On weekdays, the first person to ask me about the weather is Virgil Rennick. He asks before I have the key in the lock.
“How’s the weather up there?”
“Morning, Virgil.”
He nodded, satisfied, and went back to sweeping the sidewalk in front of Rennick Hardware. He has swept that sidewalk every morning for forty years. He has asked me about the weather every morning for seven. Neither of us has ever missed a day.
I let myself into Thornapple Flowers, turned on the lights, and took the green notebook out of my apron pocket. I turned to the tally page at the back, the one headed VIRGIL, and added a mark. Then I put the notebook away and went to feed the cat.
I should explain the notebook. People who find out about it tend to look at me as if I had confessed to keeping teeth in a jar.
I am six foot four. I am thirty-two years old, and I own a flower shop on Harbor Street in Tarrow Bay. These three facts, in my experience, are the only three facts most strangers need before they say something.
They say, “How’s the weather up there?” They say, “Do you play basketball?” They say, “You must be a model,” and then, looking at the bucket of wet eucalyptus in my arms, “Or not.”
They ask me to get things down from shelves in stores where I do not work. They tell me how tall I am, in case I had lost track.
For years I said nothing. I smiled the polite smile, the one that uses the fewest muscles. Then I went home and thought of the perfect answer in the shower, forty minutes too late.
Seven years ago, on the day I opened the shop, I bought a green clothbound notebook at the pharmacy. I wrote “The Ledger” on the cover in silver marker. And I started writing everything down.
Every entry has a number, a date, a location and a category. W is for weather. B is basketball.
R is reach, as in “Can you grab that for me, hon?” I is informational, as in “Do you know how tall you are?” There is a category G for giraffe, which gets its own letter out of respect for its staying power.
Then there is the last column, the one that matters. In the last column I write what I should have said.
I never say it. That’s the rule. The comebacks go in the Ledger and nowhere else.
Except for one exception, written on the inside cover in the same silver marker. At entry three thousand, you may say one out loud.
I had done the math. At my usual rate, I would reach three thousand sometime in the spring. I had been saving a comeback for it since the first page.
On the morning this story starts, the Ledger was on Volume Four, and the last entry was number 2,941.
Virgil does not count toward the total. Virgil has his own page. I logged him once, as entry number one, on the morning I opened the shop. After that, Virgil stopped being a joke and became a weather system.
“That one,” said Juno, pointing at a bucket with her shears, “is called Second Marriage.”
Juno Strickland had worked for me for three years. She was twenty-seven, studying for a horticulture certificate one class at a time, and she named every arrangement that left the shop. She did this the way other people name boats, with total commitment and no explanation.
I looked at the bucket. Orange dahlias, one lonely protea, a spray of something purple.
“Why Second Marriage?”
“Because it’s trying harder than it needs to,” she said. “And it’s going to be fine.”
I didn’t argue. I had learned in our first month that arguing with Juno about names was like arguing with weather. It had its own plans.
It was the first week of October, which meant the Harvest Market. Every lamppost on Harbor Street got a wreath of wheat, bittersweet and dried hydrangea. The town paid me for forty wreaths. The town also, every single year, forgot to send the ladder truck.
“Did they send the ladder truck?” I asked.
Juno checked her phone. “They sent an email saying the ladder truck is ‘with the parade committee.’”
“The parade is on Saturday.”
“The parade committee,” Juno said, “is also with the ladder truck.”
So I did what I did every year. I hung them myself.
I want to be clear. I am not a hero about my height, and I am not a victim about it either.
Mostly I am a person who has thought a great deal about doorframes. The cooler door at the back of my own shop is six foot two. I hit my head on it so often that Juno taped a foam pool noodle across the top. She labeled it, in marker, BONK DEFENSE.
But there are days when being six-four is simply useful. Lampposts in Tarrow Bay have a hook at about eight feet. With a long arm and a short wreath, I can reach it. It takes me about forty seconds a post.
By the twelfth lamppost I had a small audience. I usually do.
