Out of the Blue Bouquet (Crossroads Collection)

by Amanda Tru

  It was one of only a few multi-leveled buildings in town, and this one happened to be mostly comprised of medical offices. Looking at the envelope, Brooke saw that she was supposed to make it to suite 201, which meant the second floor. Upon entering the building, Brooke headed immediately to the elevator. But after pushing the button and waiting thirty seconds with the light above the button not even blinking, the sign advertising stairs was too tempting, and she abandoned the elevator. She held the flowers away from her body, trying to keep them balanced as her feet quickly climbed the cement stairs. Reaching the second story, she pushed the bar with her hip and made it through the door. She found Suite 201, which was the office belonging to an eye doctor, and reached the counter only slightly out of breath.

  “I have a flower delivery for a Kiffany Terrel,” she said, peeking from behind the roses to the woman behind the desk.”

  “I’m Kiffany!” the stunning blonde said with a bright smile.

  “Then these are for you,” Brooke said, extending the flowers and setting them on the counter between them.

  “Thank you!” she squealed, accepting the flowers and reaching for the attached card.

  Her duty complete, Brooke turned around to exit the office empty-handed. At the door, though, she couldn’t resist turning to watch. She loved this moment. The one where someone realizes that they are loved and cared for. The instant when a special message of love is communicated through the unique, beautiful language of flowers.

  Kiffany opened the card and immediately squealed again. The card dropped from her excited fingers, and she looked at in on the desk, as if in awe. “I knew it! He loves me! He really does love me!”

  Brooke didn’t know what the card said. Tylee had taken care of the card. But it made her heart happy to know that her work had delivered such a special message. It almost made the trouble from today seem worth it.

  Others in the office were now curiously gathering around the excited receptionist, including a not-so-happy woman in a white doctor’s lab coat. Brooke let the door fall firmly behind her, happy to walk away with the one moment and leave before any other subsequent moments had a chance to mar the memory.

  Once back to her car, Brooke called Tylee to make sure all of her orders had been delivered. After getting confirmation that the work for the day was officially complete, Brooke sat for just a minute, breathing out all the stress in great relaxing breaths that would make any yoga instructor proud. Finally, she pulled out and headed home.

  Typically, Brooke might feel somewhat lonely on a night when she had nothing scheduled and no one to talk to. She lived alone in a one-bedroom apartment, and her list of friends who liked to do things socially was rapidly dwindling as most were now married or in serious relationships. Since Brooke wasn’t interested in her own serious relationship or being a third wheel with her friends, loneliness was now becoming a familiar companion.

  But tonight, she very happily spent the evening alone in comfy pants with a bowl of soup and a good book. A little time in a world of fiction gave her a much-needed respite from the reality of today and the gloom that waited tomorrow. Some days were harder than others for Brooke, and this had been a very hard day. The troubles only served to remind her that she was really going nowhere. A world without the hope that something would change was a difficult one to live in. But for Brooke, it felt as if she would forever be the florist in the back of Helen’s flower shop. She longed for something different, but at this point, she didn’t even know what different looked like.

  It wasn’t that Brooke disliked her job. She loved being a florist. Working with flowers and making beautiful art with them made her heart happy, as long as Helen left her alone. But she felt stuck, as if she was going nowhere very fast. Her older siblings were all highly successful in their careers, while Brooke didn’t feel like working a small floral shop actually qualified as a career by comparison.

  Brooke actually had a bachelor’s degree in interior design. Right out of college, she had applied for all her dream jobs and was turned down. Then she applied for all those jobs that weren’t quite her dream, but she could work her way up. And she wasn’t hired. Then she applied for every job she could, just to have money enough to pay rent on a one-bedroom apartment. And she ended up at Crossroad Floral Co., owned by Helen Garrison.

  After that, her confidence was so low that she could never manage to make herself apply for another job. At this point, she had no dreams or plans for the future. She was adrift without any ambition to even attempt to find her way to shore.

