Open
At nine o’clock, nobody came.
At nine fifteen, I rearranged the small bunches by the window.
At nine twenty, Ruth moved them back.
“They were fine.”
“I know.”
“Then leave them.”
I went to the workbench and found a pair of scissors that needed cleaning. They didn’t. I cleaned them anyway.
The sign was up. The address had gone to customers, suppliers and everyone who had asked where we were moving. The front door stood open to the mild May morning. Through the arch, I could see Nina checking an order for the next day, her pencil behind her ear.
Outside, a man stopped to read the sign. He looked through the window. I stood straighter.
He asked whether we knew what time the repair workshop opened.
“Half past nine,” Ruth told him.
He thanked her and walked round to the yard.
“Excellent footfall,” she said.
I put the scissors down before I did myself an injury.
The first proper customer arrived at nine forty with a folded newspaper under his arm. He had bought flowers from Mum years ago and had followed the address change because his wife liked a particular shade of pink that he described as not the other pink.
“We’ll recognise it,” I promised.
We did, eventually. He chose a small bunch, asked whether the old place had been sold and accepted my brief explanation that we’d moved the business. I wrapped the stems while he looked at the arch.
“I remember that.”
“It came with us.”
“Good.”
He paid in cash and left with the flowers sticking out of his shopping bag. The bell announced his departure loudly enough to make Nina jump.
“We may have overachieved there,” she said.
By eleven, we’d sold three bunches and a plant. One person thought the plant was too expensive. Another wanted a type of rose we didn’t have. A woman came in because she liked the window, looked at everything and left without buying.
I had forgotten how much of a shop’s day consisted of being available for people to decide against it.
At the estate, a visitor had usually arrived with a reason. Here a person could wander in from the pavement, discover we weren’t what they wanted and go away. I found it oddly personal until a woman apologised because she’d only wanted change for the parking machine.
Ruth gave it to her.
“She might come back,” she said after the door closed.
“For more change.”
“Then we’ll become famous.”
At lunchtime Nina dealt with a man ordering flowers for his partner’s birthday. He wanted something enormous, then admitted the table at home was small and the cat believed every plant belonged to him.
Nina asked about the cat before she asked about the colours. She showed him two possibilities, explained what would fit safely where he intended to put it and wrote down a price. He chose one and paid.
I heard the whole conversation from behind the arch. My shoes kept moving this time. I had a bouquet to finish, and Nina had a customer.
After he left, she put the order in the diary under her name.
“Thursday,” she said. “Collection at four.”
“Good.”
There was no need to add anything.
The busiest half-hour came just after one, when a delivery arrived at the back while two customers came through the front. The bell worked. The route to the sink worked. I asked one customer to wait, and she waited. Ruth took the delivery while Nina finished the sale. Nobody had to carry flowers round the block.
It was so ordinary that I nearly missed enjoying it.
Then I passed Ruth at the sink and she grinned at me.
“Yes,” I said.
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You were going to.”
“I was going to ask where you’ve put the clean cloths.”
We found them in a cupboard Nina had labelled the previous afternoon. Ruth took one, shook it open and went back to work.
By three, the room had begun to look used. A damp mark on the bench. Wrapping paper in the bin. A little trail of leaves between the cutting area and the sink. I liked it better than I had before we opened.
A message from Sophie arrived with a photograph of her and Finn beside the evening bar, Nina’s flowers behind them. She had written that her mother had taken home some of the trailing foliage and was pretending it had always been her idea.
I showed Nina. She laughed and asked if we could print it.
We could.
At four, Ruth put on her coat.
The sight still produced a quick internal list of what remained. Buckets, tomorrow’s order, the till, the small arrangement I had promised to make before five. I looked at the list and saw that none of it required Ruth to miss the bus she wanted.
“See you tomorrow,” I said.
“Eight.”
She left. I finished the small arrangement while Nina washed the last containers. At half past four Nina went too, because we’d agreed her hours around the next day’s early installation.
For the first time since morning, I was alone in the shop.
I counted the takings. Enough for a respectable first day, not enough to fund a new life by itself. The birthday order was in the diary. There were gaps in the weeks ahead that I would have to fill, and an invoice for the cold store that had no interest in how the opening had felt.
I filed the receipt, checked tomorrow’s list and shut the till.
At five, Adam appeared outside carrying two train tickets.
We had planned the evening in the car after leaving the estate the day before. I had said I wanted to look at something that did not need dusting, pricing or carrying through a door. He had suggested the coast. I had checked the return times myself.
