Love in Bloom

by Sheila Roberts

  Hope watched him go.

  “Great butt,” Clarice said, echoing her thoughts. “No wedding ring. I wonder if he’s got a girlfriend.”

  “Didn’t you just meet Mr. Amazing last night?” Hope teased.

  Clarice made a face. “Not for me, for you. He’s probably at least thirty. That’s your age.”

  “Me?” Hope shook her head. “He’s not my type.”

  “A man like that is anybody’s type.”

  Not anybody’s, thought Hope. A man like that needed a perfect woman, not one who was scarred and had an alien implant where her left boob used to be.

  Never mind. You may look like the Bride of Frankenstein and have an alien implant, but you have your flower shop, you have your life. And you have a floral arrangement to make.

  TWO

  SEVENTY-SIX-YEAR-OLD MILLIE Baldwin felt like the Invisible Woman. What did it take to snag a boy’s attention these days? “Guess what I did while you were in school?” she asked her twelve-year-old grandson.

  No response.

  “I stole the Liberty Bell.”

  Eric gave a grunt and frantically pressed the controls on his video game.

  “I buried it in the neighbor’s backyard,” Millie continued, trying to make herself heard over the sound of gunfire coming from the TV. “Of course, it won’t stay over there. That’s just temporary, till I can find a buyer. I would have buried it in your backyard, but it would have been too hard to hide all that freshly dug sod under gravel and a bonsai bush.”

  “Oh, man, he killed me!” cried Eric in disgust.

  Millie sighed and let him go on with his game; something called “Halo” that he played on-line with his new best friends who happened to be total strangers. Maybe if she had expressed an interest in killing virtual people when she first came to stay with Debra, she and her grandson would be spending more time together now. Maybe they would talk. Maybe when she talked he would listen. Probably not though. Who wanted to listen to an old woman?

  She had tried to figure out the game one afternoon, thinking it would be fun to surprise Eric and challenge him to a duel when he got home from school, but she’d been unable to even make the game start, let alone decipher the purpose of all the buttons on the controller.

  “I think I’ll just scoot out to the kitchen and make myself a cup of tea, plan my next heist.”

  “Whoa!” he hooted.

  “Would you like something to eat, Eric?” she offered.

  “Fritos,” he said, and jerked in sympathy as his on-screen action hero dodged a barrage of bullets.

  The child had been programmed with selective hearing. Millie fetched the bag of chips, then returned to the living room and stood in front of the couch where her grandson was planted dead center.

  “Hey, Gram,” he protested, leaning to the right. “I can’t see.”

  “Maybe you’ve been playing that game so much that you’re going blind.”

  “I don’t play that much,” he argued, frantically pressing the game controls.

  “Your mother wanted me to make sure you did your homework.”

  “I didn’t have any,” he said, not missing a beat. His face suddenly crumpled in pain and he dropped the controls and fell over on the couch with a moan. “I’m dead again.”

  She dropped the chips on the coffee table in front of him. “These should resurrect you.”

  He sat back up, reaching for the chips while simultaneously punching the game controls.

  “You’re welcome, dear,” she prompted.

  “Oh, yeah. Thanks, Gram.” He shot her a quick grin and she tousled his hair. He was a cute boy. They used to have fun together when he and his sister came out to visit, playing games like Sorry and Steal the Pack. But here, on his home turf, those quiet games couldn’t compete with the action on the TV screen. Neither could she.

  Back in the kitchen, Millie fed Socks the cat, who was winding around her legs, begging for food. Then she put the kettle on to boil and stood looking out the window. She saw a drizzly Pacific Northwest day and a stark landscape of raked rocks, dotted with a few ornamental bushes. Her daughter claimed it was restful. How could a yard with barely any vegetation be restful? And if it was so restful, why was Debra always so tense?

  That, of course, was a rhetorical question. Debra was a single, working mother with a stressful job and spoiled children who required the latest of everything. How could she be anything but tense?

