by Lyndsay Faye
“It would be beautiful,” Ben replies, moved, “if that were how time worked. But it’s just infinite pieces, all in a row. I wanna go back to some of them. Several of them. Better ones.”
Horatio was twenty-five years old and Ben twenty-two when they dragged their meager furnishings up to the second floor of their new building. Benjamin insisted he just wanted to be a real American who mows his own lawn and shit. Horatio replied I don’t believe we have a lawn, and Benjamin joked we have Riverside Park, Morningside Park, St. Nicholas Park, and Central Park, we need to buy a lawn mower, like, immediately, and felt a small click in his chest like a key fitting when Horatio laughed. But they aren’t roommates any longer, and Horatio lives in London now.
Time isn’t a crop that grows more bountifully according to how fertile you are. Time eats everything in the end, from stones to stars.
Horatio stretches stiff legs. “Whenever Roman generals prevailed in battle, there was always a slave chosen to ride behind whoever was being feted, and the slave’s only task was to keep repeating throughout, Respice post te. Hominem te esse memento. Memento mori.”
“Look behind you and remember that you will die. Nice.”
“Indeed.”
“Hey, Horatio?”
“Benjamin.”
“I can’t help but feel like this is kinda gay.”
Horatio snorts into Ben’s hair before retreating to his side of the car, leaving only their fingers linked.
“It’s been a spell since I held hands with anyone in the backseat of a cab,” Ben admits.
“We don’t countenance this sort of dodgy behavior at all back home. There are especially draconian laws.”
“Christ, I’ve missed you so much.”
It takes another half an hour to reach upper Manhattan, trying to breathe past the anchor resting on Ben’s chest, trying not to think about an entirely different quote about death, made by C. S. Lewis in his memoir on loss.
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. . . .
Ben is frightened.
Strike that, he’s terrified of something he can’t see yet. Something just around the bend.
They ooze unsteadily onto the pavement. Horatio tries to pay for the cab, but Ben pushes him away in genuine annoyance. His friend is a compact, competent traveler, so there’s only one rolling bag to match the carry-on briefcase, and this Horatio handles himself.
So Ben turns to what used to be their shared apartment on 155th Street, a whole floor of a redbrick townhouse, and he’s digging in his pocket for keys when he looks up and the world
g o e s
d a r k
“Hey, Ben!” Uncle Claude pushes to his feet from where he’s clearly been waiting on the stoop for them, a dented cardboard box resting beside him. “Sorry if this feels like an ambush, but you haven’t been that easy to find by phone lately. Or email. Anyway, I’ve got some stuff of your dad’s for you. Can I come in?”
LIA
Ask the woman where she going, or dare to ask her
where she been. You’ll find bluing water on ya
doorstep, and ya breathin dis-eased by the wind.
—Luisah Teish, “Hoodoo Moma”
Lia sits outside the flower shop, taking a nonsmoking break at eight in the morning, when the trouble starts.
It’s not that she minds cigarettes—she understands the sins that make life meaningful. She’s adamantly against asking smokers to cease smoking. If they want to, they will, like Ben picking up his socks when he took them off. You can’t just compel a person to do something because it would be objectively better.
No, Lia doesn’t smoke because she looked truly stupid (a friend’s words) the one time she ever tried it, holding it with her knuckles to her lips like some cave dweller who’d never so much as seen a TV show before, or a movie, or even a gas station.
Lia hates looking terrible at something.
So during her nonsmoking break between the flower market and the shop opening, she sits outside the Three Sisters’ Floral Boutique on the bench that’s a slice of tree, knots and bark and all, fretting. The chill in the darkness has nearly vanished, and shabby birds trill showtunes from traffic signals. An old man wearing duct tape sandals with cardboard soles shuffles past, smelling of provolone. Lia feels dull-headed and desperately anxious.
But there’s nothing to be done about that last item. If Ben needs her, he’ll ask.
And he doesn’t need you anymore.
But he does know that he can always ask?
