Chapter 10
SIENNA
“Ma’am, I want to say up front that none of this was my idea.”
The driver has his clipboard flat against his chest like a shield.
Behind him the lane is full. His van is nose-in at the gate with the back doors standing open, there is a second one behind it, a third has put two wheels up on the grass because there is nowhere else to put them, and a fourth is coming down the hill with its indicator on for a turn it cannot make yet.
I heard the engines and came out without drying my hands.
“How many?”
He checks. “Sixty-one.”
“Sixty-one arrangements.”
“Three shops. Nobody had the stock alone.” He shifts the clipboard. “The tall ones have to go on their sides or they don’t clear the doors, and I want you to know I did that carefully.”
The nearest one is on my step already, hydrangeas the color of a bruise healing, in a glass cube I could not lift with one arm. There is a little envelope on a plastic fork. I open it.
Sienna. Call me. Cade.
His handwriting. I would know it anywhere.
Surely all of these aren’t handwritten. If he went to all three shops himself, he was here in town, close enough to find my lane, and he did not come to the door.
I do not know if that makes it better or worse.
“They all say that,” the driver says. “I’m not supposed to know that. But we load them in the shop and the cards go on last.”
“All of them?”
The driver nods. “Every one. He went to every shop to sign them.”
In the first month of the marriage Cade came home with carnations from a bucket outside a grocery store, holding them upside down like a man who had never carried flowers in his life, and I kept them until they went brown, and nobody in an office ordered those.
“How do you take it?”
“Ma’am?”
“Coffee?” I say.
“Black, two sugars.”
He stands in my kitchen with the mug in both hands while I put the card in my cardigan pocket and get my phone off the windowsill, and he tells me his route, which was supposed to be a wedding at eleven and a hospital at two.
Then I start making calls.
The nursing home on the ridge answers on the second ring.
I get the activities director, and I say I have a large number of fresh flowers arriving at my house by mistake and I would like to give them away today, and would her residents have any use for them.
There is a silence I recognize. It is the silence of a woman waiting for the catch.
“There’s no catch,” I say. “There’s no charity, there’s no photograph, there’s nobody coming to be thanked. It’s a delivery I’m refusing and I’d rather they went to people than a dumpster.”
“How many are we talking about?”
“Tell me your limit first.”
She laughs. Then she says nothing scented on the memory wing, because scent sets people off in ways that take the rest of the day to settle, and no lilies anywhere near the dining room because of the pollen on the tablecloths, and can I promise there are no lilies.
I put my hand over the phone. “Are there lilies?”
The driver leans through the door and reads down his manifest with his lips moving. “Eleven with lilies in.”
“Eleven have lilies,” I tell her. “Those go somewhere else.”
The second home is smaller, twenty-two beds, and the woman who answers is out of breath and takes four arrangements before I finish the sentence, then takes nine, then says she has a resident who’s had a rough week and would love some flowers.
Then I call the shelter in the next town over.
The shelter director listens to the pitch without interrupting. She explains their safety rules in plain sentences: drop-offs happen at the intake office by the highway, stripped of cards, no names attached.
“I’ll send the best of what’s here,” I say. “The white roses. The ones designed to look like a fortune.”
“You don’t want to keep those?”
“No,” I say. “I’d rather someone there enjoyed them. The cards come off before anything leaves my lane.”
“All of them?”
“Every one. They go in my trash, not yours.”
“Then who are they from?”
I look out the window at the lane, where the fourth van has finally worked out the turn and is reversing toward the gate.
“Tell them a woman had more flowers than she could use.”
She is quiet for a second. Then she says, “Come by sometime. Don’t bring anything.”
The shop is the only one that fights me. I call the florist and the owner picks up, very sorry and very firm: the recipient cannot redirect an order, only the purchaser can, and there is a signature required, and also, he says, I should know the order is standing.
“Standing.”
“There’s a standing daily delivery until further notice, ma’am. The gentleman was clear.”
The driver looks at the ceiling.
“Then take my refusal,” I say. “I’m not signing for any of it.
And before you spend an afternoon driving all the pieces back to a cooler to die, let me give you three addresses that are all inside twenty minutes of each other, and your man gets home earlier than he would have, and I’ll say your name to everybody I know up here, which is more people than you’d think. ”
The owner gives in first. He tells the driver to take the three addresses.
