La Fleur de Blanc

by Sean Platt

  Lily arrived to find a woman outside, tapping her foot. She had shoulder-length black hair and black-framed glasses, and the tapping foot wore a sensible shoe rather than a tall heel.

  “About time,” said the woman as Lily opened the door.

  “I’m sorry. Have you been waiting long?”

  “Did you know there’s no Cinnabon in this place? I was appalled. But luckily, I found this bakery. It’s called ‘Butt.’”

  “Buns,” Lily corrected.

  “Right. I got something that was probably five thousand calories. I have no regrets. So help me here. I need something for my boss’s office. She’s really fancy. I see you only sell white flowers. That’s the kind of shit my boss would love. You remember the parable of the “Emperor’s New Clothes,” right?”

  “Um … ”

  “You could sell her an invisible suit no problem. Just tell her it’s really expensive. But yeah. So what’s a good office flower for a woman who could freeze water with her … ”

  “How about hydrangeas and roses?” Lily offered.

  “Sounds like a win. Can you deliver them after lunch, then?”

  “Oh,” said Lily. “We don’t deliver.”

  “You don’t deliver?” It was as if Lily had just told the woman she didn’t breathe.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Why not?”

  “We … just don’t.” Lily supposed that La Fleur would have to deliver if she wasn’t the only person working (seven days a week).

  “Oh. Well, that’s not great. I have this little BMW, and it’s not going to fit all I need. And I can’t be a porter, carrying her flowers up. It’s a power struggle thing, you know. She treats me like an assistant. I’m an account manager, not an assistant. I’m only here because she tricked me into looking for flowers “while out meeting with that client.” She knows the client is like ten miles away. Bitch. Anyway, it’s a whole thing. I can’t take her her flowers, though. Too much power. How can you not deliver?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  The woman put her hands on her hips. She was blunt and brusque, but for some reason Lily found that she liked her. Maybe it was the black-frame glasses and the sensible shoes. She was pretty, but not runway-model pretty, and she wasn’t old enough to get away with “distinguished and elegant” instead of “kind of slutty.” So different from most of the Palms foot traffic.

  “Shit. How am I supposed to play this?” She tapped her chin with one finger. “The politics are pretty complex. Have you ever worked in an office?”

  “No.” She’d worked in Aunt Bev’s shop and, for two months when seventeen, McDonald’s.

  The woman scrunched her mouth sideways, thinking. For some reason the nerdy expression made Lily like her even more.

  “Blame me.”

  The woman looked at her.

  “Blame me,” Lily repeated. “Say I was a raging … jerk … and that La Fleur — which, you could point out, has a snooty French name — is super, super chichi and totally full of itself. Say I told you we’re not 'f'ing 1-800 Flowers’ and that we refuse to deliver any order under five thousand dollars.” Too late, Lily realized she might have made a mistake. It was absurd to think that the woman had come in willing to spend five thousand dollars, but there was no way of knowing.

  The woman’s brow furrowed.

  “Then,” Lily added, struck by a whim, “take back a bouquet for yourself. Put it in your office. Fluff it admiringly whenever your boss walks by.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Because you are worth it,” said Lily. “Which also kinda means she’s not.”

  “Interesting,” said the woman. “You sure you’ve never worked in an office?”

  Lily nodded.

  “Because you’d make a good manipulative bitch. I mean that in a good way.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Tell you what,” said the woman. “Let’s make it a weekly order. Tuesdays.”

  Lily smiled at her fluttering heart. It was one bouquet, but a recurring order. She’d been ready to offer the woman her screw-you bouquet for free, but if she was buying weekly she’d obviously be paying. But that wasn’t all. She was buying for herself. Yes, it was about spite for now. But that would change as she grew used to seeing flowers on her desk every day. Lily felt certain.

  “Sure,” said Lily, trying to contain her enthusiasm.

  “But you don’t deliver.”

  Lily smiled. “Not unless you want to order a weekly five thousand dollar bouquet.”