Lia yearns for a mindless errand. She could peek into the nearby art galleries and kick herself for not being featured in them, or head for the vintage stores to survey the latest socialite discards. She could pretend to want caffeine. Most of the trendy young people swarming the coffee shops with the AC cranked up to refrigerator temp order something either incredibly simple and single-sourced or else shockingly complicated.
But she doesn’t want a crowd. And she tormented herself with the galleries not three days ago, and she’s already wearing a beloved yellow-and-white striped Free People shirtdress she picked up for eight dollars. Perfect for her late mother’s genes, the Sicilian Jews, the source of her perpetual tan and wiry coiffure. She’s even wearing her late mother’s scarf, the long one with the sweet little strawberries embroidered on the edges, making a coronet over her hair. She almost always craves it lately. Like a good luck charm or a talisman.
The Tompkins Square Library, maybe, where she can look up residencies. Maybe even apply for them.
Or grad schools, her ex’s voice murmurs.
Shut it, Ben, she responds, accustomed to arguing with him in her head.
Please be all right, Benny. I’d come the instant you wanted me.
She attempts some impromptu studying in her head, hitting on flowers at random because they weren’t given to her alphabetically in the first place—she’d jotted down notes gleaned from around twelve different recipe books lent by the sisters. None of which were so much as paginated.
FORGET✴ME✴NOT: Fosters depth and wealth of friendship, even after a parting. Forgiveness (both sides) following a dispute. Loyalty in the marriage bed.
PEONY: Primarily for luck, health, and success. Pay attention to root vs. bloom. Guardianship and healing for those in your close circle.
Lia fluffs her shock of curls. Only honest-to-god sleep will remedy this stupor. Not that she minds being a zombie when half of New York has barely slapped their morning alarms. This city keeps all hours, like poets and addicts and thieves. And she adores rummaging through the 28th Street wholesale florist shops—skirting sidewalk water, dodging forsythia branches straining their electric yellow fingers toward her, searching for the insane vines and blooms and boughs her employers require. All freshly decapitated, waiting to be arranged into holy oblations.
What’s a bouquet if not an offering on the altar of love, or gratitude, or forgiveness? Wasn’t that what every one of your own pieces meant, once upon a time?
What’s a guillotined rose if not a sacrifice?
DOG ROSE: Pleasure liberally mixed with pain and heartache.
RED ROSE: Unconditional, unending romantic love.
LAVENDER ROSE: Infatuation, mystery, the unattainable.
Funeral wreaths and prom corsages are floral demise in the hope of human redemption, and Lia feels hallowed doing that work before the sun rises. But she’s also absolutely wiped whenever the sisters send her wholesaling. She’s been clocked in for four hours now because they needed hyacinth—as blue as humanly possible—and it was an “emergency.”
“Oh god, please be open, please be open.”
A woman has materialized, one wearing a wrap dress in a bold black-and-white DVF pattern, sporting mussed flat-ironed blond hair and a stunned expression wit
hin pools of mascara.
“What are the hours here?” she hisses. “When does it open, is it open?”
Lia rouses herself. “We open at ten.”
“Ten o’clock? Oh, fuck me. No.”
“I’m so sorry, but yeah, ten.” Lia squints, pulling vintage Coach sunglasses from the pocket of her dress.
The woman shifts from stiletto to stiletto. “No, please, please. Don’t they live above the shop? That’s what she said, her name is . . . oh Christ, how long have you worked with this woman? She said that they’re always home.”
The would-be customer bangs on the heavy door with the antique cut-glass window inset. Very hard.
“Hey, whoa!” Lia leaps up.
“I have the money, here!” She produces a credit card and slams it against the glass pane.
“Please, will you try to stay calm?”
Lia tips her glasses down, blearily registering an Amex reading JESSICA ANNE KOWALSKI.
“They really don’t like early customers.” She glances at her phone: 8:06 a.m. “Late customers when the rum bottle is open, sure, but—”
Jessica quashes a sob. “You have to be open, I need help.”