  Her siblings had offered to use their connections to help her get a job in the city, but she had steadfastly refused. If she couldn’t get there on her own, it wasn’t worth doing. She’d always felt like the runt of the litter where her family was concerned. She desperately wanted to prove herself, by herself. Most of the time, she felt like she failed miserably.

  The next morning Brooke got up early and ran a couple miles on the treadmill before breakfast. The stupid treadmill seemed almost an allegory for her life, and yet, as with everything else, she religiously made herself run nowhere at least four days a week.

  By the time she showered, ate some cereal, brushed her teeth, and headed out the door, she was feeling pretty good. Hopefully, her boss was back from the funeral and today would be a normal day.

  As usual, Brooke arrived at the shop early, much earlier than Helen and Tylee came to work. Though she didn’t get to count all of her early hours for pay, the early arrival allowed her to do her morning devotions, unload and arrange her supplies, and look at some interior design magazines. It was her quiet time that allowed her to be fully prepared for when her boss walked through the door and the time clock started.

  The phone was ringing as Brooke stepped through the door. She would normally have just let the answering machine get it, but it seemed strange to be getting a call at a floral shop at 7:00 in the morning. With a vague premonition that something wasn’t quite right, Brooke hurried to the desk and dove for the phone, picking it up right before the call went to the answering machine.

  “Hello! Crossroads Floral!” Brooke answered with far too much breathless energy for so early.

  “I’m calling from Eyjania. There was an order that was placed for today’s delivery, and we’ve run into a problem.”

  Dread settled like a large rock in the pit of Brooke’s stomach. “Yes, I remember the order.” Only this wasn’t the friendly woman Brooke had spoken to yesterday. This was a man who was already sounding quite gruff. “What is the problem?”

  “We sent the order out for delivery. It was a bouquet of flowers native Eyjania,’ as requested. But the name we have doesn’t appear correct, so my delivery man doesn’t know who to deliver them to!”

  “I’m so sorry!” This wasn’t an employee she was talking to; this was the owner!

  Brooke hurried to her work area and, with fingers shaking, scrambled through all the papers she could find. Pulling out the coffee-smeared list of online orders, she worked to keep her voice cool and professional, instead of revealing the complete panic she actually felt. “Let me see. I have the order right here. Let’s see if we can figure out what the problem is.”

  Brooke bit her lip. This was one of those orders where she had guessed on a few of the letters in the first name. And with it being an overseas country, it was very possible that she had guessed wrong for the unfamiliar name.

  She heard a noise that sounded distinctly like the impatient drumming of fingers. “Now, this may not be your mistake at all. In fact, I rather doubt it. The employee you spoke to yesterday wrote the information with a defective pen that she happened to think had pretty ink. Then she used the same pen to address the envelope for delivery. Both smeared terribly, and now the person delivering the flowers can’t read the name. My employee thought she remembered the name you gave her, but she was apparently wrong.”

  The man literally growled his frustration. “I should have taken matters into my own hands and calle
d to clarify the name from the beginning.”

  He muttered something else under his breath, but the only word Brooke understood was “incompetence.” She could hear the stress in his voice and pictured some guy standing with a bouquet of flowers in his hand, waiting to find out who to deliver them to. Worse, Brooke had the awful feeling that the shop owner was wrong—it wasn’t his employee’s mistake at all. It was Brooke’s.

  Finding the order on her list, Brooke ran her finger across to find the recipient’s name. “What is the name you have for the order?” she asked.

  “I have Katrin for the first name.” And he gave the spelling.

  Brooke swallowed with difficulty. “No, that’s not correct.” Brooke squinted, trying to decode the letters. “The name I have is C-a-l-r-i.”

  “You mean Clari?”

  Brooke paused, looking at the brown spots amidst the black spots that she was trying to decipher. “Yes. It could be that,” she said pathetically.

  “What’s the last name?”

