Chapter 11 Deli
Deli
Paola reached toward her, her dark hair and golden-brown skin so much like a sunflower. “Oh, mija, what happened?”
Deli pushed past her with her head down. “Don’t. Please. I can’t.”
Her throat was hoarse from crying as she balanced on a mound of thorny rose stems left under her station from the day before—when they’d all been too tired to do the big shop clean after the Valentine’s Day onslaught.
As she dragged her first bucket toward her, pain radiated in her bones. And the pain in her heart?
One time, Deli and Trey were watching one of those ominous nature documentaries, and she turned it off after a small gazelle was separated from its herd—lost and scared in a world too harsh to survive without the other gazelles it had counted on its whole life.
It’s too sad, she’d said.
Trey had looked at her, baffled. It’s life, Deli. Some things die.
In the shop, only Sarah was cleaning as Paola returned to crunching numbers in her office, trying to be casual as she poked her head out to watch Deli now and then with a furrowed brow.
Deli was glad it was Sarah beside her. Sarah was gentle and a person of nuance.
After years of listening to the will-they-won’t-they saga, Sarah still understood that Trey and Deli were a complicated thing.
She wouldn’t poke or prod or whisper, I told you so.
Sarah knew a lost gazelle was too sad a thing to watch.
Deli’s coffee from the day before had long since gone cold, but it had a lid to keep the bits of flora out of it, and that was something.
As she lined up her many orders going to women whose men had forgotten to send flowers, she sipped and swept an arm across her station—sending stems, wires, and tape to the floor in a waterfall of Valentine’s Day fallout.
A perfect, bloodred tulip clung to the counter.
In an arrangement, it would be a declaration of love or a plea of believe me.
Deli reached for it, unsure of why she’d cast it aside, until she peeled back a petal and found the fine layer of soft blue rot underneath.
Deli made the first order on her stack—two dozen red roses—and checked the card message with a pen poised in her hand.
Baby,
I can’t wait to run away with you.
XOXO,
Big Papa
P.S. Sorry I’m late, but you’re the one getting red roses.
Irritation prickled her skin. She pulled the next order on her stack on instinct. The same man was sending a different woman a tiny cluster of three white roses in a plastic vase—one of the cheapest arrangements they offered.
To My Gorgeous Wife,
Thank you for the best 15 years of my life. You make me a better man. I owe everything to you.
Love,
Your Hubby
A sudden and consuming anger swelled within Deli.
The white roses he’d chosen were meant to say I am worthy of you.
If she sent it, knowing the inexplicable way her flowers whispered truths, she’d be a part of it.
Deli imagined the wife who lay next to Big Papa and watched him breathe—the wife who probably cursed her intuition for the unsureness that ate at her bones.
She filled a new vase and gathered red carnations (my heart breaks), snapdragons (deception), yellow carnations (disdain), gladiolus (you pierced my heart), geranium (stupidity), hydrangea (indifference), yellow lilies (lies), and anemones (forsaken).
As a final touch, she placed the red tulip to rot just out of sight.
Altogether, it said He’s in love with someone else.
Instead of Big Papa’s message in the card, Deli wrote, simply, Believe me.
By the end of the day, a wife who’d spent fifteen years taking care of a man who sent roses to another woman would open the door to a bouquet Deli had filled with meaning. And that wife would know.
Good, Deli thought, wiping her hands on her apron as she watched Carol load it up and drive away. She deserves to know.
About an hour before the shop closed, the bells on the front door chimed. Sarah’s bubblegum pink voice was cheery as she greeted the backlit figure tapping his foot at the counter. “Good afternoon, sir. How can I help you?”
The man jabbed a finger at Deli’s friend. “You really fucked up.”
Deli’s hands stilled. Sarah didn’t do well with conflict, and she was small and young.
After many years of working in a flower shop where men were the most common customers and few believed this “women’s work” was worth respecting—especially if the woman was someone they thought they could intimidate—Deli knew what was coming next.
She heard the smallest quiver in Sarah’s response. “I’m sorry, sir. Can yo—”
“Sorry, oh sorry!” He cut her off to mock her, mimicking her high voice.
“Sorry’s not gonna cut it. I don’t know what you people did, but one second I’m ordering my wife overpriced, shitty flowers, and the next she’s screaming in my face, completely hysterical, holding some ugly thing you delivered to her, shrieking, I know! I know! I know!”
