by Cathy Lamb
C h a p t e r 1 0
“We made a bouquet today in the shape of a pig’s face using pink roses,” my mother said. “It was about three inches tall and twelve inches wide. I used black-eyed Susans for the eyes and red carnations for the bow on her head. We put it right up on Facebook and our web page, and everyone loved it. We had many pig-loving people write in saying they wanted the same bouquet delivered to them or people they knew on the mainland, but you know we only deliver to the islands.”
My mother and Aunt Iris and Aunt Camellia and I were eating four-cheese garlic pizza on the deck of Rose Bloom Cottage, pink and red roses ready to bloom off the trellis, their scent light and sweet. Pizza is part of a healthy diet, so I made sure to have an extra slice. Lord knows I could die tomorrow, perhaps eaten by a whale, and I’d definitely want to make sure I had another piece of four-cheese garlic pizza in me before I headed up the golden staircase.
“I saw it,” I said. “I heard about it from a customer. It was a sweet pig, personable.”
The bouquet was labeled “Check your meat! Make sure you are getting your bacon from farmers who are kind to their pigs!
Oink!”
“The other bouquet that was particularly popular,” my mother said, “was the one Iris made. She used a piece of plywood, then glued fake grass over it and spelled out ‘Tina Sorbel Sucks’ with tiny glass vials and daisies. It was exquisite. Inspired!”
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“Please tell me that you didn’t put that one on Facebook or your website,” I asked, dreading the answer and the possible defamation. The tulips were blooming, row after row of flower bliss. Iris had been busy photographing them, straight into the petals to that luminescent mystery in the center, from the stems up, in bunches and singles, upside down, at odd angles, and odd designs. They were almost like tulip people.
“Oh, yes, we did,” my mother said, her shoulders squared.
“For business and marketing reasons.”
“We did it because of Karma,” Aunt Camellia said, waving her arms. “What goes around comes around. Karma drifts around people like the wind.” She moved her arms wildly. I think she was trying to imitate blustery wind and not a seizure.
“And we posted it because we’re vengeful,” Aunt Iris said,
“when our friends are hurt.”
“Who was the bouquet for?” I asked. There was a reason for this mean bouquet, by golly.
“It was for Kora Liponski over on Lopozzo Island,” Aunt Iris said, her disgust apparent. “Her husband left her last week for that manipulative dragon. The lout. The spider. The worm. Her sister ordered Kora the bouquet to show sisterhood bonding.”
“And the manipulative dragon who seduced the husband was Tina Sorbel,” I said.
My mother and aunts nodded. I groaned. Poor Kora. Tina was prissy. Awful. Manipulative. She was a piece of work. However, she could be a sexy piece of work for a man dumb enough to fall for the vulnerable act she had perfected over the years, where she pretended that she needed protecting. Tina needed protecting about as much as a rabid viper.
“She did wrong,” my mother said. “Taking another wo -
man’s man!”
“Hopefully her intestines will twist,” Aunt Camellia said. “I don’t like to get violent about people’s intestines—I believe that one should wish for happiness and peace for all—but Tina deserves it. Kora and Vance have five young kids. Five. Tina has a black soul poisoned by her selfishness, and Vance has the brain
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of a skunk, but Vance was Kora’s skunk and Tina shouldn’t have taken the skunk. The skunk was Kora’s to shoot, not Tina’s.”
“Tina Sorbel doesn’t even seem like the type of woman who would like sex, so it’s hard to picture a torrid affair here,” I said.
“She’s too concerned with keeping her lipstick on straight and her hair brushed. She looks like an overgrown Barbie.”
“I don’t think she took Kora’s husband for the sex,” Aunt Iris said.
“She took him for his horses,” my mother said.
“You’re kidding.”
“Oh no,” Aunt Iris said. “Those horses are racing horses. He takes them off the island a couple of times a year. She loves traveling and wearing those fancy, silly hats to the horse races.”