  Fourteen-year-old Emily bounced into the kitchen, freshly home from school and ready to forage for food. She planted a quick kiss on Millie’s cheek and gave her a casual, “Hi, Gram.” Like Eric, Emily was a beautiful child, with golden hair and blue eyes. She was two years older than her brother and just as skinny. She also had an equally never-ending appetite. Millie was beginning to suspect these children had tapeworms.

  Emily was a multitasker, just like her mom. Right now she was searching the fridge and talking on her shiny, pink cell phone. What did a fourteen-year-old need with a cell phone?

  “They all have them, Mom,” Debra had informed her. “And, anyway, I like being able to get ahold of her when I need to.”

  They didn’t have cell phones when Debra was growing up, and Millie managed to get ahold of Debra just fine. It was ridiculous if you asked Millie. Not that anyone did.

  “I did not say that about her,” Emily snarled into her phone. “Is she crazy?”

  “I made oatmeal cookies this afternoon,” offered Millie.

  “Cool, thanks.” Emily grabbed a yogurt, piled two cookies on top, and then pulled a spoon from the silverware drawer. “Well, I didn’t say that and you need to tell Rachel I didn’t say that, and if Brandy doesn’t stop telling lies about me, I’m going to nail the skank bitch to the wall.”

  “Emily,” chided Millie. “What nasty words to come out of such a sweet little mouth.” Emily had never talked like that as a little girl. She’d been all innocence and curls, and Millie had so enjoyed showing Emily off to her friends on those summer vacation visits. The curls had vanished with adolescence. The sweetness was still there, Millie was sure, just hiding.

  “Sorry, Gram,” Emily said breezily, and sailed out of the kitchen.

  Hiding very well.

  The phone rang. Millie checked the caller ID and saw that it was her oldest and dearest friend, Alice Livingston, calling from Connecticut.

  Alice barely gave her time to say hello. “Are you ready to come home yet?”

  “This is my home now,” Millie said firmly.

  Alice gave a snort. “Living in your daughter’s house?”

  “I like it here,” Millie insisted. All right. Perhaps she had made a bit of a hasty decision, but at the time it seemed like the perfect solution for both her daughter and herself. Debra needed help, and Millie needed a home. All those unexpected medical expenses had really upset her financial apple cart. She and Duncan had been the poster couple for why all Americans over the age of sixty should have long-term-care insurance. She was sure that, in the end, Duncan had willed himself to pass on to save what little they had left for her. Sadly, he hadn’t saved much.

  “Oh, you can’t be serious,” Alice said, her voice dripping scorn. “Going from your own home to being a dependent.”

  “I’m not a dependent,” Millie said stiffly. “I contribute.” Not only did she do the laundry, help with the cooking, and clean up the kitchen after meals, she paid Debra rent from her Social Security check. Debra had balked at taking the money at first, but Millie had insisted. After all, she had her pride.

  “You should have moved in with me,” Alice said. “We could have had so much fun.”

  Just thinking about her happy life in Little Haven was enough to bring a sigh—tea parties with her friends of forty years, gardening, attending St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, where Debra had been married.

  “It’s not too late. You could come back,” Alice coaxed.

  Sounds of kabooms from the TV drifted in from the living room. “No,” M
illie said firmly. “Going back is never a good idea. I need to move forward.”

  “Living with your daughter? I call that moving backward.”

  “Maybe that would be true in your case, but it’s not in mine,” Millie said. She was needed here. And that was certainly better than staying put, moldering in the past. “Now, dear. I have to go. I have to start dinner.”

  “Debra’s going to work you into an early grave,” Alice predicted.

  That made Millie smile. Secretly, Alice was jealous. She and her daughter weren’t on speaking terms. “I’ll talk to you soon, dear,” she said, and hung up.

  She pulled the teapot from the burner before it could whistle. There was already enough noise in this house. She wasn’t about to add to it.

  The phone rang again. This time it was Debra. That could mean only one thing. Millie picked up the receiver. “Do you have to work late?”

