Grampy Fernside's Arc

Chapter 16 of 16

Grampy leaned on the cane and watched Delphine finish watering the row. Twelve green hooks. Six blue stones over sleeping seeds. One pink stone with nothing under it. He had walked every hedge and fencerow this week and found no cutting, no volunteer, no seedling that matched the flowers already up. The bouquet needed nineteen. He had eighteen coming, and a hole where the last should stand. "Grans keeps things," Delphine said. She had not looked up from the jug. "In that painted box. On the shelf above the stove." "What box." "The wooden one with the hearts. She showed me once. She said it was full of you." He knew the box. He had carved the hinges himself. He had not opened it in thirty years, and he could not think what a keepsake chest had to do with a missing bloom. But Delphine was already walking to the burrow, and he followed with the cane biting the path. Grans was at her writing nook by the window, her tea steaming beside an open book. She looked up once, said nothing, and turned a page. Delphine climbed the stool and lifted the painted chest down with both hands. She set it on the table in front of him. Inside lay a stack of folded notes, a dried sprig of rosemary, and a small cake topper of two gnomes in ivory, holding each other by the wrist. Under the topper was a scroll tied with a pink ribbon. He untied the ribbon. The paper was brittle at the edges. It was his own handwriting, forty years younger, listing what he had promised her on the morning of their wedding. He read down the list. Tomatoes. A bench by the door. A song on her birthday. And near the bottom, in a line he had forgotten writing: nineteen blooms of the pink kind, one for every year until we stop counting. Folded inside the scroll, flat and dry as paper, was a single pressed flower. Pink. Five petals. The exact match of the seeds he had spent the season coaxing from dirt. "That's one of yours," Delphine said. "From before." He held it to the window. The petals were thin as moth wing but whole. Grans had kept it forty years in a box he had built her. He could not plant a pressed flower. But he could set it in the empty spot beneath the cloth, stem in the soil, and the bouquet would read nineteen when she lifted the cover. Eighteen alive and one remembered. He tucked the flower into his shirt pocket, closed the chest, and reached for the cane. Grans turned another page and did not look up. "Whatever you found," she said, "put the box back where it was." He did. Then he walked out to the bed to place the nineteenth bloom.