the flower/the bud

She wasn’t San Francisco’s Best Florist ten years in a row, she was only her daughter. But Clara wasn’t immune to the charm of the shop, to the jewel toned bouquets hanging in the windows, like heaving baskets of star-colored fruit; to the sweet perfume air, the smell of only good tomorrows. 

She did well enough, with her mother away - quotas were reached, sprinklers turned on at the right times; she could wrap the thick, soft paper around the selected bouquets and nestle them in a customer’s arms like a newborn baby. But Clara saw it in their eyes: the almost irritatingly loyal regulars, the tourists who had seen her mother on television or the front page of the Times. The defeated little wilt of not seeing The Azalea Newcastle in person, her with the magic touch and green thumb. 

And to make matters worse, their consolation prize wasn’t even Clara’s big sister, Lily, she who had had that effortless loveliness since she was a girl. She could tie her ribbons around the stems just as well as her mother. People didn’t wilt when she’d looked after the shop. They at least got to buzz that they saw the local weather lady, the one who most sexily delivered the temperature to the greater San Francisco area, with her big hair like the magazines and her power suits like the catalogs. She had married an executive named Sebastian - family money, too-white teeth - always loudly introducing herself or making reservations as “Lily Newcastle hyphen Bowles.” When they had come over for dinner at Lily and Sebastian’s penthouse for the first time, with the view and the soft lighting and the private-chef-prepared filet mignon, Clara had gone to the bathroom to cry. She had muffled herself in an impossibly soft custom embroidered hand towel - LNB. 

Sometimes, at the checkout counter, or some banquet, or shitty house party, someone stuck making small talk with Clara would say, “Oh, that’s funny, your mom’s Azalea and your sister’s Lily, you’re the only one who’s not a flower, did you ever notice that?” 

Clara had noticed that. 

Azalea was in New York, appearing on a daytime show to talk about “floral centerpieces that POP”, and Lily was hosting bridge for the girls this week, so she was out of commission in preparation. Clara still lived with her mother, in the apartment above the shop, haunting her old childhood bedroom, retracing all the steps of her life. She had moved out after college, and life had transpired and it hadn’t worked out. Every day she grew more and more tired of doing the emotional work to undo the shame of being this far into your twenties and still having to live with your mother - it’s just a moment, it’ll all work out, no one judges you like you judge yourself - rinse, repeat, try to believe.

Her mother, the florist, her sister, the lovely, and Clara, the longing. Titles are not given to those who yearn most greatly - there are no glossy magazine spreads of our nation’s top ten yearners, they aren’t asked to speak on chipper daytime shows, their names are not engraved on trophies shaped like golden hands reaching up, up, up, toward the sun. 

The drug of sorrow didn’t know a worse temptress than the flowers. The grace of them. The vibrancy - the color of a flower makes you feel that you’re being stared at back. “The Earth laughs in flowers”, that’s what Emerson wrote, and the quote was printed at the bottom of each shop receipt in blocky, robotic font. Clara liked when the printer was running out of ink, when the receipt was streaked with lines of white where the ink had run out. People still smiled when they took them from her, still held their flowers like a kid’s favorite toy on Christmas. They still loved the shop, even if there were little pieces missing. 

It was a beautiful day for the work of yearning - the rain outside the window was a steady metronome of melancholy. The cars zipping by sliced through the air with their shining gold headlights. The moisture made the air in the flower shop thicker, the plants sighing with pleasure. There had been a rush that morning - the particularly romantic see the skies open and think to have their beloveds wake to brightness when the world outside is dark - but it was early afternoon now. Those who aspire to be particularly romantic will have eaten their sandwiches by now and in a rain-sleepy haze figure they can always try again tomorrow. 

Clara was passing the time preemptively curling ribbon to secure around the bundles that would be taken home. She loved bringing the blade along the soft edge, the sssssshhhhhhhp as her arm rose above her head, the ribbon twisting to her touch. She didn’t look up when the bell above the door chimed its friendly two tones, called out “Welcome in!” as she finished another curly-Q. People usually wanted a moment to take in the shop, the shiny wood floors, the big romantic windows. 

It was only when Clara looked up that she saw him. The rain had stuck his Jheri curl to his face, to the nape of his neck, just below his earlobe, where a gold stud winked. The rain had soaked him through, his gray Olympics sweatshirt clinging to his broad chest like a toddler in tantrum, begging him not to go. His shorts were too short for the weather. They left slow drops on the entryway. Plip. Plip. Plipplip, plip. He wore an expression like he was actively falling, like a pit had opened beneath his feet and his only hope of coming back to the surface was pretending none of that was happening at all. He had meant to come here - Clara was more than acquainted with people under the influence, wandering inside by accident, clinging to her clothes, begging her to remember the lyrics to a song no one else was hearing. That wasn’t him. He knew he was here, knew logically he had walked into a flower shop to buy flowers, but something had happened to make the world nonsensical. It was like going grocery shopping in a dream. It all felt uneasy, pointless. Everything had lost its edges and was floating ephemerally in the ether.