  It happened so much. Millie had thought when she moved out here they’d have more time to talk, do things together. That hadn’t quite worked out as planned. Between work and the children, Debra was so busy. And Little League was about to start for Eric, which would make her even busier.

  “Sorry, Mom. But don’t worry about making dinner. I can pick something up on the way home. The kids don’t mind eating late.”

  That was the trouble with life at Debra’s house if you asked Millie, no routine. “You have leftover chicken in the refrigerator. I can make a pot pie.”

  “No, that’s okay. Just leave the chicken. I’m going to make chicken curry with it on the weekend. I’ll bring something home. I should be there by quarter to seven.”

  Almost seven at night. That was too late for Millie to eat. If she ate that late she didn’t sleep well.

  But this was Debra’s house, so she didn’t say anything. Instead, she wished her daughter well with the rest of her day and hung up the phone. So much for making dinner. She fixed her tea and then stood in front of the window, looking at the nonview.

  Most of Heart Lake was pretty, with its tall evergreens and tangled brush, its homey downtown and converted summer homes. Even the newer houses on the lake had a casual feel that fit the area, and were landscaped in a way that blended with the firs and pines and alders. But the development where her daughter lived camped at the edge of town like an unwanted visitor. It was made up of tract mansions painted in the latest popular colors, bulging like squatting monsters over their small lots. The developer had left a string of fir trees at the back of the development in an attempt to make Heart Lake Estates fit in, but it was plain that whoever planned this suburban ghetto had been given a list of only three landscaping options and told to alternate them: small yard with a couple of rhododendrons and a maple tree in the corner; small yard with a boulder or two at the edge, some pampas grass, and a maple tree in the corner; a gravel Sahara with no front lawn, sparsely dotted with scraggly bonsai and a Japanese maple in the corner. The landscaper on her daughter’s house had opted for the latter, both back and front.

  Looking at the scene before her, Millie felt far from Zen. Perhaps Alice was right. She didn’t fit here. She shouldn’t have let Debra persuade her otherwise. At least in Little Haven, she had familiar surroundings and good friends. And a lovely garden.

  “Mom, you could live with Randall or me,” her son Duncan Jr. had told her. You don’t have to move there just because Deb wants you to.”

  “I know, dear. But she needs help with the children.”

  “She needs help. Period. When she’s not working you to death, she’ll take over your life and boss you around. That’s what she did to Ben. That’s why he left. She’s high-maintenance, Mom.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Millie had assured him. Debra was the youngest of her three children, the baby of the family, her change of life baby, and she had brought Millie such joy. Perhaps she’d spoiled Debra just a little, but Debra was her daughter, for heaven’s sake. And, yes, Debra could be a little high-maintenance, but Millie didn’t have anything else to maintain anyway, so why not? The old house in Little Haven had felt too big for her to rattle around in alone. Just as well it was gone.

  But this house felt too small. There was no room for her to squeeze into the lives of the people occupying it. Her daughter barely had time for her, her grandchildren ignored her, and the nonyard mocked her.

  She loved to garden. Debra knew that. Where did Debra think her mother was going to garden out there in the Japanese Sahara? Millie longed to feel cheered by an English garden with flowers of all shapes and colors spilling everywhere, a garden she could stand in the middle of and smell the fragrance of new life in bloom. Here at the Heart Lake Bonsai Farm, there wasn’t room for so much as a sweet pea.

  Millie turned her back on the nonview. “It doesn’t do any good to mope,” she told herself. “I need to make some changes.”

  She took her tea, settled at the kitchen table, and began to look through the weekly edition of The Heart Lake Herald, determined to find something with which to build a new life.

  The Heart Lake High girls’ volleyball team had won their third straight game. Standing O was conducting auditions for Oklahoma! The police blotter was full of high crime. A deer had gotten caught in rush-hour traffic at the corner of Lake View and Loveland Lane. The police had been called and the deer escorted to safety. A runner on Lake Drive had found and turned in a silver ring, which was being held until someone came in to claim it. How sweet. So much about this place seemed friendly. Except this house, this yard.

