Theo's Last Bouquet of the Season

The last bucket of the season is always ranunculus, because they hold longer than anything else in the cooler, and at four I tape brown paper across the front window until every bit of light in the room goes the color of weak tea. Tomorrow I lock the door until March.

My grandmother kept this room for forty years and could put a flower to any feeling a customer cannot get out of their own mouth, and when she handed me the keys at twenty-six the habit came with them, so I have named one for grief, one for a son leaving, one for a woman in front of the peonies who cannot say why she is crying. I have never used it out loud on myself.

The bell goes at twenty past four and Mara comes in shoulder first, like the door is a surprise nobody warned her about, which is how she has come through it every Friday for two years.

"You taped the window," she says.

"Tomorrow I close for the season. Today I'm only closing early."

"So I'm the last hour."

"You're the last hour. One ranunculus?"

"One ranunculus." She says it to the cooler glass instead of to me. "You'll open again the first week of March."

"First Friday in March."

"I'll be gone by the first Friday in March. I told you that last week."

One ranunculus, never two, never a bouquet, and then an hour on my counter while I find slower reasons to keep wrapping one stem.

"Ask me why I buy one at a time," she says.

"Because you're careful with your money."

"Is that what you settled on." She lifts a stem out of the bucket herself and turns it around by the neck. "A whole bouquet is a thing you carry home and put down. One flower is a thing you have to come back for."

"Mara."

"There it is. You say my name and then you tell me about the weather."

There is a flower for what she does with her voice on that line, and it is anemone, the kind that opens too wide and cannot shut again, and I do not say that either. I say the pollen count in that valley runs brutal through April, and she laughs at me, and the laugh comes out with a hole in the middle of it.

"I almost stopped coming in October," she says. "I stood out on that sidewalk for twenty minutes working out whether a person can be a regular somewhere for two years and still be nothing to anybody but a Friday. Then I came in and bought a flower and went home and put it in a jam jar."

I do not pull one stem. I pull the ranunculus first, then garden roses the color of the underside of a cloud, then scabiosa, unglamorous and strange up close, which most people walk straight past, and Mara has never walked past anything in her life. Last I cut three stems of hellebore, which my grandmother held back for customers who came in during a bad winter, because it opens in the cold and does not care what else has shut.

"Theo. That is not one ranunculus."

"No."

"What is it, then."

My hands tie the twine straight on the first pull, which is what they do while the rest of me comes apart, and I hold it out and say the sentence I have been trimming down and building back up since August.

"I made this one because I love you. Not because it's Friday."

Mara does not move. Then she takes the flowers up against her coat, exactly as she has held every stem she ever carried out of here, and her mouth goes crooked and stays crooked.

"Two years," she says.

"Two years."

"And on the first Friday I ever walked in here, you sold me carnations."

"I panicked."

"You have not panicked once in two years."

"Not about this."

"I asked you in August whether you wanted to get dinner and you told me about aphids."

"Aphids were a genuine problem in August."

"Theo."

"I know what I did."

"Say it again," she says.

"Which part."

"The part you rehearse in the cooler. I could hear you through that door in September and I never said so, because I wanted you to be the one who opened it."

"I love you. Two years of Fridays, and that is all I ever had to say."

She gets her free hand into mine, careless and certain, like a thing decided somewhere else that I am only now being told about, and then she turns the bouquet and looks at the pale green one at the edge of the paper, the one nobody ever picks up on their own.

"What's that one called."

"Hellebore. It flowers in the cold."

She does the arithmetic without saying any of it out loud, and I let her get to the end of it.

"Seventeen Fridays until March," she says. "Wrap them slow."