  The woman didn’t smile back. “Not yet,” she said.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  MARCELLO AND MATTHEW VITALE

  After the woman (Rachel, according to her order slip) left with her “fuck you flowers,” Lily went about her opening chores with the door propped open, singing softly. She barely noticed at first, but took it as a good sign after she did. Lily sang to herself all the time back home, but didn’t think she’d done it even once since moving to Cielo del Mar. It was something she did when alone and happy. But not just happy; at peace. It came from a contented kind of joy that she had no right to feel now, on the second day of a business she’d was doomed just one night before. But she did, nonetheless.

  The next few hours did their best to throw cold water on Lily’s ambition. After Rachel left, Lily had sat down and, feeling stupid, had begun working out her total sales per hour during La Fleur’s one-day-plus existence. The number was — thanks in large part to Dean Moreno yesterday and nudged a bit by her first second-day customer — larger than Lily thought she had any right to. Extrapolated at this rate, she’d make a nice chunk per week. So she doubled it to find her biweekly take, then subtracted rent. Lily was still a week ahead; the Palms wouldn’t formally begin charging her until next Monday. But even without that credit, she’d be in the black.

  But then Lily remembered the rather obvious expense of the flowers themselves, and watched her number plummet. Then she remembered utilities, supplies, and other miscellany, and watched it drop again. In the end, she might manage to make minimum wage at her current clip. She might be able to afford groceries. But then there was Dusty’s rent to consider, gas for her car, and …

  The game stopped being fun. Lily shoved the pad and pencil into a drawer, then tried to forget she’d been playing. It was her second day. Every business struggled for a while; no one soared from the get-go. She’d also led with a loss, giving out all those free roses. That had been an investment. In the coming days, as her takers looked at their beautiful roses, they’d come back to buy more. Even the shops around her could use flowers to pretty them up. Silas had seemed interested in a recurring order. Len wouldn’t need flowers for his business, but what about the baker with the red hair and the kind smile? She might want flowers on an ongoing basis, right? It wasn’t fair to calculate a per-hour rate so early.

  Have faith, Mom said in her head.

  Lily sat on her stool, behind the counter of her deserted shop, and waited, trying not to think of that too-low hourly sales rate clicking downward by the passing minute.

  As the sun shortened shadows across the courtyard, foot traffic swelled. Customers entered, curious. Lily had been lucky with Rachel. For hours, all that followed were thin women in heels and jewelry, most middle aged, none cracking a smile.

  There was a woman with long, red hair who kept asking “Is this all you have?” But she didn’t just ask once. She asked at least six times. Despite the fact that Lily had spent a delivery-bouquet’s worth of money at the Market between her two trips, the woman couldn’t believe there weren’t more varieties of flowers, more species of cut orchids, more colors, more shades of white, more types of arrangements. Lily wanted to smack her. If she didn’t think La Fleur had enough variety, why didn’t she just leave? Why did she keep staying to express displeasure on repeat?

  There was the older woman with a short gray bob of hair and an untold fortune in pearls around her neck who kept asking Lily why she didn’t carry baby’s br
eath. Lily didn’t want to tell her the core truth (I learned to hate it when my old boyfriend brought me red roses with baby’s breath and then immediately stuck his hand down my pants) but did tell a version of an equally accurate truth: that baby’s breath was gauche and decades out of style. Lily told her delicately, thinking the woman might be offended and think Lily ageist. But the woman simply kept huffing, saying that any self-respecting shop should carry baby’s breath to make arrangements pretty.

  A fussy man with a pocket square couldn’t believe Lily didn’t stock tropicals.

  A woman with a stick’s physique and straight blonde hair kept demanding to see the “back room” where Lily kept “her secret stash of colored flowers, for emergencies.”

  No one bought anything. There were plenty of looky-loos and a few people reporting they’d heard about the shop that gave out free flowers. Lily started telling people she’d exhausted that promotion the day before, but then after a while simply gave them out again, working to stay upbeat. Her attitude, if anything, would determine her altitude.

  Lily could see Len at Hit N’ Run in the big tree’s shadows. He caught her eye and waved.