I sign the refusal against the door frame. Then I go up the lane in my socks, because I am not going back inside for shoes, and I go van to van pulling the little envelopes off the plastic forks. I open a few as I go. Every one is the same. My name. Call me. His name. His handwriting on every card.
The last card comes off an arrangement of white roses tight as a fist, taller than the van’s shelf, and the driver takes that one from me and says it retails at hundreds of dollars, and I say I believe him.
Then I stand in the lane with a fistful of envelopes and text my husband.
I didn’t accept the flowers and I won’t accept any others. Stop. Donate the money to a good cause.
I put the phone in my pocket next to the one card I kept, and I wave the other three vans out one at a time, which they need, because the turn is bad and the ditch is worse.
I send my driver off last with the last of Barbara’s shortbread in a napkin.
He asks if I am all right in a way that suggests he has been building up to it since the step, and I tell him the flowers are the most interesting thing that has happened in my lane in a while, which is true, and he leaves laughing, and the lane is empty and smells like a funeral.
The scent of flowers still hangs in the lane when Patricia’s car comes down the hill.
She gets out with a bottle in one hand and a casserole dish in the other and does not go for the door.
“We passed a florist’s cortege on the coast road,” she says.
Nancy gets out of the back seat while Barbara peers back up the road.
“Four vans,” Barbara says, getting out the other side with her tin. “I counted.”
They stand in my lane. Nobody moves toward the house. Patricia looks at me over the roof of the car. I watch her decide, then stop pretending she hasn’t.
“All right,” she says. “We’re asking now. We’re going to be very unpleasant about it.”
Inside, Barbara puts the kettle on without being told, Nancy takes the chair by the window, and Patricia sits down at my kitchen table and folds her hands.
They know his name. They know the broad shape of it, the company, the arrangement, the grandfather. What they do not know is why I am here.
So I tell them about the gala. I tell it plain, in order, and it takes less time than it should. Barbara puts her hand over her mouth before I am halfway through and leaves it there.
Then the questions come, and they are not gentle.
“Did he ever put a hand on you?” Patricia asks.
“No.”
“Is there another woman?”
“There’s a woman. But I don’t think he slept with her.”
“Is there money?”
“Mine is mine. It always was. I don’t need anything from him and I won’t be taking anything.”
“Did you leave, or were you left?”
“I drove out at two in the morning.”
“Good girl,” Patricia says, and Barbara mouths Patricia, and Patricia says, “What? She is.”
“Does he know where you are?” Barbara asks.
“He came up here. Three flower shops. He wrote every card I opened himself.”
The table is quiet for a beat.
“Does anybody down there know where you are?”
“One person. I have not asked her not to say.”
Patricia folds the dish towel into a square and sets it flat on the table. “And what does a man like that do about it? They don’t sit still.”
“He calls. He sent flowers.”
“He sent a floral parade.”
Nancy has not said one word.
Barbara turns from the stove. “Was he cruel to you, sweetheart?”
I hear myself answer before I have chosen to.
“He was never cruel. He never raised his voice, not once in two years. He never lied to me, not even at the end, when a lie would have been kinder. He never forgot a birthday. Every material thing I ever asked for, I got.”
Patricia sets down her glass.
“Do you hear it?”
“Hear what?”
“You just read me a list of things that did not happen.” She says it without heat, which is worse. “Sweetheart, I have made that same list twice. Mine even rhymed.”
The kettle gets loud and Barbara takes it off and nobody talks while she pours, and the sound of pouring is the whole room for a while.
Then Nancy, from the chair by the window, dry as salt:
“All those years, my husband never once sent me flowers to apologize. He just never did anything that required a fleet to apologize for.”
Barbara laughs into her hand and then looks stricken about it. Patricia does not laugh. She watches Nancy, because Patricia has known her longer than the rest of us and she can hear a run-up when it starts.
Nancy is not finished. She turns her head from the window, and she is not being funny anymore.
“A man who has to send that many flowers is a man who knows exactly how much he owes.”
Nobody answers her. Barbara puts a cup in front of me that I did not ask for.
My hand has been in my cardigan pocket for a while, holding the corner of the card. Sixty envelopes went in the trash. I kept this one.
In two years of marriage he never once left me a note on the counter, not on a birthday, not on our anniversary, not once in answer to the hundreds I left him, signed with my name, and sometimes with little pictures, hoping to make him smile.
Every card I opened was in his handwriting, and all he had for me was call me.
I cannot throw it away. I should. But I cannot.