When his eyes found her, Clara wished she had thought to change everything about the way she looked. She brought her hand to her braid, pulling at the end in a nervous tic - a “horrid habit”, her mother loved to say, though Clara was pretty sure it was because Azalea thought she sounded British saying ‘horrid.’ She approached him, her heart a hummingbird thumping its wings at the base of her throat.  “Anything I can help you with today?” He didn’t answer as she got closer, still trying to arrive back in the world. She watched him. 

She knew him already. When the pit had opened beneath your own feet, you knew when someone was falling. Names, birthdays, favorite colors, it was all irrelevant - you knew them, really. Realizing that things didn’t have to make sense or matter and they mostly wouldn’t ever do either. She had felt it when her father had first fallen in the kitchen when she was 13, the way he looked in that hospital bed, the fact that he was gone days later - gone gone. She couldn’t go down the hall to his office to ask him what he thought about it, this him dying thing. When she found the shoebox in her mother’s closet shortly after she’d left for New York, full of letters and documents and a photograph of a man which told her why she felt so different from her sister. She was falling, and so was he. 

“Sorry” was all he said, but he still couldn’t move.. 

“It’s okay,” Clara said, breaking eye contact. A tidal wave of infatuation crashed up her ribs, electrifying her insides as it pulled back with the current. 

“For someone…” His eyes wandered helplessly, remembering he was in a flower shop, but needing to be somewhere else. “For someone.” 

Clara nodded. It was more vague than most customer requests, but not the most difficult she had received. The flower language her mother had taught them as children (“More important than your ABCs”) ran through Clara’s mind like a Rolodex - baby’s breath for everlasting love, marigold for jealousy or grief, tansy for declaring war. Azaleas - womanhood, temperance. Lilies - purity, fertility, sweet innocence. Not right. Not enough. When there is a someone who is so all-encompassing that they are referred to as only Someone, they deserve the flowers that were kept behind the glass cases. 

Clara unlocked the glass case with the key that hung around her neck. She made brief eye contact with the daffodils - their hanging, duck-like heads. Uncertainty, chivalry. Unrequited love. But these flowers were not from her, they were from him, to Someone. Clara reached for the top shelf, for bouquet in the heavy white vase. Her grip was steady, and still, her arms shook from the weight. Her mother had been excited about this one, she had said, more than usual: the parentheses of silver dollar eucalyptus leaves, within them lilac pea flowers, lavender Escimo roses, lilac hydrangeas, plum lily galsand flowers, white phalaenopsis, cream hybrid tea roses, cream avalanche roses, lavender gardenia…it was more than a hundred dollars. More than two. 

She carried the bouquet gingerly around him like a bucket that could spill. She set the vase on the counter. It was a lavender chandelier, a monument to naturally occurring opulence. Even in his despair, his eyes went to it, and he panted, “Wow, that’s beautiful.” And that’s really what these services were for, providing beauty within grief. 

He began to pat his pockets, pulling his wallet from his shorts. His hands were shaky; the wallet dropped to the floor and skidded to Clara’s feet. He crouched to pick it up with a soft “Oh” and Clara fell in love with him. 

She picked up the vase, holding it between them. She made herself look in his eyes, memorizing the deep brown of them, like the bristlecone pine tree that’s been alive for a thousand years.  “We won’t take your money,” she told him. And he was suddenly there with her, breaking from beneath the surface, gulping mouthfuls of air. Tears fell from his eyes easily, his expression mostly blank. Clara was jealous of people who could cry and do other things at the same time. Weeping made her face twist in a gnarled tangle of ugly knots that wouldn’t come loose until the crying was done.

“Thank you, you don’t know what I - I can’t tell you what this - you’re my angel, thank you.” And he put his hands over hers, squeezed them with genuine tenderness, rubbed his thumb over hers. He only had fragments of sentences to offer at the moment. Clara gathered them like sea glass, tucked them in her pocket. “This has been, I can’t say what I, he’s been, oh, thank you.” He took the bouquet in his arms - easily, Clara noticed, not with the effort it had taken her - and turned on his heel to rush back into the chaos of his Someone. With his foot holding the door open, he turned back to her over his shoulder. “I’m Abel, what’s your name?”

And she knew he’d be her magnum opus. Her finest work. All the longing of her life had led her here. Just like she knew the falling, she knew he’d never love her. It was a truth that blossomed in her belly, so she knew it was real. And right beside it, the knowing that she already loved him, that she’d see him again and the feeling would never pass. 

“I’m Clara.”

“An angel named Clara. I’ll be back to thank you. I’ll be back -”

But his body had already taken him out of the shop, out toward somewhere else. To Someone. What was it her mother had always said? If you’re looking for hope in a weary world, go outside and find a bud. Find the beginning of nature’s holy alchemy. Within humanity’s chaos, whatever it may be, there was still the promise of a flower. 

But it filled Clara with dread, to know what would unfold, to be unable to stop something from its becoming.