“Those hats don’t compare with ours,” Aunt Camellia sniffed. “We make our hats with the intent to bring smiles to others, to make them laugh, to bring creativity and color to their day.”
“No comparison,” my mother sniffed, too. “We make our hats with love.”
“We will never make Tina a hat, or a bouquet. We will not even sell her one daisy,” Aunt Iris said. “Can we agree on that simple, rational solution?”
“Agreed,” my mother said. “She took Kora’s husband, and that makes her not hat or flower worthy.”
“She’s on The List,” Aunt Camellia intoned. She enthusiastically drew Tina’s name in the air with an imaginary pen.
My mother and aunts have a Flower Black List they keep—
it’s short—with the names of people who have wronged others.
My mother and aunts will give hats away to friends who are going through hard times to cheer them up. And sometimes they’ll sell their hats in Flowers, Lotions, and Potions for charity or for school fund drives. They also donate hats to other worthy charity fund drives. But if you’re on the Flower Black List, you’re on it for good, shame on you and your meanness.
I decided that tonight I would bring up one more teeny, tiny subject to see how they would react. “I’ve noticed more people coming in and out of the greenhouse.”
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None of them answered, and the atmosphere suddenly felt charged. I almost laughed. My mother squirmed and reached for her wine. My aunt Iris suddenly found that she was extremely interested in the small wood bridge near the willow trees in the distance. Or maybe it was the pond with the red bench. My aunt Camellia hummed, the song rising and falling dramatically.
“What a wonderful place to grow your exotic flowers. From Hawaii and South America and Delaware.” Exotic flowers. From Delaware. I almost laughed again. “And your orchids. Why, your orchids must be in a delicate full bloom.”
My mother squirmed once more, rolled her shoulders, slugged down more wine.
My goodness! The willow that Aunt Iris was fixated on must be fascinating.
Aunt Camellia’s humming rose to a high, near-shrieking pitch.
“The greenhouse is particularly, uh, perfect, for the plants and flowers that are more . . . difficult to grow outside,” I said. “The ones that need special care.”
Squirm. Stare. Hum hum hum!
“More wine?” my mother said, and got up.
“I’ll get it!” Aunt Camellia and Aunt Iris said. They all three darted into the kitchen, chairs scraping the deck, to get more wine.
I laughed, then tried to muzzle it under a cough. There was already wine on the table. I had one more slice of cheese and garlic pizza. If I met my maker tonight I’d want to have a full stomach. We had a lot to talk about.
The bookstore was busy the next day. Tourists streamed in.
Part of the reason was that I had an employee standing outside giving away samples of apple cider caramel cake. It was the treats that drove them in. I don’t blame them. I believe a treat a day keeps the doctor away. I also had my tea specials up on a board at the door: Honey Lavender and Cinnamon Chai.
But who couldn’t love a shop called Evie’s Books, Cake, and Tea? The finest things in life, right? They loved sitting in the café area and looking out over the bay. They loved the deck. They
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loved the bouquets I sold for my mother and aunts today labeled “Men Are Dense, Like Cheese. Buy Your Own Bouquets”
and “A Woman’s Place Is Wherever She Damn Well Wants It to Be” and “Laugh More, Laugh Loud, Drink Beer.”
They loved my aunt Camellia’s lotions and potions, called A
Lady’s Secret and Carnal Coconut and Soothing Seduction.
And they loved my aunt Iris’s puzzling/somewhat suggestive/now and then a little creepy flower photographs that made you stop and think and tilt your head as you tried to “get it.”
One of her purple flowers definitely resembled a penis, and two other exotic red flowers together definitely resembled breasts.
She had turned many of her photographs into cards, and they flew out the door.
I met with customers and tried to get them to buy piles of books they would love. I am not bragging, but I know my books. I can find any book for anybody. And I can usually figure out what they might like to read that they had never thought to read. Books are my business. I am their book gal.
