The Light of Hidden Flowers

by Jennifer Handford

  “What else?” I asked, steering the conversation away from work. “Tell me about yourself.”

  “Well, I’ve been in the area my whole life.”

  “Same,” I said.

  “Went to University of Maryland, and then to American.”

  “Tell me something that’s not on your résumé,” I said, smiling.

  Lucas’s face flushed red. “That’s a tough one!”

  Quickly, I thought of a laundry list of things that weren’t on my résumé: I was an Italian-language learning novice, gelato lover, Jeopardy! genius. I wouldn’t dare tell Lucas any of these things. “You’re right!” I admitted. “Believe it or not, I read that question in a magazine: questions to ask when on a date. Kind of stupid, now that I think about it.”

  “No!” he said. “It’s a good question. I just feel bad I can’t think of anything. Makes me feel like a dolt!”

  “Sports?” I asked.

  “Yes, that’s it.” Lucas nodded wildly. “I work out at the gym. I run, play a bit of basketball.”

  “I used to run in high school,” I said. “Because my father made me . . . insisted that I play a sport. And I used to play tennis, but hardly ever now.”

  “We should go running sometime,” he said. His tone was sweet, considerate. His baby blue eyes were worth looking at.

  “I’d die,” I said. “But it would be fun.”

  “I’d dangle dill pickle chips in front of you,” he said.

  “I’d make you eat some.”

  After lunch, Lucas walked me to my car. A breeze mussed his hair. I reached up and cleared the blond swath from his eyes. “This was fun,” he said.

  “This was fun,” I agreed.

  “The restaurant was great.”

  “I think I like food more than you,” I said. “I think I ate more than you.”

  “You haven’t seen me with pie and ice cream,” he said.

  I hadn’t converted him to my food religion, but maybe that was okay. I’d make a project of it. The good news was that he seemed sold on me, and judging from my sweaty palms, I apparently was interested in him. Lucas Anderson was cute and smart, smelled of soap and toothpaste, liked fruit, pie and vanilla ice cream, taxes and laws, and apparently, me.

  As I slid into my seat, Jenny called. “Everything okay?” I asked.

  “It’s your father. He’s at the country club and apparently misplaced his car keys. Do you have a spare set?”

  “No,” I said. “But I’ll go pick him up. Tell him I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  As I drove to the club, I listened to public radio. The newscaster interviewed an elderly gentleman who had suffered a brain tumor. Was that a possibility for Dad?

  That night, I typed a search into my computer: brain tumors.

  The most prominent symptom of a brain tumor was headaches. I tried to remember if Dad had had many headaches lately. Other symptoms included seizures, changes in vision, difficulty walking. And then, there it was: memory loss.

  Tumors were most readily removed through surgery. In instances when the tumor was positioned in such a way as to preclude surgery, radiation or chemotherapy was used. The only problem was the damage to the healthy cells, of course. Such damage could lead to the loss of certain faculties.

  My first thought was Dad losing his ability to speak. My father bound and gagged. A storyteller who had lost his words.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I sat on Dad’s sofa while he scowled at the computer screen. I saw him differently these days—actually saw him, for the seventy-year-old man that he was. I was so used to focusing on measuring how he saw me that I’d rarely reevaluated my assessment of him.

  “If you would just come out of your shell,” Dad would say to the teenaged me. “Then the world could see what’s inside that beautiful mind of yours.” My father—who understood human nature so well, yet never fully got me—deployed his brand of pragmatic optimism against me as the only panacea he knew. “Pretend you’re social, even if you’re not,” he’d say. And as horrible as it sounded to the outside observer, my father wasn’t criticizing me. He loved who I was, but he also believed firmly in emulating the achievements of others. And to him, sociability equaled success.

  As I studied him now, he hardly seemed like the same man.

  Dad looked up. “Tell me about this Lucas fellow,” he said. “You like the guy? Is he good enough for my daughter?”

  Since our lunch at the Fruit Stand, Lucas and I had seen each other two other times.

  “Lucas is a nice guy,” I said.

  “But does he do it for you?”

  “Dad!”

  “I’m not talking about . . . that. I’m just asking if he floats your boat. Does he raise your blood pressure, give you chills, make your heart race?”

