I had only learned about flowers so that I could be closer to her. Flowers were beautiful before then, but never meaningful to me. They were never a way for me to gaze deeply into the soul of somebody and to understand them, and to love them, whatever their faults, whatever the problems they labored under.
She worked at a flower shop out in the county. Is working there still. Worked there since highschool. May very well work there until she dies. That shop or another. The location’s not important. The flowers are what’s important. They seemed like all she’d ever known. That and the death of her mother, and the coming death of her father, and the long string of failed relationships she never tired of talking about or comparing ours to. All the way back to when she was fourteen and pregnant and terrified on a table as some mall-clinic doctor vacuumed out her uterus.
It only makes sense that she’d surround herself in growing things, really. Holding them close to her face, filling up on their aromas. She always made me smell whatever she brought home. And I’d always do it happily, asking her all kinds of questions about the flowers. About their leaves and petals, and varieties and growing conditions, and what kinds of flowers and filler normally went together, and when she got married, what kinds of flowers did she want to have in her bouquet? And I learned that what makes a beautiful flower arrangement is to be able to find both a rhythm and a balance.
Lilly of the Valley smelled the best. Better than all the others combined. And what a sweet little plant that is out in the wild. Just gorgeous. Its rows of delicate little white bells, and its broad healthy leaves, hiding the bells like the treasures they are. She said a woman at work had cut these ones for her. They were out of season. Marie, I think her name was. The two of them shared some sort of special bond.
I used to always make jokes to her, about how, “Just you wait and see! Soon, I’m gonna know more about flowers than anybody in the history of the world! And when I do, I’m gonna open a flower shop in this city that’s gonna run everybody else out of business, and you’re gonna have to come work for me!”
And she would laugh and laugh. She loved it, I could tell, when I boasted about my burgeoning knowledge of flowers, and when I could start to identify not only different flowers, but different varieties too. I was careful and observant. I looked at the shapes of their stems, and the way their leaves went, and the coloring and markings and shapes of their petals. I referenced and cross-referenced and asked questions whenever we were at her shop, or at her friend’s shop. Which was several times a week.
Our relationship started in her shop, actually. On Valentine’s Day. Her friend had been trying to set us up for the past few weeks. I’d really been taking my time about the whole thing, being into her, but not sure if I should really get involved. When I say that, I mean, intuitively, I knew I shouldn’t get into it with her, and I was spending the past several weeks trying to overcome that intuition. But on Valentine’s Day, I finally gave in. I let her friend load me up with a bouquet which I’d helped pick out, and a card, and John drove me up to her shop to make the delivery. I walked in a little nervous, peering through and around all the flowers, looking for her. I had to ask somebody where she was. She came out of the back, stood among the flowers there. I handed her the flowers I’d brought. She turned redder than anything in the shop.
I decided to leave the city when things started getting weird between us, when she started pulling back, and barricading herself inside. I’d tried. I’d tried really hard and patiently, and lovingly. I was careful and observant. I’d almost gotten her to come out. I thought I’d done it the Sunday morning we woke up and cleared out her overgrown garden under the stairs up to her apartment. We filled up trash bags and trash bags of pulled weeds and empty beer bottles.
Things started to grow there again really quickly. Lilly of the Valley. Some tulips, though they never blossomed. I thought I’d done it. Was proud of myself for doing it. For coaxing her to come back into this part of her heart that she’d abandoned at some dark point in her past.
I don’t know what did it though, after that I mean. I don’t know what made her shut the gates on what we’d done together. But I know, for me, exactly where and when it ended. It ended one night on her bed, looking at this little postcard of a flower she had hanging up by her alarm clock.
“Is this a phaleonopsis orchid?” I asked her.
“No, I don’t think so,” and she said what kind of flower she thought it was.
But I was sure, I’d been looking at how the stem bent around, and how it met the petals.
“I’m pretty sure it’s a phaleonopsis orchid,” I repeated smiling, joking to cover my certainty.
She assured me that it wasn’t, but took the tack out of the postcard, took it down and read the back.
“Damn,” she said. “You’re right.”
In a letter to her later, I told her how I’d seen Venus shining just underneath the moon from my brother’s porch. Beautiful and mysterious, and important. And how it made me think of her. And I told her how whenever we drove by a flower shop here, I’d always crane my neck as we passed, peeking in the windows, peering through the flowers. Always half expecting to find her there, among them all. Radiant and quiet. Her sleeves rolled up. I’d never see her, but she was there. And she always would be.
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