Coin Sink

My name is Iris Leland, I'm twenty-nine years old, and I have been standing in a convent garden since seven in the morning waiting for a flower delivery that is now forty minutes late.

The garden belongs to a working convent in a village so small the bakery closes at noon, and the nuns lease out the rose beds for weddings to keep the roof on, which is how a woman who plans weddings for a living ended up here in October with a clipboard and a grudge. The fountain in the middle of it all is cracked down one side and layered with coins, because every local kid for the last sixty years has thrown a coin in and made a wish, and I was one of those kids, and so was he, and we'll get to that.

So it's seven forty when the van finally comes rattling up the gravel, and I'm already moving before it stops, and out steps Jarrod Ashford, thirty-two years old, flower delivery driver, the last person on this earth I wanted to see before nine in the morning. He looks the same. Taller than I remember wanting him to be, same crooked grin, same rolled sleeves.

"You're late," I say.

"Traffic on the ring road, a tractor, and then a cow, in that order," he says, walking around to the back of the van like a man with nowhere better to be, which apparently he doesn't, because he opens the door and pulls out the first bucket of roses and I can see from six feet away that they're wrong. The petals are soft at the edges. Brown at the tips. Wilted.

"Jarrod. Jarrod, look at these."

He looks. "Yeah, that's not great."

"Not great? These are for a party tonight. Neal's party. These roses are supposed to be the centerpiece of Neal's party and they look like somebody already had the funeral."

And here is where he does the thing that makes me want to throw my clipboard into the fountain, because he sets the bucket down slow, and he looks at the order sheet, and he says, "You booked the delivery slot, Iris. Six a.m. pickup, coffin-hour, cheapest one on the list. Flowers sit in a van for three hours at that price."

"I needed them here early because the tables go down at eight."

"I needed them alive," he says, "which is a different requirement, and one you didn't ask about."

I open my mouth to explain exactly how wrong he is and how many years I've been doing this and how many weddings I've saved from worse, and instead I turn on my heel and stomp toward the fountain to look at the space where the arrangements are supposed to go, and I catch my toe on the cracked lip of the stone, the old cracked lip that has been there since before either of us was born, and I go down hard on both knees right in front of sixty years of other people's wishes.

"Ow. Ow, ow, ow!"

He comes over. He doesn't run, but he comes over, and he crouches down next to me, and I'm sitting in the gravel holding my foot as a child would, and he says, "That fountain's been tripping people since before Neal planted the east beds. You'd think we'd have learned."

"We? There's no we, Jarrod, there's a delivery contract and a seating chart."

"Sure," he says, and offers me a hand up anyway, and I take it, because my other option is staying on the ground, and my toe is throbbing in a way that suggests I'll be limping through this entire party. He pulls me up easier than he should be able to, and then he lets go fast, like he remembered something, and I remember it too, at the same second, and we both pretend we didn't.

Because here's the thing I don't say, which is that four years ago, when I was twenty-five and he was twenty-eight, we slept together exactly once, in the back room of the village hall during somebody else's engagement party, and the next morning we stood in this exact garden and managed roughly eleven words between us, and then he moved away six months later, and he's been back two years, and we have never once talked about it. Not once. Not even sideways.

"You're staring at the coins," he says.

"I'm staring at the fountain. It's on my site plan."

"Everything's on your site plan."

"Everything should be on my site plan. That's the whole point of a site plan."

He almost smiles at that, and I walk away before he can finish it, toe screaming, and go find the kitchen, because if I stand next to him one more minute I'm going to say something I can't take back, and I have a retirement party to build and a reputation to protect and a foot that is already swelling inside my shoe.

Lilly Crane is in the convent kitchen, thirty years old, kitchen manager, sleeves to the elbows, surrounded by trays, and she does not look up when I come in, which is a mercy. She has been prepping for Neal's party for three days and she has made it clear that people who enter her kitchen need to either help or leave, so I pick up a knife and start trimming the ends off leeks, and for ten minutes it's just the two of us and the sound of cutting, and I actually feel my shoulders come down.

Then she says, "The seating plan for sixty needs to go to the printer today."

"I know."

"Neal's cousin is coming from Lyon, and she can't sit next to her sister, they've been fighting since Easter."

"Lilly, I know."

"And the nuns want their own table at the front, but Sister Marguerite wants to sit with the garden volunteers, so somebody has to decide, and that somebody is you."

I put the knife down. "Lilly. I plan weddings. I do weddings. I do flowers and vows and a first dance and a grandmother seated away from the open bar. I do not do staff retirement parties, this isn't even my event, I got dumped here because the Marchetti wedding in Paris imploded and somebody had to be punished, and the punishment was this."

She keeps cutting. "Uh huh."

"And I don't even know these people. I know Neal, sort of, from when I was a kid hanging around the garden, but sixty seats? Sixty seats of people I've never met, with cousin politics from Lyon?"