Lia sighs—the sisters do live above the shop. So does Lia, since they took her in. They make a batshit-insane found family of four. Sometimes one sister or another will vanish for a month or two, returning to feasts of homemade gumbo, court bouillon, and lemon pies. Sometimes they bake weed-laced sweet potato turnovers and dance to scratchy jazz records as the bodega tomcats yowl. As a creator, Lia soaks up the chaos. As an employee, she spends her life baffled. As a resident, she feels inexplicably showered with affection. But then, the sisters were open devotees of her work, cooed over hulking hills of fairy moss or hundreds of tiny tea roses suspended from the ceiling with fishing line. They loved her art, and her art is her soul.
So it isn’t really so mystifying they love Lia, too.
“He’s going to kill me,” the stranger whispers. “I-I can’t . . . oh god, what am I going to do?”
The hedge-fund-looking girl makes sounds like an elderly Yorkie in distress. It isn’t even faked, which moves Lia to pity as well as sympathy. Jessica Anne Kowalski really cries like a purse dog.
“Take the bench.” Lia shoos Jessica off her fuck-me pumps. “Be right back, OK?”
Lia tugs the cool iron of the handle and slips into the spacious, darkly wood-paneled room, lit with soft Edison bulbs and waxed amber shades. There’s just the four of them living here, but the place thrums with life. At first, Lia assumed it was all the plants. Dangling from reclaimed industrial buckets, spilling out of upcycled kegs. Lately though, she suspects it isn’t just the flora. There’s another quality here, one that pours down through the ancient skylight, bordered in stained glass and always seeming to catch moonbeams—even when the moon isn’t out. Lia knows it’s just the glare from the taller office building nearby.
It sends an eerie static zinging through her chest all the same.
Before her is an antique display table offering succulents and deco glass terrariums and soaps made from goat milk and vetiver oil. To her left, beyond the built-in shelves, is what passes for an office with fiddle leaf figs for walls. And to her right, past the sleek black and gold industrial refrigerator, is the scarred oak work counter with its exit like a saloon keeper’s bar top.
“Lia, is that you? No rest for the weary! We’ll need peach blossom tomorrow, chouchou, barely blooming or no way this order for Mr. Goldsmith’s ever coming out right,” Mam’zelle announces in her musical way from deep in the jungle. “Oh, and a cypress branch, s’il t’plait. Now don’t fuss, I know well and good that’s two days running you ragged.”
Mam’zelle pokes her head around a rubber plant. She is round and shining, like a golden pearl. She has the subtlest accent of the three New Orleans natives, but seasons her speech with the most French and slathers her croissants with the most butter. She manages the store, pays the bills, and balances the books, all while wearing variously blinding shades of pink. Her hair forms a huge kinky halo—Madonna of the fuchsia velour sweat suits. Lia adores her. Mam’zelle’s gracious bulk and lilting French are not mere manifestations of her Southern hospitality; they are also knives to pry open the oyster, see what makes her customers come back begging for more. She seems to be around fifty, give or take a few years—but who could say?
“Mercy yes, I need some peach and palm what ain’t hardly figured out it’s dying yet. How I’m gonna satisfy Mr. Rivera else? Lia!” Moma calls from behind the counter, wrapping a red ribbon around a curious mixture of sweet peas, chamomile, and peppermint. “Supposing you can get there by five in the morning and hustle on back, then there’s beignets in it for you, baby.”
“You keep giving our petite chou so much lagniappe, you’ll bankrupt us. She’s no customer—she’s our own,” Mam’zelle teases, sipping café au lait as she slinks into full, fabulous view. It’s a hot-pink blouse today over a swishing petal-blush skirt. Lia used to try in vain to identify any of Mam’zelle’s designers and concluded that every last piece was bespoke.
“What you said, my sister?” Moma asks.
“I said we pay her, no call to cook for her every time she has to set her alarm clock.”
“Y’all spoil little Lia here rottener than I do.” Stretching her back, catlike, Moma ties the bouquet’s silk. “What you give her outta the till this very morning for fetching them bluer than blue hyacinths, twenty? Sixty? Don’t you think I don’t see it. I see everything, me.”
“You surely do, chère.” Mam’zelle offers a Cheshire smile.
