The Homecoming
Page 20

The shop was empty. Only Grace was working. None of her part-timers were in. The bulk of the design work was done by Grace herself. And she got right back to it, indicating a stool at the worktable for Iris. It appeared Grace was designing a romantic arrangement, perhaps for a wedding or anniversary—white with green-and-red accents. Lilies, roses, baby’s breath, fluffy white hydrangea in a large glass vase.
“You look very serious,” Grace said. “What’s going on?”
“It’s about Seth,” she said. “We had it out. Cards on the table. I didn’t plan it but launched a full frontal attack, a confrontation. I really let him have it.”
“Well, Iris, I suppose you should’ve done that a long time ago. This has been eating at you for years and if you’ll forgive me saying so, it seems you were a little over-the-top about the prom thing.”
“There was a lot more to it than the prom,” Iris said. “It’s between you and me, right?”
“Right, of course. But what more?” she asked, as she kept clipping and slipping stems into her arrangement.
“Well, remember how I told you I rescued him from that party when he was drunk?”
“Yes. And he was mad at his girlfriend and asked you to the prom and then unasked you when he made up with her and then—”
“We had sex,” Iris said.
Grace stopped arranging. She looked at Iris over the hydrangea. “Sex?”
Iris nodded. “He got all sentimental and touchy, told me I was the only girl he loved, started kissing me and it just went where that sort of thing usually goes. We got naked. In the flower van. Except he was drunk and I was a young girl who had lived for him to notice me as a female and not a buddy. I couldn’t see that it was one of those stupid, groping, meaningless—”
The bell on the front door of the shop jingled. Grace’s mouth was hanging open. Her eyes were fixated on Iris. “I will kill whoever that is. Don’t lose your place.” She dashed out of the workroom.
Damn the luck, Grace thought as she saw her customer. It was old Barney Wilcox. He came by every week or so, poked around at the flowers, made conversation, left after spending a couple of bucks on a single flower for his wife of fifty-two years. He was there as much out of boredom as affection for his bride.
Grace took the bull by the horns. “Barney, so nice to see you. Listen, I’m rushing to meet a deadline and don’t have much time. Can I fix you up with a beautiful hydrangea stem in a vase for about three dollars?”
“That would be nice, I suppose,” he said. “But I—”
Grace dashed to the back room, plucked a stem out of her arrangement, plopped it in a slim vase, tied a length of white ribbon around it and sped out to her customer.
“Think that will make Mrs. Wilcox happy today?”
“I think so. Thanks,” he said.
“Three even,” she said. He paid her and she rushed back into the workroom. “Okay, I think I left you somewhere around ‘meaningless nudity,’” Grace said.
“I didn’t realize he didn’t mean any of it,” Iris said. “I was so inexperienced. I was a virgin. I figured it out when he clearly didn’t remember it. By the time I got my clothes buttoned, he’d passed out. And when he asked me if I wasn’t making too big a deal out of that prom thing I knew—he had no idea. He’d blacked out.”
“Oh, Iris. That’s been hurting you all this time?”
“I don’t know what hurt me more, his forgetting or the fact that I let it happen. But a couple of weeks ago he was cutting my grass on Saturday morning and I stormed outside to tell him to go away because I was sleeping. Sometimes I get a little crabby when someone wakes me up before I’m ready,” she said. “And he said exactly the same thing that he said that night in the flower van. ‘Come on, Iris. I need you.’ And I totally lost control. I decked him.”
Grace’s mouth fell open. “As in hit?” she whispered.
Iris nodded. Her chin quivered.
“You hit a police officer?”
She nodded again. “Knocked him flat. A felony. Maybe.”
The bell jingled. Grace looked at the ceiling of her little flower shop. “Am I being punished for something?” she said. She dashed into the store.
“Jeremy,” she said. She sighed. Another infrequent customer who never bought much and loved to talk. Jeremy was one of the young guys from down at the marina, so in love with his pretty little wife but without much to spend. She’d been fixing him up with single blooms for a long time. “How are you?” she asked.
He puffed up a little. “I guess you could say I’m perfect. Janie had the baby! A boy! Just like we thought! And wow, is he big—over nine pounds, twenty-one inches, and we sat up through the night before he decided to come. His feet are so big they’re like skis. I was there the whole—”
“I have just the thing,” Grace said. She ran back to the workroom. She looked at her stash of accessories, grabbed a pair of blue baby shoes, pulled a length of blue ribbon from the ribbon dispenser, stuck the shoes in the arrangement she’d been working on, tied the ribbon around the vase in a nice bow, filled the vase half-full with water and ran it back into the shop. “Here you go, with my sincere congratulations!”
“Wow, that’s pretty big. I don’t know if I can—”
“From me to you,” she said. “To celebrate the birth of your son!”
“You can’t believe how hard that labor was and how much I really had to help,” he said, holding the arrangement in the crook of his arm. “And the doctor said—”
“I can’t wait to hear all about it, Jeremy! Please promise to come back and tell me all the details when we both have more time. I’m in a rush and I know you want to get those flowers to your lovely wife.” She walked around her counter, led him to the door, tried not to push him out too zealously, and flipped the Open sign to Closed. She locked the door and ran back to the workroom. “Okay, when I left you, you had just committed a felony. And I closed the shop.”
“You closed?”
“I’m not opening that door again until I know everything! Did you knock him out?”
“No. But it sure surprised him. He had no idea why I’d do that.”