I said no to Coach Teague for exactly one day. Then I said yes, with conditions.
I wrote the conditions on the back of a Thornapple order slip, because that is what I had. Then I slid it across the counter to her and Hap like a ransom note.
1. Nobody gets laughed at who doesn’t laugh too.
2. I am not on the jumbotron. I am a florist.
3. Billie Pardo says yes, herself, or nothing happens.
Coach Teague read it twice. Then she took out her marker and drew a check mark beside each one. Beside the third, she stopped.
“Billie’s at an away preseason game till Friday,” she said. “I’ll ask.”
She asked. The next morning Hap came by the shop with a folded sheet of Tempest notepaper. He handed it to me and stepped back, like a telegram boy in an old movie.
There were three words on it, in small, upright handwriting.
Tell her yes.
Underneath was a pair of initials, B.P. Under that, almost too small to read, she had added a fourth word.
Finally.
That night, after closing, I did something I had never done in seven years. I read the Ledger out loud.
Not all of it. Volume Four alone runs to two hundred pages. But Coach Teague wanted the comebacks. So I sat on a stool behind the counter and read them to the strangest audience the shop has ever held.
Juno sat on the cooler step under BONK DEFENSE, hugging a bucket of white stock. Virgil sat on an overturned crate, still in his hardware apron. Hap took the customer chair. Coach Teague stood at the whiteboard she had wheeled in from her car, because of course she owns a portable whiteboard.
“Entry 412,” I read. “Category W. Grocery store, cereal aisle. ‘How’s the weather up there?’”
“What’d you write?” said Virgil.
I looked at the comeback column. My handwriting from five years ago looked back.
“‘Partly cloudy. Your bald spot has a forty percent chance of sunburn.’”
There was a pause. Then Virgil, who has a bald spot, slapped his knee and laughed so hard the crate creaked.
“That’s mean,” I said quickly.
“That’s accurate,” said Virgil. “Do another one.”
I did another one. Then another one.
Entry 1,089, Category R: Sure, I’ll get it. What do you do on the days I’m not here, starve? Entry 1,644, Category G: Giraffes are nine to eighteen feet. I’m an underachiever. Entry 2,203, Category I: Thank you. I’ve been wondering for years.
Juno started keeping score on the back of an order slip. Hap had his notebook out. He was laughing silently, the way people laugh in libraries.
At the whiteboard, Coach Teague drew a column for KEEP and a column for TOO MEAN FOR A FAMILY ARENA. Entry 412 went in the second column. Virgil asked if he could have it framed.
We stayed until eleven. By the end, we had forty comebacks in the KEEP column. My voice was hoarse. And I understood something I had not understood in seven years of keeping the book.
I had always thought the Ledger was a record of the jokes. It wasn’t. It was a record of the answers. It was seven years of me, being quick and funny and right, with nobody to hear it.
Now there was a whole room.
Here was the plan, as drawn by Coach Teague on a whiteboard in a flower shop.
The guys in section 112 had been coming to Tempest games since the team was founded. They were loud and loyal, and every home game they held up cardboard signs. HOW’S THE WEATHER UP THERE, BILLIE? BILLIE, GRAB ME A CLOUD!
They were not cruel men, Hap said. They were mostly plumbers, and they loved Billie. They just had no idea how to say it.
So we would answer them.
Every time a weather sign went up, the big screen would answer with a forecast. It would be a comeback from the Ledger, in big storm-gray letters. Under it would be a small line: Forecast courtesy of Thornapple Flowers.
And at the gate, anyone who traded in a height-joke sign would get a free carnation. The team would also give a dollar to the public basketball courts in Tarrow Bay, which had needed new hoops since before I was born.
“Who’s paying for the carnations?” I asked.
“The team,” said Coach Teague.
“At four dollars a stem,” said Juno immediately.
Coach Teague looked at her for a long moment. Then she wrote $4 on the whiteboard and underlined it.
There was one more thing. The team wanted flowers at the main entrance of the Tidewater Arena for opening night. Not centerpieces this time. An arch.
“How big?” I asked.
Hap checked his notebook. “The doorway’s fourteen feet.”
I have built arches for weddings. A wedding arch is about eight feet tall and built for two people to stand under looking hopeful. A fourteen-foot arch is not a wedding arch. It is a structural event.
We built it in sections in the back of the shop.
Blue delphinium, white hydrangea, silver dusty miller, long sprays of gray-green eucalyptus, all on a frame Virgil welded in his back room. Juno named every section. The left column was called Home Opener. The right column was called Home Opener Two: The Reckoning.
And then there was the van.
Persephone, as I have mentioned, is fifty-two inches tall inside. A fourteen-foot arch, even in seven sections, is a geometry problem that florist school never covered. It took three trips, a borrowed pickup from Virgil and one section strapped flat to a ladder. Juno rode in the back again, apologizing to each section by name at every pothole.
At the arena, the scissor lift was “with the concert crew.” Juno and I looked at each other. Somewhere in the universe, a ladder truck was with the parade committee.
So I built most of it from the floor. For the top four feet, I stood on Virgil’s orange stepladder while Hap held it steady with both hands and an expression of enormous responsibility.
“Left,” he said. “Little more. You’re short on the left.”
I stopped with a stem of delphinium in my hand and looked down at him.
“Hap,” I said. “Nobody has ever said that to me.”
“First time for everything,” he said. And wrote it down.
I want to tell you about the doors.
When the arch was done, I went inside to wash my hands. The Tidewater Arena has a service tunnel that runs from the loading dock to the court. The doors along that tunnel are nine feet tall. They were built for the players, for equipment carts, for anything that might need room.
I walked through four of them before I noticed I hadn’t ducked.
I hadn’t calculated. I hadn’t glanced up at the frame and done the quiet arithmetic I do in every building. I had just walked, the way I imagine most people walk through most of their lives.
I stopped in the tunnel and stood there for a minute. Nobody was around. It was very quiet. I went back and walked through the last door again, just to feel it.
It’s a small thing, a door. I don’t know why I needed to sit down on an equipment case for a while afterward. But I did.
I hadn’t logged a single entry in nine days. The players never joked, and the arena crew was too busy. Somewhere along the line I had stopped bracing for it.
Then, at five o’clock, as I was misting the arch, a man in a navy Tempest jersey came through the front doors early. He was in his fifties, carrying a rolled-up cardboard sign under his arm. He looked up at the arch, then up at me on the stepladder.
“How’s the weather up th—” he started.
He stopped. He looked at the sign under his arm. He looked at the arch, and then at the line printed on the card at its base: Forecast courtesy of Thornapple Flowers.
“Oh,” he said. “Oh, you’re her.”
His name was Boyd Tolbert. He was a plumber. He held out his sign with both hands, like a man surrendering a sword, and asked where he could get his carnation.
I logged him anyway. Entry 2,999. Category W, incomplete.
That left one.
The gates opened at six. Eleven thousand people were about to walk under my arch, and I was one joke away from three thousand.
Up next: Entry 3,000
Continue to Part 6 →