Moma looks nothing whatsoever like her sister. She is skinny and muscled and cinnamon-colored and wears her hair in tiny little braids woven with golden threads, ending at her waist in those soundless bells you find edging fabrics in incense shops. She sports cropped tees that flaunt the abs of a woman who could stand on her head at any moment (and often does). The master craftswoman when it comes to floral artistry, Moma handles all the most difficult orders. She’s always offering Lia lucky bundles made from scrap blooms. Lia adores her too, and knows that they both have a horror of flowers being discarded at all, which explains her generosity with cuttings. She seems to be around forty, give or take a few years—but who could say?
“Beignets are worth more to me than money,” Lia admits. “Who needs money for beignets when you can just eat the beignets?”
“F’true,” Maw-maw grunts from the corner, where she wields a spray bottle at a shelf of spidery air plants. She looks less like she’s giving them a drink than like she’s holding them hostage at gunpoint.
Maw-maw too fails to resemble her siblings. She is very square and squat and old and burnished. She maintains the shop’s houseplants, curating and arranging the displays. Shuffling about in sandals and pale linen sack dresses of the sort women pay hundreds of dollars for on vacation in Boulder, muttering to herself. Whenever she does expound audibly, it’s in sweeping decrees that make no sense. Lia would adore Maw-maw too, but it’s tough to adore anyone who speaks magic eight ball. She seems to be around a hundred and eighty, give or take a few years—but who could say?
Mam’zelle makes a note on her iPad. “Hurry yourself up with that bouquet, Moma, and leave off the mint or you’ll hex the whole block. Vite.”
MINT: Guards against unsummoned spirits, repels those who threaten your well-being, when mixed with other ingredients can break very strong curses.
“There’s a customer outside,” Lia reports.
Clicking buttons with immaculate acrylic nails, Mam’zelle hums. Moma’s scissors slice a sharper angle on her ribbon. Maw-maw ping-pongs off, monologue too low to hear.
“She’s very upset and wants your help. Now, not at ten. The poor thing’s all dolled up in last night’s club shoes. She’s a mess.”
“Pauvre petite,” Mam’zelle intones.
; “Too many lonesome girls in this big dirty city,” Moma clucks. “How I’m gonna make enough bouquets for all? Not enough love to go around, baby, and ain’t it a crying shame. Tell this child to come back at ten. Maw-maw! You done took your pills, my sister?”
An indecipherable grunt emanates from the bromeliads.
No. There’s too much love in the world, just like there’s too much food in America. The problem is getting your hands on it.
“It’s a real emergency. And she just waved her credit card in my face and she’s good for it. Her name is Jessica Anne Kowalski. Also, she knows you’re in here, FYI.”
Mam’zelle snorts prettily, fingers clicking.
Moma flips shining braids over her shoulder as she plucks an unsatisfactory mint leaf.
Maw-maw could be anywhere by now. Lost in the topiary section. Playing tarot. Violently spritzing the ferns.
Lia angles a shoulder. “If you wanted to give me some pointers, maybe I could handle Jessica myself? She’s too sad to be wandering the streets, seriously. It’ll bum out all the pigeons.”
The crinkle of tissue and the tapping of scratch-resistant glass are the only replies.
“OK. Well, I’ll just tell her to come back, but she said something about how he’ll kill her.”
The small noises cease.
“What exactly she said to you, baby girl?” Moma wants to know as she tapes the golden crepe paper—a signature touch at the Three Sisters’—around her latest creation.
Lia leans her elbows on the rough countertop. “She said oh god, what will I do, and he’ll kill me.”
“Oh, I can hear your heart, chouchou.” Mam’zelle slides a motherly arm around Lia’s shoulders. She smells like the signature sea salt and melon eau de parfum they carry in cobalt bottles, the one called La Sirene. “She reached right in and touched the strings. Moma! We’d better let her in, hadn’t we, my sister? We can’t let Lia’s new friend pace the banquette for two hours!”
There’s just too much pain in the world. Lia’s throat aches. There’s so much that’s already past mending. We should do everything we can, when we can.