  “He’s a nice guy,” I said. “A really nice guy.”

  Dad lifted his eyebrows at me, clearly doubting that “nice guy” status was good enough.

  “What else?” he asked. “Are you happy? Are you doing what you want to be doing?”

  “I’m good, Dad,” I said. “Really, I’m happy. I’m fine. What about you?”

  “Your old man is better than ever,” he said, granting me his trophy wink and a smile. “Are we ready for our day?”

  At ten o’clock, the Sherwoods came in. Dad had known Bob Sherwood for fifty years; they went to the same high school, played varsity football, worked at Dairy Queen in the summer. Both were deployed to Vietnam, and both came home with stories to tell and an urgency to marry their high school sweethearts. Bob married Laney, and Dad married Mom. Today, Dad and Bob reminisced, while Jenny brought in coffee. I attempted chitchat with Mrs. Sherwood, a stunningly assembled woman who put me to shame with her jewelry and makeup and matching shoes and purse.

  “Been on any trips?” she asked.

  “No, just around here,” I said, trying not to hold this against her. It wasn’t like she knew about my desire to travel and the paralysis that prevented me from it.

  Jenny poured coffee.

  “Best coffee ever!” Dad beamed, Jenny blushed, and the Sherwoods lifted their cups.

  “Are you seeing anyone, dear?” Mrs. Sherwood asked. Another common question for a longtime family friend to ask, but still—she was on a roll.

  “I am,” I said. “A very nice guy. A tax attorney.”

  She pulled her coral lipstick into a broad smile. “Do you still like working in your dad’s office?”

  Working in my dad’s office? I wanted to scream: Do you mean working with my dad as a partner and the firm’s principal financial analyst? The person who manages your $2.4 million? I’m not some summer intern, filing papers and answering the phones, thank you very much! I have more degrees and certifications than most in this business, I wanted to tell her. Though of course I didn’t. She was just a nice old lady asking nice-old-lady questions. And why wouldn’t she see me that way? As the mousy daughter of the charismatic Frank Fletcher. Why would she think more of me than met the eye? It was true, wasn’t it? Fact: I did still work with my father, after all of these years. Fact: I was still single, after all of these years. Fact: I hadn’t gone on any trips, after all of these years.

  Finally, Dad and Bob returned from memory lane and I cued up the projector, blasted their current portfolio onto the screen and felt compelled to deliver my part of the presentation with more technical acuity than I would usually employ. I used my red laser pointer to highlight their returns, and then, for show-off purposes, launched into a detailed explanation of the difference between “time-weighted returns” and the “internal rate of return.” I drew a complicated equation on the whiteboard with brackets and parentheses, to prove my point. When Dad jumped in with a simple, “So great, we’re making money!” I knew I had impressed no one.

  Dad took it from there. He talked about seeing the lawy
er, his buddy Roger, to update the wills and trusts.

  “If we put money in the trusts,” Mrs. Sherwood said, “how will we get to it?”

  Dad carefully explained how putting money into a revocable trust meant nothing in terms of control. “It’s still your money, L—”

  Dad looked at me. Then Bob looked at Dad. Then I looked at Mrs. Sherwood—Laney. And I finally got it: Dad couldn’t remember her name. Laney! I wanted to shout at Dad.

  “That’s right, Dad,” I said. “With a revocable trust, Laney—Mrs. Sherwood—still has full access to the money. She only needs permission from the trustee. But in this case, she is the trustee, so she only needs permission from herself.”

  “You see, Laney,” Dad said, “it’s still your money, Laney.” Dad couldn’t stop saying Laney, as if, now that he had it again, he was desperate to cement the name in his memory. “Nothing to worry about, Laney.”

  After the meeting, I poked my head into Dad’s office. “You okay?”

  “Of course I’m okay. Why wouldn’t I be okay?”

  “You forgot Mrs. Sherwood’s name.”

  “Too much time on the golf course!” Dad said, flashing a false smile. “My brain is in a sand trap!”

  “How often are you forgetting things, Dad?”

  Dad turned his mouth downward and waved me away. “I’m fine!”

  “Dad. Seriously. Have you forgotten other things?”