  She saw Kerry Barrett Kirby pacing her store’s frontage like a prowling dog. When she looked toward La Fleur, Lily looked away, pretending she hadn’t seen.

  Around lunchtime, the store’s traffic thinned, and Lily’s stomach growled. She hadn’t eaten during her open hours the day before and had ransacked a box of granola bars from her car’s overheated trunk after closing, feeling like a hog. She was beginning to wonder how she could take a break (was she supposed to post a “Back in 5 minutes” sign?) when Lily heard footsteps behind her.

  She steeled herself for another annoying, draining, no-sale encounter with someone demanding something she didn’t have, but instead found herself facing the man who owned Bella by the Sea.

  “Hello,” she said when the man didn’t speak. He’d stepped just past the doorway and was standing mildly, waiting for an invite.

  “Buongiorno,” he said.

  Lily hesitated for a fraction of a second, disarmed by the man’s bearing. He was tall and thin, wearing a dark suit that was almost a tuxedo. He looked early 50s, his skin weathered but still somehow youthful. His beard was equally salt and pepper, and the long hair pulled back into a ponytail matched its color at the temples. He wasn’t smiling, but Lily couldn’t help but feel charmed. It was as if she was at his place of business, with him as the gracious host. Her reception at Bella by the Sea hadn’t been gracious the time she’d entered, but that wasn’t this man’s fault. She was suddenly sure that if she told him her story, he’d be aghast, that he’d walk her over and treat her to whatever she wanted, because that was what a gentleman did for a lady.

  “You own Bella by the Sea, don’t you?”

  “Si. My son, Amadeo, as well. The credit is mostly his. I never would have had the bravery to try.”

  “To open a restaurant?”

  A small smile creased his lips. “To open Bella by the Sea.”

  “Oh.”

  He extended a hand. Lily, enchanted, set her hand in his rather than taking it, as if she thought he wanted to bend and kiss it. Then she turned it into a proper handshake as he said, “I am Marcello Vitale.”

  “Lily Whistler.”

  “We have been watching your shop,” he said.

  “We?”

  “Amadeo and me.”

  “Matt?” She’d said it too eagerly.

  “You might have heard others call him Matthew. To me and to his departed mother, he will always be Amadeo.”

  Lily held back a too-eager smile. What Marcello had just said was like walking around showing baby pictures, embarrassing his boy and not at all caring.

  “We meant to come over yesterday.” His vowels softened with the foreign rhythm. “I apologize that we were not able before now.”

  Lily looked over Marcello’s shoulder, hoping for Matt.

  “Well,” she said, unsure how to proceed. The most elegant evening of Lily’s life had been with Jason at Olive Garden before senior prom. Marcello was lapping that experience simply by standing in her doorway. “I guess it’s nice to meet you.”

  “You’re not sure?”

  “It is nice to meet you. I mean … ”

  But Marcello was softly laughing, setting a comforting hand on Lily’s shoulder and turning her as if inviting her inside her own flower shop. “A joke. Please.” He gestured toward Lily’s stool, but she stayed standing. Marcello shrugged. “Like I said, we’ve been watching. Eagerly. It’s romantic, what you’ve done here.”

  “Romantic?”

  “Not in the sense of love, but in the sense of idealism, of a hope for how things might be. In the sense of fantasy, perhaps. It’s similar to the romance of Bella. We had to create the experience first, then show people how it was what they wanted all along. You are doing the same. Most people wouldn’t think they’d want only white flowers, but that’s not what you’re doing, are you, trying to set up your shop and hope people will come in and agree? No. You have to go ‘all in’ as they say in poker, as we did at our restaurant. You have to set up as if there is demand for what you have, with all the world’s confidence. You do not go in wondering. You go in sure. Then you wait for those who agree with what you have already said is true to recognize it as such.”

