A Bouquet of Fresh-Cut Flowers

By Dennis Vannatta

We’d been sitting on the low stone wall at the edge of the cemetery for a good half-hour waiting for the funeral to get over with.  I pushed down on my palms and eased up off my bottom to get the blood flowing again.  Then I eased back down.

            “Damn it, Chub, you’re driving me nuts,” Meggie said.  “Can’t you sit still?  If I’d’ve known graveyards were going to make you all antsy, I would’ve left you with your momma.”

            “I’ve got nothing against graveyards,” I said.  “I mowed the grass on this very graveyard last summer working for Bixby.  It’s this wall.  My rear end’s not built for sitting on stone for this long.”

            For some reason Meggie thought this was hilarious.  She laughed so hard she almost fell backwards off the wall.  It’s not PC anymore to laugh at fat people, but us skinny guys are fair game, I guess.  I’ve been called Chub ha ha ha since grade school, just about as long as I’ve known Meggie.  Maybe she’s the one who gave the nickname.  That’d make it OK, then. 

Meggie would have to try hard to do something that wasn’t OK in my book.  I’ve loved her that long—grade school.  Not that she’s any great beauty or anything.  She’s short and a little on the plump side and has bad skin.  We have that in common—acne.  It’s a good thing love is blind.  We have fathers in common, too.  We don’t either of us have one.  My father died when I was little, and Meggie’s just up and left.  I don’t know which is worse.  I still live with my mother most of the time, which is getting a little embarrassing, frankly, me being almost twenty.  Meggie lived with her mother until she couldn’t take it anymore and moved out right after high school.  Not long after that, her mother died—no connection, though.  Cancer doesn’t work that way.

            I was glad my skinny butt made her laugh because she’d been in a bad mood all day.  Well, maybe not a bad mood, exactly.  Tense, she’d been tense.  Like there was something important she had to do and there was a lot riding on it.  Whatever it was, the thing she had to do was in this cemetery, and she couldn’t get it done until those folks over there, all weepy and everything, got finished putting their loved one in the ground.

            In fact, they were starting to break up.

            “Thank God,” Meggie said and slid down from the wall.  Then she stood there with her hands on her hips glaring at the people who were taking their time clearing out, giving each other hugs and kisses and stuff. 

            Finally, they were all gone except for the workers waiting to take down the tent the immediate family sat under, load it up with the folding chairs, and then lower the coffin into the hole and fill it up with a little backhoe.

            In movies and TV you always see mourners filing past a grave that’s already got a coffin lowered into it.  They’ll throw handfuls of dirt down there or maybe a rose, and if they want to get real dramatic, someone will jump into the grave, or try to, others holding them back.  I kind of like that.  Makes things more interesting.  But they don’t do it that way anymore, at least not around here.  Sit on the folding chairs, the preacher says a few words, then vamoose so the workers can clear everything away and shovel in the dirt.  Doesn’t seem like real mourning, somehow.  Not real grief.

            “Well, what are we waiting for?” I said to Meggie, who was still standing there, glaring.

            She nodded at the workers.

            “How long are those A-holes going to be there?”     

“Oh, it’ll take them a while to get everything done,” I said.  “You mean we’ve got to wait for them to leave?”

            “If you don’t like it, go home to Mommy, and maybe she’ll give you a sugar tit.”

            Actually, I like just about anything as long as I’m doing it with Meggie.  Abraham says I’m playing a losing game with her.  That’s exactly what he said:  “My friend, you’re playing a losing game with that chickie.”  I’d tell him to mind his own fucking business except he’s my best friend and besides lets us sleep in the work shed behind his house.  We’ve been staying there since the weather warmed up.  Before that, Meggie stayed with her aunt, who Meggie says she’s going to murder some day because she’s almost as big a bitch as her old lady.

            “Hey, they’re going,” Meggie said.

            Yes, the workers had loaded up the tent and folding chairs and were driving away.  The coffin still sat beside the hole with the mound of dirt behind it.  Maybe the backhoe wasn’t available right then.

            I followed Meggie over there, then around the hole to the next row of graves where Meggie stopped at the foot of one of them and stood there, staring down.

            I read the inscription:

MARGARET MARY PUTNAM

            “Hey, that’s your name, Meggie.  Wait.  That’s your mother, right?”

            Meggie didn’t say anything.

            “Margaret Mary Putnam.  I guess that makes you Margaret Mary Putnam, Junior,” I said, trying to lighten the mood a little.

            “My name’s Margaret Ann Putnam, moron.  And if you ever call me Margaret, I’ll rip your nuts off.”

            Sometimes in school a teacher would try to call her Margaret, but she’d just ignore them, like they were talking to someone else.  Except for something like that, everyone calls her Meg.  I’m the only one who calls her Meggie.  I feel privileged.

            She stood there, and I stood there, feeling awkward because I didn’t know how to act, didn’t know what I should be doing.  Comfort her?  Express my sympathies?  Maybe she’d come because it was Memorial Day just a couple of days ago.  Or maybe this was the anniversary of her mother’s death.  I decided that I’d better steer clear of expressing sympathy, though.  Things had never been right between Meggie and her mother.  I didn’t know what the problem was, but the safest thing for me was to stay out of it.