  “I forget things all the time, just like anybody else,” he said. “I go to the refrigerator and can’t remember what for. My father was the same way. But he didn’t exercise his brain. My mind is working all the time.”

  “Sure, Dad, but there might be something going on—”

  “The Dow 30!” Dad roared, clapping his hands. “Let’s go: 3M, Wal-Mart, Amex, Disney, P&G, Apple, Nike, Pfizer, Boeing, JPMorgan, Goldman. What else? Don’t tell me, Missy. Chevron, Exxon, Intel, IBM.” He stalled, tapped his head. “Let me think.”

  “Dad, stop!” I said. “Can you please stop for a second and consider that perhaps something is going on with your brain? Can I make you a doctor’s appointment?”

  Dad settled down, gave up on his Dow listing. “I’m good, Daughter! I’m good,” he whispered. Then he looked at me long and hard. “Did I ever tell you about my army buddy, Dick McMurray?”

  Though I had heard many of Dad’s army stories, I hadn’t heard about Dick McMurray. I settled into the crook of the sofa.

  “Dick was a scrappy guy and that’s exactly the way I always thought of myself—maybe not the smartest, but scrappy as hell, resourceful, hardworking.”

  Dad often referred to himself as scrappy and resourceful, traits he found admirable because they involved hard work. Being smart, like me, he considered a bit of a freebie, like athleticism. I was born this way. Fortitude wasn’t involved in intelligence.

  Dad zoned in on me. “One day, the fighting had gone on so long, we didn’t know which way was up. Dark, murky hellhole: you couldn’t see a damn thing. We were taking rounds from every direction. Mackie got hit. It wasn’t until a few hours later that we were able to really take a look at him and see how his body was sprayed with shrapnel. We couldn’t see the piece that was lodged in his head. He survived, though.

  “When I was shipped home in late ’68, your mother and I drove to Philadelphia to see him. His wife, Marie, told us to be prepared, he wasn’t the same guy, because of the brain injury. She walked him out and sat him down. Gave him a snickerdoodle and a cup of tea.

  “He looked like an old man, withered, shrunken—just skin covering bony limbs. When he recognized me, he cried like a baby. He pointed at me like he wanted to say my name, but for the life of him, he couldn’t get it out. ‘Frank,’ I said. ‘It’s Frank.’

  “Missy, dear daughter,” Dad said, “that’s how I feel sometimes lately. Like there’s a piece of shrapnel lodged in my brain, a barricade preventing me from reaching up and grabbing the information I need.”

  “Can I make you a doctor’s appointment?” I asked.

  “Not yet,” Dad said. “Not yet.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The first weeks of summer fell upon us. In typical fashion, the office slowed to nearly a halt. Many of our clients were vacationing around the globe. Jenny pinned postcards on the bulletin board in our lunchroom. In exuberant script, they gushed their thanks on the blank space of the card. Thank you for making this possible. Thank you for giving us our retirement. Thank you for caring for us so well.

  And Dad was on the golf course every day. And selfishly, I was glad. When he would leave, I’d think, thank goodness, because I couldn’t watch my father humiliate himself in front of another client. I didn’t want to see him as anything less than the man I held him up to be. Our schedules nearly crisscrossed. Dad would arrive to the office early, dictate a few pieces of correspondence, instruct Jenny to schedule some lunches and golf dates with some of his buddies. And me? I came in late and stayed late.

  And Lucas Anderson became part of my vocabulary.

  The phone rang just as I had swept the Great Men category in Jeopardy! “Who was Charlemagne? Who was Pope Alexander? Who was Pericles? Who was Hannibal?”

  What’s it like to be such a know-it-all? I heard my old boyfriend Jason ask. But of course it wasn’t Jason, it was Lucas, who called every night at seven o’clock. And Lucas would never say such an awful, angry thing to me.

  Lucas and I chatted, made dinner plans for Saturday night.

  “But I’ll need your car keys early that day,” he said. “No questions. I have a surprise for you.”

  Saturday morning bright and early, Lucas came by for my car, looking very pleased with himself. Then promptly at six that night, he rang my doorbell and kissed me hello. “Would you like to see your car?” he asked.