  Brooke swallowed. If she was creative, she might be able to come up with an answer that would lay the blame on the owner’s employee. Maybe she could say that the last name on the order had just this minute become damaged. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t sugarcoat the truth or let anyone else take the blame for something that may not have been her fault.

  “All I have is ‘S,’“ Brooke confessed.

  Then, with a voice as strong as she could muster, she explained, “We had an accident yesterday, and the information from the original order was damaged. It likely wasn’t your employee’s mistake at all. I just hoped that the first name and the first letter of the last name would be enough to get it to the correct person at the apartment building.”

  “It isn’t an apartment building! It’s the palace!”

  “Did you say palace?” Brooke coughed.

  “Yes!” the man thundered. “I have a man at the palace right now, and he doesn’t know who gets the bouquet! Are you telling me that you don’t know the last name? How do you think that makes my business look?”

  Brooke gasped, “I’m so sorry!” Desperately, Brooke strained her eyes at the coffee stains. She could see a tiny bit of a figure beneath the brown tinge, but it didn’t even look like a letter. “I think I see a funny looking ‘o’ after the ‘S,’“ she admitted, trying to give him at least one more clue. “But it doesn’t quite look right. It almost looks like there’s a line going through the ‘o.’ And there might be an ‘n’ at the very end, but it’s so faint, I can’t be sure.

  “‘S,’ funny looking ‘o,’ and ‘n.’“ the man muttered. “Do you mean Sørensen? Could the name be Sørensen?

  Brooke studied at the name, the letters falling into place like the pieces of a puzzle. “Yes! That’s it!”

  “I’ve got to go,” the man growled. “You’d better hope Clari Sørensen is the right name. Otherwise, my employee’s pretty ink pen and your Clari S. will be no excuse for either one of you!”

  The line went dead.

  Brooke weakly walked back to the front desk and dropped the phone on its cradle. She had messed up an order to a palace in a foreign country. She tried to tell herself that it wasn’t entirely her fault. The shop owner had volunteered the fact that the name his employee had written down was smudged and illegible. But if Brooke hadn’t provided the wrong name at the beginning, maybe it would have been easier to figure out.

  She wandered back to her work counter and looked nervously at the clock. If she didn’t hear within the next couple minutes, then that should mean that the flowers were successfully delivered, right? She tried to tell herself that she was sure Clari Sørensen was the correct name. It would work out, the flowers would be delivered to the correct person, and there would be no lasting harm done. But just the knowledge that she had messed up in such a grandiose way, completely unnerved her.

  Brooke hadn’t yet finished agonizing over what had happened when the bell rang above the door, announcing the arrival of Helen and Tylee.

  The first red flag was that they were early. In all the time that Brooke had worked for Helen, the woman had never arrived before 8:30.

  Then, the look on Tylee’s face when she pushed the door open should have caused Brooke to immediately retreat. It was a clear, “run for your life” expression, which not even the happy jingle of the bells on the door could mask.

  “Do you have any idea what you have done?” Helen hissed, rushing up to Brooke. The older woman’s head didn’t quite make it to Brooke’s shoulder, but that didn’t stop her from thrusting her face up as close to Brooke’s as possible.

  Startled, Brooke automatically stepped back, trying to recover her personal space. But her back bumped against the counter. She looked to Tylee for a little help, but the other woman was obviously too upset. She had stepped back from Helen as well, bumping against the front door and giving the bells a perturbed little ring.

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” Brooke said hesitantly. “What have I done?”

  “Everything!” Helen squawked, arms flapping dramatically. “You did everything wrong! Every order from yesterday was messed up. And it’s all your fault!”

  Brooke’s heart leaped painfully, and her stomach felt ill at the intensity of Helen’s anger.

  Brooke shook her head. “But I didn’t… I don’t understand. I know about the overseas order. But I just fixed that one.”

  Tylee, her voice small and miserable, spoke up. “Brooke, we sent flowers to the wrong people!”