            Then it was like Meggie all of a sudden noticed something.

            She started nodding her head and said, “Well well well.  Look at what some jerk put here.  Probably my asshole aunt.”

            She marched straight across the grave to the headstone where someone had left a bouquet of plastic flowers propped up on a wire bracket stuck in the ground.

            Or at least it was stuck in the ground until Meggie reached down and yanked it out and flung the whole thing over the mound of dirt and into the grave.

*

            Abraham lives in a little two-bedroom house south of Markham.  I got to be friends with him when we were working together for Bixby.  Abraham has his own lawn-care business now with two pickups and five Mexicans.  He’s real proud of the house, you can tell.  It’s smaller than the one I live in with Ma, but it’d probably be a palace in Mexico.  Abraham Martinez.

            On the walk over there we stopped at the Kroger’s and bought a can of chili.  The shed has an electrical outlet, and we keep a hotplate and a mini-frig plugged in.  Abraham gave us the frig.  He’s a good guy, even if he doesn’t understand Meggie.  Not that I understand her, either, I’m not saying that.  I think understanding is overrated.

            We were about to check out when Meggie said, “Hey, let’s get a bottle of wine.”

            She said it like she had something to celebrate, ripping those flowers out of her mother’s grave, I guess.

            Back in the shed, she didn’t want any chili.  She really made a run at that wine, though, drank probably half of the 3-liter bottle of Gallo Burgundy before I’d finished my chili.

            I was hoping the wine would put her in a better mood, a little friendlier mood.  We sleep together, but we don’t “sleep together,” if you get my meaning.  She’ll give me what she calls a “helping hand” once in a while, and I’m grateful, but come on.

            Tonight, the wine didn’t do a damn thing for her except put her to sleep.  Well, there you go.

            Ma never liked Meggie, never.  She says Meggie treats me like shit.  She says I should be more demanding, expect more from her.  It’s like she and Abraham have been comparing notes.  I guess if you looked at it like a bookkeeper—Chub gives Meggie this, Meggie gives Chub that—it might look like Ma is on to something.  But I don’t think love works that way.  I think you love because you love, and you just go with it, case closed.  I mean, what choice do you have?

            It wasn’t even dark yet when Meggie, too much wine, went to sleep in the wheelbarrow.  We have a canvas cot and a blow-up mattress that we sleep on, but the closest thing we have to a chair is this wheelbarrow pushed up against the wall of the shed.  Meggie will sit in it with her back against the wall and her legs dangling over the side.  It doesn’t look that comfortable to me, but sometimes she’ll sit there for hours reading a book or just brooding on things.

            I lay down on the cot.  That’s usually where Meggie sleeps, but I figured if she got tired of the wheelbarrow and took to the cot, then got sick in the night and leaned over the side and puked with me right below her on the mattress, I might wind up with a face full of Gallo Burgundy.  Hey, I’m not as stupid as Abraham and Ma seem to think.

*

            When I woke up, it was pitch dark in the shed, and Meggie was easing herself out the door.  Then she closed the door behind her slowly and carefully like she didn’t want to make any noise.

            If she would’ve just yanked open the door and walked out and slammed it behind her, I wouldn’t have thought anything of it and just gone back to sleep.  It’s nothing new for one or the other of us to get up in the night to go into Abraham’s house—he leaves the back door unlocked for us—to use the toilet.  But sneaking out?  I got up and went out after her.

            I trailed along a half a block behind her as she walked east on Markham, too far away to tell what it was she was holding in her hand.  I thought it might be a knife but wasn’t sure.

            She kept going right on past Kroger’s, so I thought, got it, she’s heading back to the cemetery.  Turns out I was right.

            At the entrance, there was a padlocked chain across the road, but Meggie stepped right over that.  I hurried up a little to close the gap because I didn’t want to lose sight of her.  I knew she had to be going back to her mother’s grave, but I wasn’t sure I remembered exactly where that was.  It’s a big cemetery, windy paths and trees, and I didn’t want to go stumbling around in the dark and Meggie see me and get all pissed.

            I didn’t have any trouble following her, though, and she didn’t have any trouble finding her mother’s grave.

            She looked down at the headstone a minute, and then did a funny thing.  She started looking around at the other graves, then went over to one of them and did something with the thing she’d brought from the shed.  Then she stood up and went back to her mother’s grave, and, peeking out from behind a big crepe myrtle where I was trying to hide my skinny butt, I saw what she was doing, and I realized what she’d come there for.

            The thing she’d carried from the shed wasn’t a knife but one of Abraham’s garden trowels.  She’d used the edge of it to saw off some flowers that someone had planted by their loved one’s headstone, and then she was digging a hole for them on her mother’s grave.  She hadn’t wanted plastic ones, see.  She’d come out here in the middle of the night with the idea of honoring her mother with real flowers.  Jesus, I loved her more at that moment than I ever had in my life.

