Are You Sitting Down? (31 page)

A sign on the door said to ring the bell, and a large bell hung on a red rope around the door knob.
I hesitated but rang
it
anyway.
A tiny dog barked from behind the door and scratched at the threshold.
After a few seconds, I turned to walk away and had just made it down a few of the steps when I heard the door creak open behind me.

“You wanna buy roses?”
a
slow child
’s
voice asked b
e
hind me.

I turned to find a small black boy’s face pushed out b
e
tween the door and the frame.
He had a finger in one nose and was holding a small dirty poodle back with his other hand.
The poodle growled ferociously.

“I think I have the wrong house,” I said
,
trying to di
s
miss myself as I continued backing away to my car.

“Who is it, Bud?
Who’s there?”
a
frog-like
voice called from behind the boy.

Just then, a fat hand pulled the boy out of the way and pushed him behind the door.
A small toothless woman whose skin resembled a burlap sack appeared.
She was wearing a fl
o
ral print dress that reminded me of bed sheets on a clothes line blowing in the breeze.
The fabric pulled at every wrinkle in her fat little body hid
ing
beneath it.
Her hair was silvery white and pulled back in a bun.
Her round eyes were distorted behind her thick coke bottle glasses.

“You need somethin, sweetie?”
s
he asked in a soothing grandmother tone.

“I saw your sign about the roses,” I stuttered.

“Sho’nuff!
C
’mon in an
’
I’ll fix ya right up!”
s
he e
x
claimed.

Standing aside, she held the door open for me and we
l
comed me in with a gesture of her hand and a nod of the head.
She instructed Bud to take the “damn poodle” in the back.
The smell of sweet vanilla incense immediately
filled
my
nostrils, covering me with a sense of
pleasantry.
A black pot bellied stove in the middle of the room warmed the heavy air.
I held my hands over it to feel its soothing love.
The old wooden floor creaked beneath my feet like a haunted house or an old one room church deca
y
ing in the backwoods somewhere.

The ambience of the old lady’s shop was like an ornate dried flower arrangement with its brown, red, and orange flo
w
ers in various sized vases all around the room.
Faux pumpkins were nestled in shelves lining the wall next to colored glass trinkets and porcelain figurines.
A tall freezer hummed behind the counter.
Filled with large budding roses, it was an anomaly amongst the comforting décor of the little room.
The old lady stepped behind the massive work counter and opened the freezer.
She took out a dozen yellow roses and began wrapping them in cellophane.

“Boy, why you wear your heart on the outside today?”
she asked.

“Excuse me.”

I stepped away from the stove and walked over to the station where she was working.

“You missing somebody?”

“Ye
s
. Ye
s
, I
am
.”

I felt like I was blushing, but it could have just been the heat from the stove.
She didn’t seem to take notice.

“They across the street?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Ain’t been there long.”

I mistook this as a question.

“No, ma’am.
Not too long. Their headstone was deli
v
ered today.”

“I bet it’s purty.
You gonna be needing these then to dress it up a bit, eh?”
s
he asked handing me the yellow roses.

“I was thinking red.”

“He say he don’t want red.”

“I’m sorry?”

“He say he want yellow roses.”

I stood there for a moment studying what she had just said.
It sent chills down my spine.
The lady just looked at me kindly and grinned.
Her cataract glazed eyes looked through me.

“How do you know?”
I asked.

“Red say you love him.
He know dat already.
Yellow rose be his favorite.
You should know dat.”

I did know it. Never taking my eyes off her, I reached for the flowers and took them from her slowly.
I reached into my pocket with my other hand and retrieved a fifty dollar bill and laid it on top of the counter.
I felt her finger touch my hand gently as the flowers were exchanged between us. She took the money and tucked it into her pocket.

I stood there unable to move.
The little old lady walked back around the counter and touched me on the shoulder.
She escorted me back to the front door.

“Thank you for the flowers,” I managed to say to her as we stepped back out into the cold.

“Thank ya for stopping by today,” she said.

“I’m glad I did.”

I slowly walked down the stairs and had just made it to the car door when the old lady called out from behind me.

“Boy!”
s
he yelled. I turned and glanced at her from over my shoulder. “JB say thank you.
Thank you for ever
y
thing.”

Reluctantly, I turned and looked in my car.
I looked at the front lawn of the little shop.
I studied the cut off broom sticks stuck in the ground to hold up the cardboard roses sign, expec
t
ing to find hidden cameras or someone crouching in the grass waiting to yell surprise.
What joke was someone playing on me?
How did anyone know I was here?
There was no one there except for the wind.
I looked back at the little woman standing on the porch with her hands folded across her belly.
The look on her face read, “I told you so.”

“Tell JB I love him,” I said.

“You just did.”

I nodded with a smile of content and got into the car.
No one had ever known I called Justin
“
JB
”
except for the two of us.
I leaned over to lay the roses on the passenger’s seat.
When I looked back up, the front porch of the tiny flower shack was empty.
The old woman was gone.
Tears made my eye lids feel heavy, so I closed them for a second or two
before pulling out onto the highway and crossing to the cemetery e
n
trance.

I was anxious and still overcome with shock from what had been said at the flower shop.
I decided to stop by my father’s grave first.
I’ve always envisioned cemeteries like giant
silent
parties where I’m searching for someone I know amongst a bunch of faceless strangers.
My father was surrounded by his parents.
My grandfather went before I was born.
He died from a black widow bite on
his
ass while going to the outhouse. Dad had a brother and a sister beside him, along with some uncle
s
and aunts I’d never met.
His brother fell into an empty well when he was only three.

My father’s headstone was a double stone with my mom’s name and birth date already engraved on her side, an empty seat being held for her at the party.
Our last name, WHITE, adorned the back side in deep block letters across the middle.
Intricate crosses and roses bordered the corners where their names were.
I wondered if they got those for free.

The fall arrangement fastened across the top of the stone today was bright and clean, large silk sunflowers with tufts of wheat under them and orange berries.
They looked so new I wondered if Mom had already been here this morning before me.

As children, Mom sometimes brought us here on my grandparent
s’
birthdays or for Mother or Father’s Day.
She’d let us help her hang an arrangement over the top of their stones.
She’d kneel down and pull some
of the plastic leaves and silk flowers out of the way so it didn’t hide their name.
If an old arrangement still hung there from our last visit, faded and wind
-
beaten, she remove
d
it to take home with us.

Ellen would pick it up and hold it in front of her, pr
e
tending to be a bride.
Sometimes she plucked the yellowed flowers out and gave them to us to stick behind our ears.
Ellen called us Roman Soldiers and the flowers were our wreaths of honor.

A sword fight would ensue among the boys and our flowers would fall from our ears to the ground.
Mom just stood the
re
and ignored us for a moment or two, letting us be kids.
Her eyes were focused on the graves and I knew now she was r
e
membering the way things use
d
to be. The beauty of those old flowers had weathered over time, but they still had poss
i
bilities thanks to a child’s imagination.

I was always enamored by a small
marker
, almost the size of a
brick, which
sat on the edge of the neighboring
family’s
lot.
Mom said it was just a marker to divide up where the lots were, but I traced the word BABY across it with my finger.
The word had been written across the stone when it was being cast
from a mold
.
Someone probably used a nail while the c
e
ment was still wet.
The letters were deep and perfect.

Dead
grass had filled in the crevices from where a mower and come right up to the edge of it.
I knew it was not a marker, but a grave, an infant at this party without a face or a name.
I walked over a bit and found the stone still there today.
The Y was covered by tall grass the careless mower had missed.
I knelt and pulled the grass away.