  Lily thought she’d just been complimented but wasn’t sure. Marcello Vitale, after just sixty seconds of acquaintance, struck her as a man who spoke in a romantic language of his own. His sentences were half information and half poetry, and it was up to the listener to find their own interpretation. Lily thought she understood what he was saying, but so far, judging by her internal compass, he was incorrect. She wasn’t as confident as she seemed. She wasn’t so sure of her idea that she could set up shop and simply wait for people to recognize her all-white shop as obviously amazing. She had been approaching all of her customers with the intention of converting them, of showing them how white was its own array of beautiful colors. But maybe something deep had shown through, and she hadn’t come off as desperate and needy as she felt. Marcello had seen something in her, after all … if she chose to step into it.

  “Thank you?”

  Marcello was pacing the aisle, making his way past the cart in the store’s middle. One hand, a starched white cuff visible below his blazer’s dark sleeve, was palm out on the small of his back. The other was in front, lightly touching petals, stroking flowers while passing as if greeting a lover.

  He pulled a Casa Blanca from one of the buckets.

  “Like you, yes?” he said, holding it high like a toast. Then he smelled it, his face mild and pleased. “Consider: This same flower could be in a bucket in a supermarket. The exact same flower. Just as the ingredients we use in our kitchen could be in any food you might find anywhere. But yet you have made from it a delicious recipe, by putting it here, next to all these others. But not just in mixing flowers, as we mix cream with sherry and chervil. No. You have created an experience.”

  Lily looked around. “I have?”

  “Si. And that is why I have watched your preparations with such interest. I see in you something I believe in myself.”

  “What is that?”

  “It is what makes me want to buy this flower from you, whereas I would not buy the exact same flower from a bucket in a supermarket.”

  Lily stammered. “You don’t have to buy it. You can have it.”

  “But you are not listening.” Marcello smiled. “As I would not buy it from a supermarket, I would not take it free from you. I wish to buy it, because of the feeling your shop has given me.”

  “What feeling is that?”

  “Luxury. Abundance, despite the limited palate. Nobody would shop here who does not do so because you have instilled in them a great confidence. You are stating who you are, and giving them permission to do the same. You are allowing them to take your flowers home, neutral and yet so varied in their subtleties, so beau
tiful, and allowing them to imprint their own life’s colors upon them.”

  Lily gave a helpless smile. She liked what Marcello was saying, but wasn’t sure why. He came forward, and again put his hand on her arm. She’d seen that about some European countries: in those cultures, touch wasn’t reserved for intimate encounters. Or rather, it was always intimate and sensuous, because life was intimate and sensuous.

  "Don’t you see?” said Marcello. “Colorful flowers can be like noise. But white flowers are quiet. If you buy them, you must be confident that your voice is worth hearing.”

  He was still holding the lily, brushing its petals against his nose.

  “I won’t let you buy it.”

  “But why not?”

  “Because it’s a gift.”

  “Ah,” he said, now breaking into a genuine smile. “Then I accept. This one. But I have other business.”

  “Oh,” she said, expecting him to turn and leave, to attend to his other business. It was fine. More than fine. The few minutes Marcello had spent in the store had lifted her spirits in a way Lily hadn’t thought possible. She might still go bankrupt, yes. But at least she’d do it with her head held high.

  “I would like your help in selecting a recurring order for Bella by the Sea. It is like I said. We deliver an experience. As do you. And so I wish to add your experience to ours.”

  “Oh.” Lily was afraid to move, to say the wrong thing and shatter the spell. She was twenty-two years old, fresh out of Kansas, and just as out of her element as Dorothy. Maybe Marcello saw confidence and savvy in La Fleur de Blanc, but those weren’t emotions its owner felt prepared to own. Doing so felt like wearing another’s suit and claiming it as her own. And yet if Lily gave away her nervousness or implied that whatever Marcello saw was misperception, his interest might fade. He wouldn’t buy a single lily from a merchant that didn’t believe in it. So why would he buy more from her?

  “We create an atmosphere. It’s a semiprivate space, three couples only. If there is one place where people must have a perfect mix of ambiance and neutrality which they must fill with their own personalities and conversation, our dining room is it. What would you recommend?”