The Bouquet Test

I turned sixty-four in March and my niece threw me a party at the diner, and somewhere between the cake and the toasts I realized I'd been on eleven first dates in two years and not one second date. That sounds worse than it is. Half of those were men my sister set up from her church group, and the other half I found myself on the dating app that my daughter installed on my phone when she got tired of hearing me complain. The men were all fine, that was the problem. Fine men who talked about their blood pressure medication before the appetizers came and who looked genuinely startled when I expressed thoughts about anything.

I own the flower shop on Main Street in Dry Creek, the one between the diner and the feed store, and I've had it for twenty-two years now. A florist learns things about a town that nobody else knows. I know who buys apology flowers and who buys anniversary flowers and who buys the good orchids for their mistress, and I keep all of it to myself because that's what a woman in a small town does if she wants to keep her doors open.

Anyway, that's the state I was in when the church fair planning committee pulled me back in.

Pastor Wills had called me in February, said they needed fresh blood on the fairground committee since old Marta had finally retired to her daughter's place in Sacramento, and I said yes mostly because it got me out of the shop on Tuesday nights. The first meeting of the season was in the church basement, and I came in late with my hair still damp from the shower, and that's when I saw him.

Danny Kowalski, sitting at the folding table with a coffee, looking older and wider and grayer and somehow exactly the same.

We'd gone to community college together back when we were in our twenties, him studying construction management and me taking floriculture classes, and we'd run in the same loose crowd for about three years. And the whole time I had this crush on him that I never once acted on, because I was seeing a man named Roger then, and Danny was with somebody too, and I figured the feeling would either pass or matter. It passed. Then we lost touch the way people do, and I heard through the grapevine he'd married in his thirties and divorced about ten years back, and that was the end of that particular thread.

"Camille?" he said, and he was already standing up, already coming around the table, and I noticed he'd gotten there before I'd decided anything.

"Danny Kowalski," I said. "You got old."

"You got gorgeous, so I guess we're even." He gave me a quick hug, careful, the kind you give somebody you're not sure you're allowed to touch. He smelled like sawdust and aftershave.

We sat together through the whole meeting, which was mostly about parking and porta-potties, and honestly I couldn't have told you a word of it afterward. He was sixty-five, he told me, retired from contracting three years ago, and he ran the fairground setup now because he couldn't stand being idle. His hands were big and knuckly on the table and he gestured with them when he talked, the same way he always had.

Afterward he walked me out to my car, past the feed store where the lights were already off, and he stood there with his hands in his jacket pockets like a man working up to something.

"So here's my pitch," he said. "The fair's supposed to have a floral display this year, a real one, not the sad arrangement the church ladies throw together. Committee voted on a budget and everything. I want you to do it."

"I run a flower shop, Danny. That's literally my job."

"I know that. What I'm offering is the fair job, which is a bigger one than you think, and it's yours, full stop, no strings. What I'd like first is a trial run. One week. You build me some samples so the committee can pick colors and I know what to build for." He grinned at me, and it was the same grin, the one from the college parking lot in 1985, and I felt it land somewhere I'd thought was closed for renovations. "Call it a test of the committee's patience. Everybody loves a test."

"Everybody does not love a test," I said. "But fine. Trial run. When?"

"Tomorrow. Come by the fairground office and I'll give you the specs, or better yet, I'll come by the shop and watch you work. I've always wanted to see it."

And that's how he ended up in my shop the next morning at eight sharp, with two coffees from the diner and a look on his face like he was a child set free in a candy store, which I suppose a retired contractor in a flower shop qualifies as.

***

He sat on my work stool, which I'd told him twice was for customers, and watched me process the Wednesday delivery. Forty stems of larkspur, a box of garden roses from the grower up north, some eucalyptus that had gotten crushed in transit and needed salvaging. He kept up a running commentary the entire time, and I couldn't decide if it was charming or a test of my patience, and by the third hour I'd decided it was both.

"You're cutting that stem at an angle," he said. "Why an angle?"

"So it drinks more water. You'd know that if you'd ever kept a flower alive in your life."

"I kept a peace lily alive for six years, thank you very much. Harold. His name was Harold."

"You named a plant Harold."

"He was a good plant, Camille." He was leaning his elbows on my counter now, watching my hands, and I noticed him watching my hands and pretended I didn't. "What's that one called?"

"Ranunculus. And don't touch it, you'll bruise the petals."

"I wasn't gonna touch it." He touched it. Gently, actually, turning the bloom toward the light with one fingertip, careful as anything. "They look like paper. Like somebody made them out of tissue paper and layers."

"Everybody says that. You're not original."

"Was I original in college?"

I stopped with the shears half-closed on a eucalyptus stem and looked at him, and he was looking back with that same grin, the one that said he remembered something too but was going to make me say it first.

"You were tolerable," I said.

"Tolerable. Well." He sat back on the stool and crossed his arms, and I went back to my cutting because if I didn't my hands were going to shake a little and I wasn't ready to show him that. "For your information, I drove forty minutes this morning to sit on a stool and watch a woman trim stems, and I'd call that more than tolerable on my end."

