Violet Evergreen's Arc

Chapter 3 of 11

Two weeks passed the way they had to. Violet watered the greenhouse. She packed a small bag. On the morning of the drive, she stood at her front door with her keys in her hand and realized she had nothing to bring him. She set the bag down. A man's mother had died in March. You did not walk into a house like that carrying only yourself. She had learned that from her own mother's funeral, when the neighbors came with casseroles and did not ask her to speak. She went back through the kitchen and out to the yard. Her bungalow sat close to the water, and the greenhouse leaned against the south wall, full of the plants she sold at the market. She stood in the doorway and looked at what she had. Cut flowers were wrong. Cut flowers died in a week and reminded him of the ones he laid on his mother's grave every Saturday. He did not need more dying things. Her eyes went to the potted rose bush on the second shelf. Red and pink blooms, buds still closed, thorns along every stem. It was alive. It would keep being alive if he watered it. She thought about handing it to him and watching him try to find a place to set it down. She thought about the thorns. She put it back. On the workbench under the window sat a quilt she had been sewing for months, a patchwork of floral squares in yellow and blue and faded pink. She had made it for her own bed. It was too soft for a stranger. He would feel he owed her something. She stood there a long time. Then she saw the frame on the shelf above the bench, the one she made for the market and never sold. Pressed flowers around an empty center, waiting for a photograph. She took it inside. In the drawer by the phone she found the envelope with his half of the old pictures. She dug through until she found the one she remembered: him at maybe eight years old, standing next to his mother in her garden, both of them squinting into the sun. She trimmed the photo to fit and pressed it into the frame. His mother's face sat inside a border of dried blossoms from her own greenhouse. She wrapped the frame in a clean dishtowel and put it in her bag. It was not a casserole. It was not an apology. It was a thing he did not have and could not make himself, because he had not saved what she had saved. She locked the door and got in the car. The drive was six hours. She would arrive with questions, and now she would arrive with his mother's face in her hands. That was a way to walk through a door.