The Last Bouquet

I've done four hundred weddings, give or take. I've never once gotten nervous over a bouquet until this one.

My name is Sonya, I'm twenty-eight, and I run the flower workshop trailer on the north end of the studio lot. It's a small operation. Coolers, a work bench, buckets of stems lined up like soldiers. The productions hire me to dress their sets. Fake gardens, hotel lobbies, funeral scenes. Flowers that have to look a certain way for a camera and then get tossed by Tuesday.

I like the work. It's quiet, mostly. People wander in, ask for something pretty, wander out. The PAs treat me like furniture, which is fine. Furniture gets left alone.

That morning I was conditioning ranunculus in the sink when I thought about him again. I'd been thinking about him for three days, ever since I saw his name on the call sheet taped to the production office door. Nigel Ashworth. Supporting role, the judge in the courthouse scenes. I'd read the name twice before it clicked.

Because I owed that man something. Not money. Something worse and better than money. A debt with no invoice.

Here's how it went. Five years ago, when I was twenty-three and green as a stem, I was the lowest assistant in the props department on a small film shooting out near Van Nuys. Lowest of the low. I carried things and got yelled at and got paid barely anything. One night I missed the last bus. This was before I could afford a car, before I could afford much of anything. I stood at that bus stop at eleven at night doing math in my head. Cab was forty dollars. I had eleven.

And Nigel Ashworth pulled up in an old Volvo, still in half his costume, and rolled down the window.

"You're the girl from props, aren't you? The one who fixed the peonies?"

"They were wilting. I put them in warm water."

"Saved the take, I heard." He'd glanced at the bus schedule, then at me. "Get in. Where are you?"

I told him. He drove me all the way across town, twenty-five minutes, and he talked the whole time about nothing. Gardening, actually. His mother's roses in some English village I'd never see. He dropped me at my door and said, "Good night, flower girl," and drove off before I could say anything at all.

He never asked for anything. Never mentioned it again, not once, the remaining two weeks of the shoot. I was too broke and too stupid to say thank you properly. I said it fast, mumbled, and then I was out the car door and he was gone.

Five years I've carried that. You'd think a thing that small would shrivel up. It didn't. It grew. When I was broke and cold and ready to quit the business, I thought about the Volvo. When I finally had my own shop, then lost the shop, then landed here, I thought about it. A stranger being decent with nothing in it for him. It kept me going, some nights.

So anyway. Three days of knowing he was on my lot, and I hadn't done a thing about it. Typical. I could arrange three hundred stems for a fake funeral and not manage one thank-you note.

"Sonya?" A head poked into my trailer. Vanessa, one of the PAs. Sweet, twenty-three, always running. "Do you have the courthouse arrangements ready? They want them by morning."

"Almost. Another hour."

"Okay. Oh, and soundstage six needs corsages Friday, don't forget." She turned to go, then stopped. "Is that for wrap gifts? The big one?"

I looked down at what my hands had been building without my permission. A huge arrangement. Ranunculus, garden roses, eucalyptus, some trailing jasmine I'd been hoarding.

"No," I said. "That's, uh. Personal."

"Pretty. Who's the lucky person?"

"None of your business, Vanessa."

"Okay, okay!" She laughed and ran off.

I finished it anyway. I had to, by then. My hands had committed. Creamy whites and soft yellows, nothing loud, nothing that shouted actor. Something a man could keep on a table without feeling silly.

Now I just had to find out where to put it. I caught Vanessa on her third lap past my door.

"Quick question. Nigel Ashworth. Which trailer?"

"He's in eleven." She pointed north. "Right past craft services. Why?"

"No reason. Asking for a friend!"

"Your friend has good taste. Everyone says he's the nicest guy on the lot. I carried his coffee Tuesday and he learned my name. First try. Who does that?"

"Nobody does that," I said, and she grinned and ran off again.

Trailer eleven. Six down from mine. I'd been six trailers away from him for three days. I picked up the bouquet before I could talk myself out of it.

The lot at lunch was a mess of golf carts and grips eating sandwiches. I walked fast, bouquet up like a shield, feeling completely ridiculous. Forty feet from his trailer I nearly turned around twice. At thirty feet I did turn around, took three steps back toward mine, then cursed and turned again.

This is a thank-you note, I told myself. That's all it is. Five years late. You're not asking him for anything. You're not even asking him to remember you.

I knocked. No answer. Of course, he was working. I stood there a second, then did the coward's move and the brave move at the same time. I laid the bouquet against his door, weight on the stems, propped so it wouldn't slide, and tucked the note into the ribbon.

The note said:

Nigel. Five years ago you drove a soaked, broke assistant home from a bus stop in Van Nuys and never asked a thing for it. I've wanted to say thank you properly since then. It was the flower girl. She has her own flower trailer now, six doors down. Thank you. Sonya.

Then I walked back to my trailer, sat down among my buckets, and felt like an idiot for roughly eleven minutes.

He probably wouldn't remember. He'd been fifty-three then, working steadily for decades. He'd given a hundred kids a hundred rides, probably. I was one damp evening in a long career. The bouquet would sit there, a PA would eventually move it, and that would be the whole story, and fine. At least it would be said. The debt would be off my chest.