  She turned the page and suddenly found exactly what she’d been looking for. Garden Season Is Here Again, proclaimed the headline. Millie smiled as she read on. The Heart Lake Park and Recreation Department is currently reserving plots for all interested gardeners at the community garden at Grandview Park.

  A vision of a little fence hugging delphiniums, petunias, marigolds, and violas, lavender and candytuft formed itself in Millie’s mind. And pansies, she couldn’t forget pansies with their sweet flower faces. That was the ideal, but alas, some of those flowers were perennials, and a community garden was no place for perennials. But the world was full of flowers. She could make do.

  She smiled. Heart Lake had just given her a get out of jail free card.

  THREE

  I NEED TO leave early,” Clarice told Hope as they stood side by side removing thorns from the roses the wholesaler had delivered that morning.

  Hope cocked a finger at her. “April Fools, right?”

  “No, for real.”

  She’d come in late and now she wanted to leave early? Hope combed her fingers through her hair. “Do you have to?”

  “Look on the bright side. It’s an hour you don’t have to pay me for.”

  “I’d rather pay you,” Hope said. “Come on, Clarice. I depend on you.”

  Clarice had the grace to look guilty. But only for a moment. “You can handle things on your own for the last hour, can’t you?”

  “Barely. We’re getting busier all the time.”

  Word was spreading. Hope Walker was the Picasso of flowers. Between her flower arrangements and the inspiring words she helped customers put on the accompanying gift card, she had probably saved a dozen relationships and cemented another twenty since Valentine’s Day. She was already booked for two weddings. This morning alone she’d had a dozen calls for arrangements for everything from birthdays to new babies. And with Heart Lake High’s Junior Class Spring Fever Dance coming up on the weekend, orders for corsages and boutonnieres were pouring in. Of course, that was all good, but it was all even better when her help actually stuck around to help. Clarice had to get a grip.

  “Clarice,” she began, trying to sound firm.

  “I promised I’d make dinner for Borg.”

  Mr. Wonderful, who was responsible for turning Clarice from a flake into a frustration. Of course, she should tell Clarice that she was going to have to make a choice. Either be dependable or go find some other employer to torture. But that was easier said than done.
Clarice had been Hope’s first employee. Her only employee. Who would she get to replace Clarice?

  Any number of people, for crying out loud. Hope put on her sternest expression. “Look,” she began again. Clarice was making a pitiful, pleading face she had to have stolen straight from Puss in Boots in the Shrek movies. “But you can’t cook.” Way to be tough.

  “I know,” Clarice moaned. “That’s why I need to get off early. It’s going to take me hours to figure out how to make spaghetti.”

  This was why Clarice was ditching her? “Buy frozen meatballs, canned sauce, and boil some pasta and you’re good to go. Trust me.”

  “And the place is a mess. I need to change the bed.”

  “TMI,” Hope said, holding up a hand.

  “Come on, Hope, let me go home early just this once. Haven’t you ever been in love?”

  When she was Clarice’s age, about a million times, and it had been wonderful.

  Hope gave up. She still believed in love, if not for herself, then for other people. “Oh, all right. But don’t do this to me again. The dance is Saturday, and with all the other orders by Friday we’ll be swamped.”

  Clarice beamed at her. “I’ll be here. You can count on me. You know that.”

  Her words rang mockingly in Hope’s ears when on Thursday, with forty-three corsages and almost as many boutonnieres to make (and still counting), two birthday bouquets to get delivered, and the phone ringing off the hook, the clock hit eleven A.M. and there was still no sign of Clarice. Hope had tried Clarice’s home phone and her cell only to get her voice mail.

  She had finally broken down and put in a desperate call to her younger sister. Bobbi was a disaster in heels, but she had artistic flair and a way with flowers that couldn’t be taught. Hope just had to make sure she kept her sister away from the phones and the computer. Nobody could screw up an order like Bobbi. Nobody had a heart like Bobbi, either. God bless her, when someone needed help, she came at a run.