  We walked down the few steps to a positively gleaming version of my Subaru. Lucas opened my door. I slid into the driver’s seat. The interior was almost comically immaculate, as if I had just driven it off the showroom floor.

  “Wow.”

  “I didn’t just clean it, I detailed it,” Lucas said. He reached down past me, showed me how he had scrubbed my carpets and degreased the wheels and waxed the exterior. “And I had the oil changed, and filled the tank.”

  “It’s so . . . clean,” I said. “And it has—a new car smell?”

  “That’s because I cleaned your air ducts,” he said. “It’s a hobby of mine. I spend a good couple of hours washing my car every Saturday.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “I shine shoes, too,” he said. “I could do yours.”

  I peered over to spy his shoes. They were shiny.

  “I’d like to do a lot of things for you,” he said, a bit shyly.

  I smiled, took in his blue eyes.

  “It’s just my thing,” he said, backpedaling a bit. “It’s a little weird, right? But Saturday mornings are for the car and the shoes. I’m a bit of a creature of habit.”

  “I’m the same way,” I said. “Not the cleaning part, but my patterns.” I thought of my morning routine at work: the computers, the charting, the testing. The listing, the filtering, the inputting of data. And my after-work routine: the Rosetta Stone CDs, the homemade dinners, flipping through the mail one piece at a time. The pistachio gelato in front of Jeopardy!, peeking in on my Facebook friends, planning trips on Expedia that I’d never take.

  “Two peas in a pod,” Lucas said, grinning widely.

  In the restaurant, we were seated by the window. The sun was just setting over the Potomac, the ball of fire resting at the water’s edge. When the waiter came, I ordered a glass of Chardonnay.

  “And for you, sir?”

  “I’m fine with water,” he said.

  “Sparkling, tap?”

  “Tap’s fine.”

  “And to start?” the waiter asked, looki
ng at me. “An appetizer, a cup of soup?”

  “You have to try the clam chowder,” I said to Lucas.

  “You go ahead,” he said, placing his hand over mine. “I’m fine with bread and water for now.”

  “I’m good,” I said, the disappointment audible even to me.

  “Don’t be silly,” Lucas said. “Order whatever you want.” He looked up at the waiter. “A cup of clam chowder for the lady.”

  The waiter nodded, jotted it down. When Lucas turned back to his menu, I looked up at the waiter and mouthed, “A bowl”—a tiny cup would only leave me wanting more.

  I let my heart process Lucas’s hand covering mine. It was warm, and he was sweet and considerate, and he adored me. And he had spent hours detailing my car and getting the oil changed and filling it with gas. I wanted to be with him. I wanted to be with a guy as kind as he was. On the other hand, he had just eschewed clam chowder and Chardonnay in favor of bread and water. When the waiter returned with my soup, I pulled my hand from under Lucas’s and dipped my spoon into the bowl. I closed my eyes and savored the potato melting in my mouth, the hint of dill awakening my taste buds. I took a long sip of wine. For a few seconds, time stopped and Lucas hardly seemed relevant. I just wanted to enjoy my food. At last I looked over at him. “Are you sure you don’t want a bite?”

  “You enjoy it,” he said, smiling. “I’m not really much of a fish guy.”

  In my mind, I began drawing columns and categorizing who Lucas was, and who he was not. He was a tax guy, a car-cleaning expert, and shoe-shining wizard. He wasn’t a foodie, he wasn’t a drinker, and he didn’t care for fish. How would the two of us ever travel together in Tuscany? But then again, what were the chances that I’d ever make it to Tuscany, anyway?

  When the waiter came for our order, I asked for the sea bass fillet surrounded by char-scorched tomatoes, broccoli rabe, a bed of orzo. Lucas ordered a steak and baked potato. He ate half of it, all the while chattering on about work, creating foreign entities, inventorying assets, and documenting policies for fraud prevention. When I asked about his family, he told me that he was pretty plain vanilla: great parents, one sister, his childhood home a redbrick Colonial still standing in the west end of Richmond. When I asked about trips he’d taken, he informed me that he wasn’t much of a traveler; that he preferred to stay in the States or, even better, close to home. Instead, he regaled me with the details of a fascinating National Geographic documentary he enjoyed on California’s Napa region.