But in between customers and loading up shelves with new books and rearranging displays, when I had a minute, I thought of Marco. I knew I loved him. But there could never be a future because of what I knew, what I had seen, would happen between us.
I could not let that happen.
And that made the inside of me feel lonely and cold.
I touched a yellow rose petal in the bouquet on my office desk. I would eat a raspberry rose cupcake to warm me up, then I would have some honey lavender tea.
The Book Babes were back.
They were discussing a book in which a woman watered her cheating soon-to-be-ex-husband’s Corvette with a hose.
The discussion had morphed into what was appropriate in terms of revenge if a husband cheated. They decided . . .
1) Don’t do anything that would get you arrested. Jail would not be fun, and there might not be book club.
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2) Driving his jointly owned midlife crisis car into the ocean while cackling would be okay.
3) Cutting out the crotches of all his pants was also accept-able.
4) Going to visit the mistress at work and announcing yourself like this in a loud voice to the receptionist would also be accept-able: “I am the wife of Dave Miller and I want to talk to his girlfriend, Marni Smith, about why she is banging my husband.”
5) Stalking him, taking incriminating photos, and then mailing them to his mother and grandmother was a smart idea.
6) Going to Hawaii after the breakup and having a brief vacation affair would be a splendid postdivorce event as long as one had the affair-ee take a blood test to check for all STDs and one used condoms, just in case.
Always interesting to listen to the Book Babes.
“I still miss Dad every day.”
My mother’s hands stilled. We were in our garden, snipping flowers here and there for her shop, the sun high, the wind soft.
We were both in garden boots and hats. Mine was a baseball hat, hers was straw, wobbly, with a white ribbon tied below her neck.
“I do, too.”
“He’s been gone for so long, but that pain still hits me when I think of him.” Sundance bent down with me as I snipped a bun-dle of purple tulips. Butch and Cassidy wrestled nearby.
“Me too, honey.”
Often my father, during his career in the military/government, would return to us pale and tired. A couple of times he came home with an arm wrapped or a bandage on his head, or he would be limping. He would take calls privately, so we couldn’t hear, and sometimes, as we were stationed in various locations, cars would come and get him and whisk him off in the middle of the night.
He wouldn’t talk much about what he was doing.
I would climb on his lap, his green eyes smiling at me, his brown hair cut short, and say, “What did you do on your trip,
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Daddy?” And he would say, “I missed you and your sister and your mother.”
And I would giggle and say, “No, Daddy. What did you do?
Tell me!”
And he would say, “I thought about coming home and reading you stories and chasing Jules on her bike and holding your mom’s hand.”
And I would giggle again and say, “Daddy! When you were gone, what happened?”
And he would say, “Let’s ask your mom to bake us a cake.
You know I love cake and tea. Then we’ll read books together.”
And we would ask my mom, and she was so relieved to see him, so happy to have him home, I could tell even then, as a young child, that she would bake us a cake. White chocolate coconut cake. Hummingbird cake. Dark chocolate candy cane.
We would eat cake, drink tea, and read books together.
“I always appreciated how you and Dad tried to help me with my premonitions and how you tried to help other people.
You two taught me how to change the timing so that the premonition would pass them by, and I loved you for it. I don’t know if I ever told you that, but thanks, Mom.”
“Of course, honey.” She gave me a hug. My mom always hugs me. “We wanted to help them, but mostly we wanted to help you. From a young age, we had to have the most serious of conversations with you about what to say, what not to say, when to act, when not to.” She shook her head and wiped the sweat off her brow with her purple garden glove. “I was discussing ethics and morals with a five-year-old.”
“The worst was when I had premonitions about Dad. Remember that time I saw an explosion behind him and he kept walking over a bunch of rocks, as if he hadn’t heard it? And he wasn’t in his military clothes.”
“I remember that when you told your dad, his face went grim.”
“He asked me a lot of questions, and I told him what he was wearing and what I saw.”
