I did not bring sneakers. I want that on the record.
I wore my work boots, my canvas apron and the expression I use for brides’ mothers. I brought thirty centerpieces, two hundred feet of ribbon, a glue gun and Juno. I did not bring sneakers.
“You could have refused the order,” Juno said, as we loaded the van.
“The rent is due on the fifteenth.”
“You could have charged him a sneaker fee.”
“I did,” I said. “It’s called the setup charge. I tripled it.”
Juno considered this with respect. Then she looked at the centerpieces, lined up in the cooler in their black cylinder vases. Each one was a tower of curly willow, rust-colored mums and burgundy amaranth hanging down like velvet rope. The willow went up almost four feet.
“These are called Overtime,” she said.
Our van is a white delivery van with a cracked side mirror and a hand-painted sign. Its name is Persephone, because she goes underground every winter and comes back, against all odds, every spring. Persephone has a roof height of exactly fifty-two inches inside.
Thirty four-foot centerpieces do not fit in a fifty-two-inch van standing up. This is the central problem of my profession, and no florist school teaches it. Flowers are tall, vans are short, and every delivery is a game of geometry played against the clock.
We laid them down in rows, on a bed of moving blankets, packed with rolled towels so nothing would roll. Juno sat in the back with them like a nurse. Every time I hit a pothole she said, “Sorry, Overtime.”
The Tempest practice facility was out past the causeway. It was a long gray building that looked like a warehouse that had been promoted. The loading dock had a door wide enough for a truck.
Hap Talmadge was waiting at the dock in his windbreaker. He was holding a basketball.
“Maude,” he said warmly. “No sneakers?”
“No sneakers.”
He wrote that down. I could see him do it.
“What did you write?”
“Strong-willed,” he said. “That’s a plus.” He held out the ball. “Want to take a couple of shots before setup?”
I took the ball, because he was holding it out and I was raised to take things people hand me. Then I walked it over to a folding chair and set it down very carefully, as if it were a sleeping animal. I went back to the van.
Entry 2,946. Category B, nonverbal. I invented the subcategory on the spot.
The banquet was in the main gym. The court had been covered in heavy black floor panels, and round tables filled it from baseline to baseline. A screen at one end showed last season’s highlights on a loop. Most of the highlights involved the same player.
She was very tall even on a screen, and she moved like someone carrying a tray through a crowd. Her jersey said PARDO.
“Billie Pardo,” said Hap, appearing beside me with a centerpiece I had not asked him to carry. “Our center. Six-seven. Best hands in the league.”
“Is she coming tonight?”
“Billie doesn’t do banquets,” he said. “Billie hasn’t done an interview since July.”
“Why not?”
He set the centerpiece down on the wrong table. I moved it. He watched me move it and wrote something down.
“She’ll tell you herself,” he said. “When you’re on the team.”
“Hap.”
“When you’re in the building,” he corrected. “Same thing.”
The head coach of the Tidewater Tempest was a woman named Dorrit Teague. She was forty-eight, wore a gray quarter-zip and had a dry-erase marker clipped to her collar like a pen in a lab coat. Hap had warned me about her on the way in.
“She draws plays,” he said. “On everything. Don’t leave a napkin near her.”
She came over while I was unloading the third row. She did not say hello. She looked at the van, at the dolly, at me and at the long hallway to the gym.
Then she took a paper towel off my cart and drew on it with the marker. She drew a rectangle, two circles and a series of arrows.
“You’re carrying them one at a time,” she said. “That’s sixty trips.
“Put your assistant on the dolly at the door. You run the hallway. I’ll put two rookies on the inside. Handoff at the corner.”
“They’re centerpieces,” I said. “Not a fast break.”
“Everything’s a fast break,” said Coach Teague. She handed me the paper towel and left.
It worked. Two rookies in warm-up suits, both in their early twenties, came to the corner and took the centerpieces from me like relay batons. We were done in eighteen minutes.
I kept the paper towel. It is in the Ledger now, folded in half, at entry 2,951.
Entries 2,947 through 2,950 were the rookies. They were very polite about it. One asked if I was a free agent.
The other asked if I had a twin, so the Tempest could sign the twin instead. I gave them both B, and I gave the second one a small star for creativity.
There is a door at the end of that hallway, the equipment room door. It is an ordinary door, the kind every building has. I ducked it out of habit.
So did the rookie behind me.
We both looked at the doorframe. Then we looked at each other.
“Six-five,” she said.
“Six-four.”
“You learn,” she said. She tapped the top of the frame twice, like a superstition, and went back to the dock. I found myself, briefly and ridiculously, wanting to tap it too.
Here are some numbers.
On an average day at Thornapple Flowers, I log three or four entries in the Ledger. On a big wedding day, with a full guest list and an open bar, I have logged as many as eleven.
At the Tempest Tip-Off Banquet, between seven and nine p.m., I logged eighteen.
It was the donors. The players had nothing to say about height, any more than fish have opinions about water. But the donors were people who owned car dealerships and dental practices. They had paid two hundred dollars a plate to stand near tall women, and I was the tall woman who wasn’t busy.
“So which position do you play?” Entry 2,955.
“I’m the florist.”
“Is that, like, a forward?”
Entry 2,956. I gave that one a full star.
Hap made it worse. He moved through the room like a man with a secret he wanted everyone to guess. He introduced me to the team president, two sponsors and a radio host as “Maude, a prospect.”
“A florist,” I said, each time.
“A florist prospect,” he agreed.
Between introductions, I watched him. He did not watch the screen, or the players, or the donors with their checkbooks.
He watched the doors. He watched who held them, who waited, who went first. Every few minutes he made a note.
I wanted to be angry with him. Mostly I was curious, which is worse, because curiosity lasts longer.
It happened during the dessert course.
A man at table nine, a sponsor in a camel blazer that cost more than my van, stood up to make a toast. He lifted his glass. He also lifted, with his elbow, the curly willow of the centerpiece beside him.
I was two tables away, refilling a water pitcher I had no business refilling. I saw the willow go up. I saw the vase tip. I saw it lean, very slowly, toward the four lit candles in the middle of table nine.
I put down the pitcher and reached. I reached between two donors and over a cheesecake. I caught the vase at the neck and set it upright.
A single rust-colored mum fell onto the cheesecake. Nobody else moved.
“Thank you,” said the sponsor, glass still raised.
“It’s called Overtime,” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else.
Somebody started clapping. Somebody else joined in. Across the gym, Hap Talmadge was writing so fast that his reading glasses fell off his head. Coach Teague looked up from a napkin she was drawing on, looked at me, and said one word.
“Huh.”
I learned later that eleven people had their phones out for the toast. I learned this the next morning at six forty-five, when Juno called me at home. She never calls before eight, because she believes mornings are a rumor.
“Have you looked at your phone?” she said.
“I’m looking at my ceiling.”
“Look at your phone.”
I did. There was a video. It was nine seconds long, and it had been watched six hundred thousand times. It was me, reaching across table nine, catching a vase.
Someone had slowed it down and put music under it. The caption said: TEMPEST FIND THEIR NEW CENTER… AT A FLOWER SHOP??
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