            I started backing away because I figured Meggie wouldn’t be too happy with my spying on her in this private moment when—can you believe it?—I sneezed.  Sneezed!  It happened so fast I couldn’t even cover my mouth.  It’s all this damn oak pollen, which Romeo and Juliet never had to deal with.

            Meggie jumped like she’d been shot, whirled around with that trowel held out like a knife.

            “It’s just me, Meggie.  Sorry,” I said, stepping out from behind the crepe myrtle.  “I know I shouldn’t have followed you, but I was worried when you didn’t come back and—”

            “Chub?  What the hell are you doing here?”

            “Like I said, I was worried when—”

            “You followed me?  You followed me?”

            She walked slowly over toward me like she was trying to decide if I was real or not.

            “I know I shouldn’t have, but look, Meggie, you don’t have anything to be ashamed of.  I mean, she was your mother and you loved her.  OK, so what?  There’s nothing wrong with that.  Hey, I love my mother, and she’s no prize, either, so—”

            “Who said I loved my mother!” Meggie almost screamed.  “Who said that?”

            “Meggie, the flowers,” I said, nodding toward her mother’s headstone where the flowers lay over at an angle because she hadn’t finished planting them.

            Meggie did a half-turn like she was about to take a look but then turned back.

            “Those flowers?  Ha.  You mean those flowers?  They’re dead flowers, dumb ass.  Dead ones.  I planted dead flowers on that dead bitch’s grave.”

            The flowers looked pretty fresh to me, but I didn’t argue the point.  I held my hands up like I wanted to make peace.

            “Sure, fresh, dead, whatever.  The point is you don’t have to feel bad about wanting to put flowers on your mother’s grave.  After all, she stuck by you for years after your father ran out on you.”

            All the light there was in the night seemed to blaze out of her eyes at that instant, and she lunged forward with the trowel, the tip catching me on my forehead right at the hairline.  I jerked back and was about to say, Whoops!  You got me, because I thought she hadn’t meant to actually cut me with it and just misjudged the distance.  But before I could get the words out, she lunged with the trowel again, and I felt the tip get me right next to where the first one did.

            “Ouch!  Meggie, that hurts!” I said because it did, it hurt like hell, especially the second one, which had hit bone.

            I felt the blood running down my face into my left eye and on down over my lips, and, dizzy from the pain and blood, I bent over and put my hands on my knees.  When I looked back up, Meggie was gone.

            I sat down on a headstone and pulled up my T-shirt to wipe my face with it.

*

            I woke up lying down on something.  I didn’t know where I was at first, but Abraham was bent down over me with a bloody towel in his hand.  I realized I was in his carport.  I sort of remembered getting back to the shed last night and waiting outside, trying to decide what to do, I guess.  It was morning now.

            Abraham made a motion at my face with the towel, and I jerked back.  He shrugged and handed the towel to me.

            “She did this to you—that girl,” he said, not like a question but like he was reminding me.

            “Yes, but it’s not like you think.  It wasn’t her fault.”

            “No, of course not,” he said, but in a smug-ass way.

            “No, really, you don’t understand.  I came up on her in the graveyard.  I startled her.”

            “Sure sure, now I understand perfectly,” he said, nodding like a bobblehead on a car dashboard.

            Wise ass.  Abraham is my best friend, and I owe him a lot, letting us stay here and everything, but just because he runs his own business now, he thinks he knows everything.

            “Let me explain it to you, Abraham.  Just let me explain it.”

            He didn’t say anything but sat down on a box and folded his arms over his chest and looked at me.

            I started to tell him about last night, beginning with Meggie getting up and sneaking out of the shed.  He listened without saying a word until I got to the part about Meggie getting mad about the flowers, claiming they were dead and all.  Then he held his hand up like a cop stopping traffic.

            “She’s right about that, you know,” he said.

            “Say what?”

            “She’s right about the flowers.  Once you cut them and they got no roots, they’re dead.  Oh sure, you can put them in a glass with water and a little sugar, and they’ll look OK for a while, but those suckers are dead, my friend.”

            “Yeah, whatever, who cares?  Anyway, that’s when—”

            He held his hand up again, this time laughing, and said, “No need, my friend, no need.  I know how this story ends.  Believe me, I know.”

            Smug son of a bitch.

            “Yeah, whatever.  I don’t have time for your bullshit,” I said, pushing myself up from this wooden locker thing I’d been lying on.  “I have to go look for Meggie.”

            “See, see!” he said, slapping his knee and laughing, like he’s got me figured out.

            Fine.  Let him and Ma laugh theirselves sick at dumb ol’ Chub, but last I looked, they were living alone, while I at least have a chance with Meggie, if I can find her.

            I’m pretty happy with my life.                       

Dennis Vannatta gets ideas for stories from all sorts of places, the present one while standing before his mother’s grave.  How the story took the direction it did, he’ll never know.  His sixth collection of stories, The Only World You Get¸ was published by Et Alia Press.