She finally looks up, and her face is doing something patient and terrible. "Iris. Who got you this gig? Not the Marchetti thing. Before that. Who called the agency and said the convent needs an event person for Neal's party and the only name she trusts is the Leland girl who used to pick beans for him?"

I open my mouth and nothing comes out, because the answer is Neal, it's always been Neal, Neal taught me the coin game at this fountain when I was small enough to need a boost to see over the rim, throw a coin and don't look where it lands, just wish, he told both of us, me and Jarrod both, back when the two of us were still friends, back before everything, and he never once asked what happened between us, though Lilly watched the whole fight from the kitchen window one summer afternoon and never asked either, which I've always been grateful for.

"So," Lilly says, turning back to her leeks. "Sixty seats. Printer by noon."

"Fine," I say, and it comes out quieter than I mean it to. "Fine. I'll do the seating plan. But I want it on record that my toe is broken and I'm doing this through pain."

"Your toe is not broken, you're just dramatic. Your mother said you were dramatic in the cradle."

"My mother never met you, how does she know you?"

"Neal's sixtieth, two years ago, we sat together, lovely woman, terrible opinions about soup."

I laugh before I can stop myself, and Lilly almost smiles, and then the kitchen door bangs open and it's Jarrod, holding a bucket of roses like an apology he doesn't know how to say, and Lilly looks between the two of us with the expression of a woman who has been waiting four years to see what happens next.

"The good lilies came in," he says. "Separate shipment, I checked them at the depot, they're fine. And I can be back this afternoon with fresh roses, if somebody books the noon slot this time."

I look at him, and at the lilies, white and firm and exactly right, and I say, "Book the noon slot," and he says, "You're the planner, you book it," and Lilly says, "For the love of God, I'll book the slot," and writes it on the wall calendar herself, and the two of us stand there in her kitchen not looking at each other while sixty wishes sit in a fountain outside, getting rained on.

By early afternoon the rain has stopped and the garden smells like wet gravel and old stone, and I am standing at the fountain with my sleeves rolled up, fishing coins out of the basin with my arm in the water up to the elbow, because the tablecloth budget is forty euros short and I refuse to call the agency and admit that the retirement party of a man who taught me to throw coins is going to run out of fabric. The coins are disgusting. There is a layer of green slime down there that has been accumulating since before I was born, sixty years of wishes turning to sludge, and every handful I pull up comes with a smell like a church pew cushion from the fifties. I have a bucket going, mostly two-cent pieces and old francs that stopped being money before either of us could drive, and I am telling myself this is a legitimate asset recovery strategy and not a sign of a woman unraveling, when I hear a voice behind me.

"You have got to be kidding me."

Jarrod is standing at the fountain's edge with an empty crate under one arm, and he is looking at my bucket, and at my arm, which is in the fountain, and the look on his face is the look of a man watching someone commit a small crime in broad daylight.

"It's Neal's money," I say, which sounds worse out loud. "Sort of. It's the fountain's money, and the fountain is Neal's, in a way, and I need forty euros for tablecloths."

"You're paying for tablecloths with wishes."

"I'm paying for tablecloths with coins, Jarrod, the wishes were already used, they're spent, it's recycling."

He puts the crate down on the rim and shakes his head at me, slow, like I'm a weather event he's given up predicting. "You know what this is? This is you. This is exactly you. The budget is short so you dig through sixty years of other people's hopes rather than ask anybody for anything, because God forbid one single thing happen that you didn't schedule and approve and color-code."

"Oh, that's rich, from the man who showed up forty minutes late to his own delivery."

"Forty minutes, once, and you've mentioned it eleven times."

"It's been one morning, there's time for more."

"You know what I mean." He steps closer, and his voice drops into that flat, careful register that means he's stopped joking. "You've been doing this since we were kids. Everything planned down to the last cent, everything in your control, and the second something isn't, you find a way to make it be. Neal asks for one simple party and you're out here strip-mining the fountain."

And I don't even think about it, honestly, that's the part I'll tell myself later, that there was no decision in it at all, just two hands on a soaked jacket and a shove, and then a splash, and then Jarrod Ashford is sitting in the shallow basin of the cracked stone fountain in October, in about eight inches of cold green water, with a look on his face like the whole garden has personally betrayed him.

We both stand there. Somewhere a nun is beating a rug over a balcony rail, unhurried, like this happens every day.

"Well," he says finally, from down in the basin.

"You were saying something about control."

"I was standing in your fountain and you pushed me into it."

"You were being insufferable in my fountain. It's different."

He starts to laugh, which I did not expect, a real laugh, helpless, echoing a little off the wet stone, and he holds his arms out to the sides as a man would surrender to the water. "Forty euros, Iris. You could have just asked Lilly for forty euros. She has a petty cash tin in the flour cupboard, I've seen it."

I look at the bucket, which contains perhaps eleven euros in mostly unusable coins, and at Jarrod, who is dripping, and I feel the laughter start in my own chest and come out before I can stop it, and for a second we are just two people laughing at a fountain like we used to be