I buried myself in the corsages for soundstage six. Tiny white orchids, twenty-four of them, fiddly work. Good work for an anxious mind. My hands steadied as I went.

At around four, a shadow crossed my open door.

I looked up and there he was. Older, sure. Grey through the beard now, lines around his eyes that hadn't been there. But the same easy way of standing, a man who'd learned long ago that rushing never got him anything worth having. He was holding the bouquet. And he was looking at me.

"Sonya," he said. He tried the name out like a wine he wasn't sure about.

"Yes!"

"I know that name. I know that name from a note taped to a bouquet I'm now holding, and I know it from somewhere else, and it's driving me mad." He came two steps in, uninvited but somehow not rude about it. "Van Nuys. Bus stop. Warm water on the peonies."

My mouth fell open. "You remember the peonies."

"I remember the peonies, the rain, and the fact that you looked like you'd cry if I didn't stop talking about my mother's roses." He smiled. It was a good smile, worn in. "Twenty-eight now?"

"How did you know that?"

"The note said five years. You said you were twenty-three back then, that night, when I asked why an assistant knew anything about cut flowers." He held up the bouquet. "Nobody's given me flowers since I don't know when. Leading ladies get flowers. Character actors get gas money and a handshake."

"You got a thank-you note. It came with flowers. It's a package deal."

"Five years late." He set the bouquet carefully on my work bench, right between the orchids and the shears, like it belonged there. "You know what I was thinking the whole drive home that night?"

"That my apartment was depressing?"

"That too. No. I was thinking, this girl will be all right. Anybody who fights that hard over a bunch of dying flowers has something in her." He looked around the trailer, at the buckets, the coolers, my name on the door. "And here you are. Proved myself right."

I laughed. It came out shaky. "I've replayed that ride about two hundred times. I always meant to say thank you better and I never got the chance. Then three days ago I saw your name on a call sheet and I've been a coward ever since."

"Three days. I've been three trailers down, eating terrible craft services, and you've been here being a coward."

"Six trailers."

"I counted wrong. Six trailers." He picked a ranunculus out of the bouquet and turned it in his fingers. "Well. Thank you for the flowers, flower girl. And you're welcome for the ride. Are we square now?"

"Not even close," I said. "But it's a start."

"Good." He pulled up the one other stool in my trailer and sat down like he had all afternoon. Maybe he did. "Tell me what happened to you in five years. Start with how a girl with eleven dollars ends up with her name on a door."

He listened. That was the first thing I noticed. Some people ask a question and then spend your answer loading their own next line. Nigel didn't. He sat on my second-best bucket and actually listened.

"It's not a long story," I said. "Eleven dollars was the low point. There was a year of terrible jobs after that. A grocery store. A wedding factory in Burbank, forty corsages a Saturday, no love in any of them."

"Forty."

"Some Saturdays fifty. Bride would want baby's breath. I'd want to die." I put the kettle on the little hot plate. It takes forever, but the waiting gives your hands something to do. "Then a florist named Bobbi took a chance on me. She's retired now. I bought her van."

"Is it a good van?"

"It apologizes for itself. Usually over potholes." I handed him a paper cup of coffee. It was decent coffee, which surprised me, because I'd bought it three weeks earlier and forgotten about it. "So. Your turn. Five years. What's Nigel been doing?"

"Working. Which at my age is the whole gift." He blew on the coffee. "Fifty-eight now. There's a shelf of roles I used to get and don't, and a new shelf I never wanted. Dads. Judges. One very memorable coroner."

"The coroner was good."

"You saw that?"

"My mom watched it twice. She said you were the only believable thing in it."

"Your mother sounds like a critic I should hire." He settled back. The stool creaked and he ignored it. "Honestly? The last few years have been quiet. Divorce was nine years back, so that's old news. Kids are grown. My daughter calls on Sundays. And the work keeps coming in smaller doses, but it comes, and I keep showing up. That's the trade."

"That sounds lonely when you say it fast."

He looked at me over the cup. "It does, doesn't it. I didn't mean it to."

"Too late. It's out."

The kettle clicked off. I turned the hot plate down and sat on my crate, the good crate, the one that didn't wobble. Outside, a golf cart went by with a director yelling into a phone. Inside it was just us and the smell of cut stems and old coffee.

"Tell me about that night," he said. "From your side. I only ever got the wet version."

"There's not much to it. I was twenty-three, first real job, assistant to an assistant on that terrible pirate movie."

"Salt Kingdom."

"You remember the title."

"Everyone remembers the title. It's the only thing people remember about it."

"Fair." I wrapped both hands around my cup. "The peonies were for the funeral scene. The one they cut, by the way. Two weeks of my life on flowers for a scene that's in no version of anything."

"That's show business, flower girl."

"I know. I know that now. At the time I thought I'd get fired. There'd been a mix-up with the order and they arrived half dead, and I was hydrating them, trimming, sugar in the water, everything Bobbi ever taught me, and the AD comes over and says wrap it, scene's gone, and I just. Lost it. Right there in front of the craft services table. Crying over peonies."