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“You saw him in a desert. You said you saw him by buildings made of sand and you saw guns. ‘Guns as long as jump ropes,’
you told him.”
“Another time I told him I saw an explosion in a tower and I saw a whole bunch of jeeps with guns on the back. I cried and cried, and Dad held me. Then he asked me specific questions, and I told him that he was going to run behind a black truck and get straight down on his stomach and the truck was going to get hit by a bomb and he was going away on a stretcher on a helicopter with a lot of blood.”
“That premonition saved your father’s life.”
“It did?” I was stunned. Sundance leaned against me. He likes to be close. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because you were nine years old. We didn’t want to scare you. But your father never forgot it. That incident played out in the Middle East. He actually saw a black truck and he made sure that he, and the other men he was with, did not go behind it. The black truck was blown to smithereens.”
I sat with that one shocking story for a while.
“Dad didn’t want you to know because it would have been so upsetting.”
“I feel upset now.” I took a deep breath and bent to cut a few orange-pink roses. “I know we’ve had this discussion before, but I don’t understand why me. You don’t have premonitions, Aunt Camellia and Aunt Iris don’t. Jules doesn’t. I’m all alone with this curse.”
My mother’s hands stopped for a second, and she took a deep breath.
“Mom? What is it?”
“Nothing. I’m admiring these roses. Aren’t they particularly beautiful this year? I love yellow roses with a touch of red, don’t you? And look at our Dr. Marie Curie roses. So delicate, and she was so brilliant.”
She wasn’t thinking about roses or Dr. Curie. I saw her hands shake.
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“I don’t know why you have this gift slash curse,” she said, her voice pitching up, high and squeaky. “I don’t.”
“I wish I could go to a support group. We could call ourselves The Future Crazies. Or The Premonitioners. Or, We Know It All. I wish I knew someone else who I could talk to. It would be helpful to have someone in the family older than me, wiser, who saw these things, too. She could tell me how to be as normal as possible and not haunted all the time by the things I see coming down the pike and can do nothing to stop. How to deal with the guilt, and not being able to fix something, or to help.
The knowing is hard. Plus, trying to help people on the fly is exhausting.”
The other night I had to sneak into Millie Coons’s barn. The only way to sneak up on her house was through her back fields.
It was a long walk, and it was dark. I had had a vision of her falling off her riding mower and getting her leg run over. Somehow the seat became loose, and when she stood up to see what the problem was, she fell off, and whack. Her leg was a bloody mess. She was out in the field all alone, too, into the night, crying. So I went into her barn and fixed the seat. I didn’t want to tell her, because I don’t like advertising about my premonitions, even though we’re friends and only a couple of years apart in school.
Anyhow, it was a long walk, and I was darn tired when I got home.
My mother stood up, her head bent down.
“Are you okay, Mom?” I reached for her hand. “Mom? What’s wrong?”
“Yes, I’m fine. Not too wrong. Nothing wrong. Fine and dandy.
Too much coffee. You know what too much caffeine does to me.”
No, I didn’t. What was she talking about? She drank six cups of coffee a day. It never had this effect. “Mom. Are you sick?
You look pale.”
“I’m perfectly healthy.” She took a shuddery breath. “Tell me. How is Sundance doing?”
Sundance? What the heck was going on?
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“How is Sundance, Evie?” She said it firmly, and I knew to change the topic, so I told her that Sundance was as loyal as ever, and I pet his head. “Also. Kara Lighthouse is going to have triplets. They’ll be early but they’ll be fine. Don’t tell anyone.
She doesn’t even know.”
She smiled. “That is the kind of premonition you need to have.”
Later, though, walking to my blue carriage house through a column of foxgloves and delphinium, I wondered about that conversation. It upset her. It worried her. It made her go pale.
But why?
Sundance put a ball in my hand, which was my cue to throw it. Butch and Cassidy ran after it, too.
Sometimes I wish I were a dog.