?”
“It is,” Dean says, and he’s looking at me when he says it.
Karen walks deeper into the shop, examining the flower buckets, the cooler case, the dried lavender hanging above the register. She touches things gently, checking the stems and reading the leaves. I like her immediately and completely, and that raises the stakes significantly.
“Dean tells me you moved here from Raleigh,” she says, pausing at a bucket of sunflowers.
“I did. Three years ago.”
“All by yourself?”
“All by myself.”
She shakes her head with a kind of admiring disbelief.
“That takes courage. Starting over in a place where nobody knows you.” She looks back at Dean, who’s standing by the register with his hands in his pockets, watching us both.
“Dean’s the same way. Has been since he was fifteen.
He just handles things. His father had back surgery that year and Dean ran the house for six months.
Groceries, bills, drove his sisters to school before he even had a license.
Never complained. Never asked for help.”
She turns back to me with a look of such uncomplicated pride that it makes my throat tight.
“He’s my rock,” she says. “He’s everyone’s rock. I don’t know what any of us would do without him.”
Karen’s face is so open when she says it.
So proud. Her voice doesn’t carry any of the weight the words hold for me, because she’s not thinking the way I am.
She’s not connecting the fifteen-year-old boy who drove his sisters to school to the man who orders birthday flowers because nobody else thinks to.
She’s not connecting the ladder drills he runs alone on Saturday mornings to the fact that repetition is the only way he knows how to empty himself out.
She sees her son. I see a hero.
She doesn’t know that yesterday I watched him hold me with the same steady hands he uses for everything, and I couldn’t tell if I was a person he chose or a weight he absorbed.
Dean is watching me. I can feel it. His eyes on my face, reading me the way he reads gauges and valve settings, precise and constant. He knows something just shifted. He’s too attentive to miss it.
I smile. I tell Karen it was wonderful to meet her.
I wrap a small bundle of sunflowers in brown paper and hand them to her as a gift because she’s a woman who grows things and I recognize my own.
She hugs me, which I wasn’t ready for. Dean holds the door for her on the way out, and when he looks back at me over his shoulder, I hold the smile until they’re across the courtyard and out of sight.
Then I turn back to my workbench, put my hands in the water, and grip the stems until my fingers hurt.
I knew this. I knew this about him before Karen said a single word.
I knew it from the coffee he brought me with honey, from the boxes he moved without being asked, from the lemon scone and the way he learned every flower name and the way he checked the courtyard drain before a rainstorm I didn’t even know was coming.
Every beautiful thing he’s done for me, he’s been doing for people his entire life.
I’m the florist on his list, somewhere between his mother’s birthday and the courtyard drain.
He’ll take care of me the same way he takes care of everything—steady, constant, and invisible—and one day, the weight of me will be just another thing he doesn’t complain about.
I can’t do that to him. And I can’t survive being someone’s habit—the thing he does because stopping would feel like failure.
I close the shop early. Lea knocks on the courtyard door with a latte and a question on her face.
I take the coffee, tell her I’m fine, and close the door before she can see that I’m not.
I go home to my apartment above the Trading Post and sit on my bed with my hands in my lap, still smelling like stems and cold water, and I let the wall go up.
Monday, the bell rings at nine in the morning and I keep my voice even and my hands busy.
I tell him I’m behind on a wedding order.
I tell him the shop is slammed. He stands at the counter, and I watch him register what’s happening—watch his jaw set and his eyes narrow—but he doesn’t push.
He nods and he leaves and the bell rings behind him and I grip the counter until my knuckles go white.
Tuesday he doesn’t come.
Wednesday he doesn’t come.
Thursday, the door opens at four in the afternoon and the bell rings. I look up from the workbench with my hands full of eucalyptus, and Dean is standing in the doorway.
His hands are empty.
No order form. No coffee. No lemon scone, no errand, no task. He’s not in turnout gear and he’s not in his station tee. He’s just Dean, standing in my doorway in a T-shirt with his hands at his sides and nothing to offer me except the fact that he came.
“I’m not here because you need something,” he says.
I set the eucalyptus down. My hands are shaking.
“I’m not here because something’s broken or because there’s a drain to check or because Lea told me you skipped lunch.” He takes one step inside. The bell settles behind him. “I’m not here because it’s what I do.”
“Dean.”
“I’m here because I can’t stay away from you.
Not because staying away would be irresponsible or unkind.
Because it hurts.” Another step. He’s at the counter now, and his hands are still empty, and his voice is low and raw in a way I’ve never heard from him.
“Everybody in my life needs me to show up. My mom, my sisters, the crew. I show up. I handle it. And I’ve never minded because that’s who I am.
But I’m not showing up for you because of who I am. I’m showing up because of who you are.”
My hands are gripping the edge of the workbench. My eyes are burning.
“You’re not on my list, Laurelle. You were never on my list.” He reaches across the counter, and his hand covers mine, and he uncurls my fingers from the wood one at a time. Gently. Like he’s handling something he knows is fragile. “You’re the reason I want to come home.”
I look at his hands around mine. Empty, open, holding nothing except me. Not fixing anything. Not managing a task. Not being reliable or steady or useful. Just here, in my shop, because it hurts to be anywhere else.
That’s the difference. Duty has a task. Devotion just shows up.
I come around the counter. He meets me halfway.
His arms close around me, and I press my face into his chest and I stop holding it together—all of it, the wall and the fear and the pattern I’ve been running from since my grandmother stopped calling.
He holds me, and I let him, and this time, I know it’s not because he can’t stop taking care of things.
It’s because he chose me. Just me. With nothing in his hands.
After a while, he pulls back and looks at me, thumbs on my cheeks, and says, “Call her.”
He doesn’t say who. He doesn’t have to. I told him about my grandmother in this same shop, standing at this same workbench, and he remembered because he remembers everything.
“She might not answer,” I say.
“Call her anyway.”