He slapped his hand against the counter so loudly Sarah jumped. Formal looking papers were balled up in his fist.
“You delivered the wrong thing and a divorce, you stupid b—”
Deli “tripped” and threw a vase at the man’s feet, fuming at the injustice.
It was so incredible to feel something else besides the thrumming hurt that she smiled as the sound of shattering glass swallowed Big Papa’s slur and sent him leaping back.
Sarah turned slowly, with her shoulders next to her ears, to find Deli standing behind her with her empty hands still curled in the shape of the vase-turned-projectile.
Deli glared at the man, unblinking. “Oops.”
“I’ll . . . I’ll get the broom,” Sarah said, but Deli stopped her.
“Actually, can you please check on the vendor out back?”
There was no vendor waiting for them, but Sarah got the message and nodded, teary eyed as she walked straight out the back door.
The man glowered. “Are you the manager?”
Deli raised an eyebrow. “Are you Big Papa?”
Big Papa’s nostrils flared as he took a step back. “Read my lips, girl. I want a refund.”
Deli MacDonald had been called far worse than girl by worse people, and she’d always kept her cool.
She’d stood right there while men projected their failings, belittling and cruel, while demanding her services, and it hadn’t blipped her radar.
But when Big Papa called her friend bitch, and called her girl, she got an idea.
Everything about her had been hurting, until she felt the hot lick of anger, and she thought, for just a second, Maybe I can burn it all away.
That was all it took.
“What did your wife think of her flowers? I made them just for her.”
“You?” His face mottled crimson. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
Deli shrugged, completely detached from what was going to happen to her now that she’d made her choices. She was sick of men who saw lost gazelles and licked their teeth.
“My guess is, I saved your wife forty sexless years of her only life spent bleaching the skid marks out of your undies.”
Splotchy patches of blue joined Big Papa’s bright red face. He looked like a rotting thing. “Come say that to my face, you fat, ugly bitch.”
Deli didn’t hesitate as she stepped through the gate. Glass crunched under her foot.
“Delilah!” Paola reached them from the back of the shop in record time. “Wait for me in my office.”
“Bu—”
“Now.”
Deli stalked through the shop and slammed the office door, muffling the sound of Big Papa’s yelling while Paola tried to talk him down, and nearly rattling a photo off the wall.
It showed Paola and her daughters, visiting the home Paola had grown up in in Mexico and flanked by her smiling parents, and Deli felt a sick surge of guilt for endangering Paola’s business with her impulsive recklessness.
By the time Paola returned, the heat of Deli’s anger had died and left behind soot-filled spaces for her misery to reclaim.
She slid down the wall and wept as Paola closed the door behind her, snagged the tissues off her desk, and slid down the wall, too.
“Deli, honey, what happened?”
Deli told her boss everything, and Paola listened as she ran her nails over Deli’s back—just the way Deli’s mom used to when she was very small and Lorraine hadn’t started paying for expensive manicures yet.
When Deli had recounted the way Trey made her wonder if he’d ever kissed her, the way Trey had begged her to let them stay the same while he loved someone else, had let her confess her heart and then leave—Paola took a breath and said, “Deli, I think it’s time you take a break. ”
Deli blew her nose into her tenth tissue. “I already took my fifteen minutes.”
“That’s not what I mean, Deli. You’re almost thirty years old, and you’re working your life away in a flower shop that’s not yours. Where are you gonna go from here?”
“It’s a good flower shop. It matters to people.”
“Yes, it does, and it will matter to people whether you’re here or not. You are not supposed to get stuck here.”
Deli pretended to really consider taking time off—like it wouldn’t be severing her last tether to someone she could count on to be there when they said they would. “I think I want to stay at the shop. I’m already feeling better. See?” She smiled as big as she could.
Paola did not. “I’m afraid it’s not your choice.”
There it was. The last of her herd, disappearing on the horizon.
Deli blinked in disbelief. “You’re . . . you’re firing me?”
Paola’s eyes were soft, but her voice was unyielding. “You just nearly started a fistfight with a customer. You went rogue on the arrangement.”
“It was just a mistake, Paola. One mistake—”
Paola’s skin was warm as she placed a hand on Deli’s arm. “You don’t make mistakes. Plus, you said skid marks.”