“How’s the weather up there?” said a man with a stroller full of pumpkins.
Entry 2,942. Category W. I smiled the small smile.
“Do you play basketball?” said a woman holding two leashes.
Entry 2,943. Category B.
“You could just do the whole street without a ladder,” said a man in a fleece vest. He seemed new to the concept of what I was doing.
I didn’t have a category for that. I put it under I and made a mental note to review the system.
At the nineteenth lamppost, the hook was bent. I had my arm up and the wreath halfway on when the wind came off the harbor. The wreath tipped. It slid off the hook, bounced once off the iron post, and spun out toward the street.
I caught it. I didn’t think about it. My left hand went out and closed on the wheat stalks while my right was still on the post. Then I turned and hung it back on the hook, bent side down, so the wind couldn’t get under it again.
There was a short, pleased silence from the sidewalk. A couple of people clapped.
And a man in a navy windbreaker stopped writing in a little spiral notebook and looked up at me.
He was in his early sixties and a few inches shorter than the people around him. He had a gray crew cut and reading glasses pushed up on his head. The windbreaker had a logo on the chest: a wave curling into a funnel cloud. Under it, in white stitching, it said TIDEWATER TEMPEST.
He came straight over, notebook still open.
“Hap Talmadge,” he said, and held out his hand. “Tidewater Tempest. PWBA.”
I shook it. “Maude Tennant. Thornapple Flowers.”
“Do you know what the PWBA is?”
“A tax form?”
“Premier Women’s Basketball Association,” he said, and didn’t seem offended.
“Professional league. Eight teams. We play at the Tidewater Arena, out by the causeway. I’m the scout.”
“That’s nice,” I said. I meant it. I was also already reaching into my apron for the Ledger, because I knew what was coming. I had heard this song before.
“How tall are you?”
Entry 2,944. Category I.
“Six-four,” I said.
He wrote that down. “You ever play?”
Entry 2,945. Category B. “No.”
“Not in school? Not rec league?”
“No.”
He looked genuinely puzzled, the way some people look at a parking ticket. Then he looked at the wreath, still swinging slightly on the bent hook. He made another note.
“What are you writing?” I asked.
“Left hand, no hesitation, wind correction,” he said, reading it back. “Didn’t look at the wreath. Looked where it was going. That’s a thing you can’t teach.”
“I’ve hung a lot of wreaths.”
“Tryouts are in nine days,” he said. “Open session. I can get you in the gym.”
“Mr. Talmadge, I’m a florist.”
“Hap.”
“Hap, I’m a florist. I have twenty-one more lampposts.”
He nodded slowly, as if he’d expected this answer. He had probably expected it so often that he’d started enjoying it. He took a business card from his windbreaker. When I didn’t take it, he tucked it, very politely, into the wheat of the wreath I was holding.
“Lovely to meet you, Maude,” he said. And he walked off down Harbor Street, writing.
I took the card out of the wreath. HAP TALMADGE, it said. DIRECTOR OF PLAYER PERSONNEL.
Under it someone had written, in ballpoint, You don’t have to know how. That’s what practice is for.
I put it in the Ledger as a bookmark and finished the street.
When I got back, Juno was at the counter with the phone pressed to her chest. She wore a look I had seen only once before. That time, a customer had ordered a funeral wreath shaped like a jet ski.
“Big order,” she whispered.
“How big?”
“Thirty centerpieces. Tall ones, branches and everything. The Tempest Tip-Off Banquet, next Thursday, at their practice facility.”
I stopped untying my apron.
October is slow. October is always slow. The rent on Thornapple Flowers is due on the fifteenth, and I had been doing the arithmetic on a napkin every night for a week.
“Who placed it?”
Juno held out the order slip. She had written it down word for word, the way she does when she suspects something will become a story.
Thirty centerpieces. Setup by the florist, in person. Under special instructions, in Juno’s neat print, it said:
Bring sneakers.
Up next: Load-In
Continue to Part 2 →