The shop was quiet then, just the cooler humming and the radio I keep tuned to the country station, and I wrapped a bouquet in brown paper because my hands needed something to do. When I turned around he was holding the ranunculus again, turning it over slow.

"Danny," I said. "Why are you really here?"

He set the flower down on the counter, careful, and thought about it before he answered, which I appreciated, because I've had enough men answer me fast in my life.

"Honest answer? I heard you were on the committee and I signed up the same week. The fair display was real, the trial run is real, but I came to see if the thing I remembered about you was still there." He shrugged, big shoulders moving under his flannel. "It's there."

I looked at the man for a minute, sixty-five years old, gray in his beard, holding a ranunculus like it might bruise, and I thought about eleven first dates and none of them making me feel anything at all.

"Well," I said, and picked up my shears again. "The trial's not over yet. Sit back down."

He sat back down. And I caught myself smiling at the eucalyptus like a fool.

He came back Thursday for the second round of samples, and Friday, and by the time the week was up I'd made nine arrangements and he'd made forty comments and drunk eleven coffees, and somewhere in there it had stopped feeling like a trial and started feeling like something I didn't have a name for yet. So when he leaned on the counter Friday afternoon and said, "You free Saturday? I want to buy you a piece of pie," I said yes before I'd even thought about it, which is not like me. I think about pie purchases. I think about everything.

"I'm free Saturday," I said.

"Good. Diner, two o'clock. Wear something you can eat rhubarb in."

"Is that a joke about my figure, Danny Kowalski?"

"It's a joke about rhubarb. It's stringy. I've got a strategy for it."

***

The diner was doing its usual Saturday business, which meant the Lutheran ladies had a corner table and Roy was on his third coffee and the whole place smelled like bacon grease and burnt coffee, and I'm not going to lie, that smell is half of what I love about this town. Danny was already there when I walked in, two o'clock sharp, sitting in the booth by the window with his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead like he'd forgotten they were there. He'd combed his beard. I noticed. I wasn't going to say so.

"You're punctual," he said, sliding the menu across.

"You're surprised."

"I'm impressed. There's a difference."

We ordered, and I got the rhubarb because apparently I have no pride, and he got the cherry, and he did in fact have a strategy for the rhubarb, which involved forking it apart into strings first, and I laughed so hard the Lutheran ladies looked over. It was a good laugh. It came up from somewhere old.

We talked about the fair for about ten minutes, and then we were done with the fair, and then there was that pause that happens when two people have run out of safe topics and both know the next one isn't safe. He stirred his coffee. I ate my pie and let him stir.

"You want to ask me something," I said. "You've got your stirring face on."

"My stirring face." He set the spoon down. "All right. Fair enough." He looked out the window at the feed store across the street, then back at me. "You ever wonder what would've happened? Back then. You and me. In college."

I put my fork down, because that was not the question I expected and I needed my hands free for whatever came next. "Danny."

"Because I did. I wondered for about three years straight, and then we all graduated and scattered, and I wondered it about once a year after that, usually in February, don't ask me why February." He shrugged. "And I'm sixty-five now, and I've learned that not asking things is the thing I regret the most in my life. So I'm asking."

"You were with somebody else."

"And you were with Roger. I know. I'm not asking what we should have done. I'm asking if you wondered."

The rhubarb was sitting there going warm and I picked up my fork again mostly to have somewhere to look. "Once," I said.

"Once."

"Fine. More than once. Are you happy now?"

"Yeah," he said, and he grinned, that same grin, and I threw my napkin at him and he caught it without even looking, contractor reflexes, apparently they never leave. "Camille. I'm not trying to make you squawk. I just figured we're two adults, we've got the time, and I always wondered what it would be like to kiss you, and I'd rather die knowing than die wondering."

I laughed, because it was such a blunt way to say it and because my face went hot and laughing was the only cover I had. "Well, don't die about it. Eat your cherry pie."

"You're dodging."

"I'm eating pie. There's a difference, apparently."

He laughed at that, a real one, and we dropped it, and we talked about his granddaughter and my daughter and whether the feed store had gone downhill since the old owner died, and it was easy, the way it had been easy in college, and that ease was exactly what scared me. Easy is dangerous. Easy is how you end up somewhere you didn't plan to be.

He walked me to my car, and he stood there with his hands in his jacket pockets, and I could tell he was doing math about whether to try something, and I got in the car and said, "Not today, Danny," and he said, "Okay," just like that, no push, and drove off whistling. And then I sat in my car in the diner parking lot for a good four minutes thinking about a kiss from 1985 that never happened.

***

Monday he showed up at the shop with coffee again, and this time instead of sitting on my stool he said, "I've got a better offer. I do woodwork, you know. Little stuff, since I retired. I've got a shop behind my house, and I've been building display risers for your fair arrangements, and I'd like you to come see them before I finish them. So they actually fit what you do."

"You built me risers?"

"I built you risers. Come look at them and tell me what's wrong with them. You strike me like someone who'll tell me what's wrong with them."

"I'll tell you what's wrong with everything. It's my best quality."

"So come Thursday. Six o'clock. I'll feed you first, I'm not a barbarian."

His house was out past the water tower, a