“But . . . he made Sarah cry! And you know how often we see men cheat like that—fifteen years they’d been married, Paola. Didn’t she deserve to know? Didn’t he deserve to—”
“It’s not fair, I know.” Paola squeezed Deli’s arm, and Deli remembered that Paola knew more than most about being married to a man who sent roses to another address.
“I’m sorry,” Deli said, unsure which of her apology-worthy antics she was referring to. She’d never been fired before. She didn’t mess up like that. She didn’t fail. “Please, Paola—”
“That marks the second vase of mine you’ve killed in a week—and one you’ve tried to steal, if you count the vase in your foot.
” She held a hand up at Deli’s attempt to interject.
“You’ve been distracted, Deli. And more importantly, it doesn’t fit you anymore.
This job, this place—you need something new. ”
“I don’t want to go.” Another thing she’d broken, slipping through her fingers.
Paola pulled Deli into her arms. “Sometimes things are done with us before we’re done with them.”
Deli surveyed the landscape of her life—so vastly different from what it had been just twenty-four hours before.
Paola didn’t need her anymore, Trey had Scarlett, her family was .
. . her family, and something was really, really wrong with Chloe.
She peeled herself from the ground and left the office.
Deli hung up her apron for the last time and wondered how she’d gotten there.
“Delilah? There’s more for you out there.” Paola’s eyes welled. “Take a leap. Go find it.”
Deli wasn’t sure if the sound she made as she left was a laugh or a cry or somewhere in between, but she knew it was a goodbye to the woman who had once gone far from home in search of something more.
Paola had created a place of belonging for so many.
Loneliness threatened to knock Deli off her feet as she felt the places she’d always belonged growing thin.
She tossed her things in her car and slammed the trunk closed to find Sarah waiting and wringing her hands.
“You’re leaving?”
Deli nodded. “Yeah.”
Sarah looked her over, worry creasing her creaseless forehead. “Are you feeling okay?”
“No,” Deli whispered. “Headache.”
“Oh, um . . . what happened?”
“I sabotaged his marriage.”
“I didn’t mean with that asshat. Thank you for that, by the way.”
Deli shrugged her shoulders.
“I meant what happened with . . . with Trey?”
“He, you know . . .” Deli tried to say it simply. “He didn’t.”
Sarah’s jaw moved back and forth and her fingers wrapped around her wrist, twisting the skin. “So . . .” she said. “He’s still pretending you’re just friends?”
“He wasn’t pretending,” Deli said as she slid into her car. “I was.”
Sarah put one hand on the door and leaned down. “No, Deli. You weren’t.”
Deli stuck the key in the ignition, impatient. She had to leave to do . . . What was she going to do now? “I’ll see you later, Sarah.”
Sarah’s words came out in a jumble. “I know it’s not my place, and if I’m crossing a line you can hate me forever—but I’ve been watching you two for a long time, and I think I know why Trey doesn’t get it.
He’s always had you—being there for him.
Like, Trey has no idea what his life is like without you in it.
He makes you act like a girlfriend, but he doesn’t know the difference.
He doesn’t know. The one time you actually started to move on, he freaked out.
” She raised her eyebrows. “Deli . . . I think he needs to lose you.”
Trey’s voice, so clear it felt cruel, rang in her memory. I knew you’d come.
She thought of her family—the way they beckoned for Deli and the way she always responded, despite how little they seemed to notice. She thought of her best friend—after a lifetime of counting on Deli to meet her at the lunch tree with tissues in her pockets—suddenly gone.
Things had gone so bad, so quickly. Whatever she and Trey had been twenty-four hours before was already buried.
How was Deli supposed to wake up in the same bed, put on the same clothes, drive the same streets, and live the same day over and over again—like she hadn’t just seen something precious die?
Then Deli thought quite suddenly of a torn photograph and an envelope full of money with her name written in her Grandma’s loopy script.
She thought of her aunt—once a woman Deli loved so much her cheeks would ache from laughing together—far away from the mother and grandmother who always seemed to need.
And Chloe, who had never had to learn what to do when your best friend vanished.
It wasn’t just Trey who believed Deli would come when they called.
An idea was churning in her head.
“Sarah,” Deli said, “you’re a genius.”
“What are you gonna do?”
Deli felt a thrill as the words rolled around in her mouth. Maybe her life could be glued back together. Maybe she could fix it.
She grinned.
“Disappear.”