Chapter 7
Story: The Business Card in Her Coat Pocket Ended the Christmas Eve Toast
The spring turned to summer, and the company turned to its new shape. The manager started on Monday, and in the weeks that followed, Pilar watched from the distance of the flower shop as the books got cleaned, the personal expenses got repaid in installments deducted from Harris's reduced salary, and the annual report — due in July — got prepared by the new manager and the auditors together.
She saw it before it went to print. The manager brought the draft to the flower shop on a Friday afternoon in June, a clean, modest document that opened, as Pilar had moved, with a line on the first page: "The company wishes to acknowledge the founding investment that made its operations possible: the proceeds from the sale of the Devereaux family flower shop, established on Main Street in 1967, which were contributed by Mrs. Pilar Devereaux in April 2003, and which are reflected in her current majority shareholding."
Pilar read the line twice. Then she read it once more. Then she signed off on the report, and the manager took it back to the warehouse, and the report went to print.
She didn't tell Chloe. She didn't call Harris. She just watered the orchids in the shop's front window, the way she'd done a hundred times, a thousand times, and went about her Saturday.
The phone call came on the Monday the report was mailed. Pilar was at the shop's front counter, working on an arrangement for a wedding the following weekend, when her phone buzzed in her pocket. She set down the shears and looked at the screen.
Chloe.
"Mom," Chloe said, and her voice was thick. "I got the annual report. The company one. In the mail."
Pilar set down the shears and leaned on the counter. "What does it say?"
"It says — " Chloe paused, and Pilar heard her breath catch. "It says the company was seeded with the sale of the flower shop. Gram's shop. It says your name, Mom. On the first page. It says your name and the shop and the year."
Pilar closed her eyes. She had not expected the words to hit her the way they did, coming back to her through her daughter's voice, from a document that had been mailed to a hundred shareholders, a document that would sit on shelves and in drawers for years.
"Do you know how long," Pilar said slowly, "I thought I'd be forgotten? Do you know how many years I spent being the ex-wife at the end of the table, the one who slid left, the one who sold the shop and was never mentioned again?"
"I know, Mom."
"And now — " Pilar opened her eyes and looked at the shop around her, at the albums on the back counter, at the photographs of her father and her mother on the wall. "Now it's in writing. The first page. And it'll be there in ten years, and fifty years, long after all of us are gone. Long after Harris. Long after me."
Chloe was quiet for a moment. Then: "Can I come see you? I want to show you the report. I want to show you the line."
"Of course." Pilar looked at the clock. "I'm closing early today anyway. The shop's empty. I have the albums out. I was going to make tea and go through your grandmother's first year of orders."
"I'll be there in twenty minutes."
Pilar hung up. She stood at the counter for a moment with the phone still in her hand, listening to the quiet of the shop — the hum of the cooler, the distant sound of a car passing on Main Street, the soft tick of the old clock above the door.
Then she went to the back counter and took down the first album — the dark green one, the one her mother had started in 1967, when the shop was new and Pilar's father was still alive and the world was made of flowers and possibilities.
She opened it on the counter in front of her. The pages were tissue-paper thin, yellowed at the edges, and the handwriting was her mother's — tall, careful letters, the loops of a woman who'd been taught to write beautifully and had never stopped.
Order #1. June 4, 1967. Client: Mrs. Alma Whitfield. Occasion: Granddaughter's christening. Arrangement: White roses, baby's breath, and one stem of blue delphinium.
Order #2. June 11, 1967. Client: Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Nash. Occasion: Twentieth wedding anniversary. Arrangement: Yellow roses, white freesia, and a ribbon.
On and on. The first year of her mother's work, recorded page by page, twenty-two years before Pilar was born, thirty years before she'd taken over the shop, forty years before she'd sold it to a man who'd never thanked her for it.
And now the company's annual report would say it. The record would be complete.
The front door chimed. Pilar looked up. Chloe came in, holding the annual report in one hand and a paper bag in the other. She was smiling the way she'd smiled at the shop back in March, on the morning of the audit, when she'd held the ring up to the light on Main Street.
"Hi, Mom."
"Hi, sweetheart."
Chloe set the report on the counter beside the album. She opened it to the first page, found the line, and pointed to it with her finger. "Read it."
Pilar read it even though she already knew it by heart:
"The company wishes to acknowledge the founding investment that made its operations possible: the proceeds from the sale of the Devereaux family flower shop, established on Main Street in 1967, which were contributed by Mrs. Pilar Devereaux in April 2003, and which are reflected in her current majority shareholding."
"That's you, Mom," Chloe said quietly. "That's Gram. That's the shop. It's all in there."
Pilar felt the tears come. They were quiet, not dramatic — they just rose in her eyes and spilled over, and she blinked and let them fall on the open page of the annual report and the open page of her mother's album, the two records lying side by side on the counter of the flower shop on Main Street.
"I thought," Pilar said, and her voice was thick, "I thought I'd get to the end of my life and no one would remember any of it. The shop, my mother, my father, the work — I thought it would all just disappear. That I'd be the ex-wife at the end of the table, and my name would only ever come up in the past tense, in stories that weren't even true."
"Not anymore," Chloe said. She reached across the counter and took her mother's hands, the one with the gold band on it, the one with the gold studs in her ears, the woman who had read the share line out loud on Christmas Eve and had not slid left. "It's in writing now. In the annual report. It'll be there forever."
Pilar squeezed her daughter's hands. In the quiet of the flower shop, with the album open and the report new on the counter and the summer light falling through the plate glass, she felt something settle in her chest — the deep, quiet, permanent settlement of a thing finally in its proper place.
"Come," she said, and her voice was steadier now. "I was going to make tea. And I'm going to show you your grandmother's first year of orders. Every single one."
They made tea and they sat at the counter together, and Pilar read each order aloud — the christenings, the weddings, the funerals, the ordinary Tuesdays when someone came in for a stem for a kitchen table — and Chloe wrote nothing down, but she turned the pages with her finger the way you turn the pages of a book you never want to end.
Advertisement