  Helen had to be wrong. She had been so careful with those orders. There couldn’t be more mistakes. She was sure.

  Shaking her head again, Brooke insisted, “There must be some mistake. I followed the lists you gave me. I know they went to the people on the list.” Frantically trying to prove her innocence, Brooke went around the counter to where the papers were still spread out haphazardly where she had left them.

  “You mean these lists?” Helen said, grabbing the brown, crumbly papers off the counter and waving them under Brooke’s nose. “The ones that you doused with coffee? The ones that you can’t actually read?”

  Brooke’s gaze shot to Tylee, but her friend’s eyes were downcast. It didn’t seem that Tylee had mentioned any of her involvement in the coffee disaster, and it also didn’t seem like she would receive any support from that direction. The poor woman was pale and literally shaking. If a fraction of Helen’s anger turned her granddaughter’s way, Brooke feared Tylee would collapse.

  Brooke swallowed. Helen was too upset to see reason. If there was an actual problem with some of the orders from yesterday, Brooke needed to know the details so she could fix it. “Helen, if I messed something up, I’m sorry. It wasn’t intentional. The lists we needed were illegible, and we printed out new copies of the ones we could. You’ve never shared the passwords for us to print out all of the lists. The coffee was a complete accident, and we did the best we could. Please tell me what the mistakes are so I can try to remedy them.”

  “So you admit that you hacked my computer without my permission,” Helen spat.

  “No. I logged onto the store computer to print out order lists,” Brooke stated calmly. “If there were mistakes in the order it’s likely because I did not have access to what was necessary to get them right.”

  “How dare you insinuate that this is my fault!” Helen huffed. “I wasn’t even here!”

  Brooke didn’t back down. “If you had been here, it would have been nobody’s fault! It wouldn’t have happened! It should have been a quick fix to print the lists after there was an accident with the coffee.”

  “Since you so easily hacked the computer login password, I would have thought the other passwords wouldn’t have been a problem,” Helen snapped.

  Brooke immediately shot back, “They wouldn’t have been if you conveniently left them all on the bottom of frog cups. But I was a little busy and didn’t have time to look!”

  Helen’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t think you under
stand what serious trouble you are in, Miss Hutchins. You admit you accessed my computer without permission. You admit that you ruined the lists. And you admit that you used the ruined lists and placed the orders incorrectly. The blame rests squarely on your shoulders. Do you realize that I could sue you for the damage you did to my business, and have you arrested for hacking my computer?”

  Helen’s word sent a shot of fear through Brooke, not because Helen’s threat wasn’t ridiculous, but because the older woman rather specialized in the ridiculous.

  Hoping to at least insert a thread of rational truth to her tirade, Brooke explained, “In order to arrest me for hacking, I believe you would need to prove I was accessing the computer for some illicit purpose. Since I got on it with your password, which was written in an open place, and I used it to do the job you assigned to me, there was no crime committed.”

  With a glance at Tylee, she continued firmly, “As for the rest of your accusations, yes, I admit to all of those. Now, if you would be so kind as to tell me what mistakes I am admitting to, I would really appreciate it!”

  No, she was not going to rat out Tylee. While it was very true that Tylee was the one who knocked over the coffee and figured out the passwords to access the computer, Brooke wasn’t going to admit any of that to Helen. With her boss so angry and set on Brooke being wrong, the truth wouldn’t help anyway. It would just serve to make her furious at both Brooke and Tylee. Brooke would fully take the blame, and do it without complaint if it spared Tylee the wrath of her grandmother.

  Helen glared at Brooke. “I already told you what you did. You sent all of the orders to the wrong people!”

  Brooke felt her lips form a thin line as she struggled with her irritation. “Helen, I need to know what actually happened, with no exaggeration. We handled between 30 and 40 orders yesterday. I’m sure it wasn’t all of yesterday’s orders that were delivered to the wrong people.”