Now he stood beyond the window, pointing at his watch with unnecessary solemnity.
I locked the back door, turned the sign and picked up my coat.
“Ready?” he asked when I came outside.
“I haven’t cleaned the front glass.”
He looked at it. There was a thumbprint near the handle.
“A terrible loss.”
“I’ll do it tomorrow.”
He took my hand, and we walked to the station.
On the train I kept thinking of things I might have forgotten. The cold store. The tap. The note for the early delivery. Each had already been checked. I took out my phone once, then put it back in my bag.
Adam sat opposite me because the seats beside one another were taken. Every so often his knee touched mine beneath the table. He was looking out at the fields with the expression he wore when a building had pleased him, except there was nothing there to improve.
“What?” I asked.
“I haven’t been on this train for years.”
“Were there more comfortable seats?”
“No. I’ve remembered why I drove.”
I laughed. A child across the aisle was counting bridges and had become furious with her father for missing one. The father attempted to correct the count. She rejected his evidence. Adam and I exchanged a look and stayed wisely out of it.
At the coast, the wind took my hair apart before we’d reached the seafront.
The town was busy with people making the last of the long evening. Children carried buckets. A woman in a business suit ate an ice cream with fierce concentration. The sea beyond them was pale and restless, folding over itself in small bright lines.
We bought food and ate it on the low wall, watching gulls assess us. Adam guarded the paper bag with one hand while trying to drink from a bottle with the other. I stole a chip and told him his security arrangements were poor.
He gave me the bag.
“Then you’re in charge.”
A gull immediately came closer. I moved the food to my lap.
“Leadership is difficult,” he said.
We walked down to the water afterwards. I took off my shoes and rolled up my trousers. The first wave reached my feet with a coldness so sharp I shouted.
Adam laughed from several feet away.
“Lovely, is it?”
“Come and find out.”
“I believe you.”
“That would be a first.”
He put his shoes beside mine. The water caught him before he had finished rolling his trousers, and his expression was worth the whole journey.
We stood there laughing while another wave came in.
Farther along the beach, a child was digging a channel towards the sea. Every time he got close, the water moved away. He continued, undiscouraged, with a concentration I admired.
Adam put an arm round my waist. I leaned into him, feeling the wind through my cardigan and the cool wet sand shifting beneath my feet.
“How was your first day?” he asked.
I looked out at the water.
“Real,” I said.
He nodded, as if that was an answer he understood.
I turned towards him. There was salt on his skin when I kissed his cheek. He caught my face gently between his hands and kissed me properly, while the sea came back and soaked both our hems.
We had a train to catch later. For now, I let my shoes wait.
Chosen
On the morning I married Adam Reeves, I couldn’t find my other earring.
I had put both on the chest of drawers. I was certain of it. One remained beside the little box containing my mother’s card. The other had apparently reconsidered the commitment and left.
Adam stood in the bedroom doorway with his tie undone.
“Could it be on the floor?”
“I’ve looked.”
“Under the chest?”
“I’ve looked there too.”
“Would you like me to look?”
“No.”
He waited.
“Yes.”
He got down on one knee, lowered his head and retrieved the earring from behind the leg of the chest in less than ten seconds.
I found this unnecessarily competent.
“Thank you.”
“You sound cross.”
“It’s a complicated gratitude.”
He put it into my palm and kissed me.
Outside, March rain moved across the window. We had left the flat the previous autumn, when I was ready and the tenancy arrangements allowed it, and moved my two chairs into his house. The comfortable one was in the sitting room. The other remained in his study, where he claimed it discouraged meetings from running long.
The upstairs wallpaper was gone.
We had argued over its replacement for an entire afternoon and chosen paint neither of us had suggested first. I liked that more than I liked the colour.
Now the chest stood beneath the window in our bedroom. The little LATER box occupied a shelf in the cupboard, still within easy reach. I had opened it while looking for the earrings and found myself sitting on the bed with the cream cardigan in my lap.
Adam had been downstairs then. I had touched the small wooden bear on the button and read Mum’s card, the one about bringing the finished sleeve on Sunday.
I missed her.
I missed the baby who had never worn the cardigan.
When I was ready, I had folded it into its pillowcase and put it back. The box was not waiting for me to become a different woman before it could belong in my home.
Adam touched my cheek.
“All right?”
“Yes.”
He knew what was in the box. He had learned that sometimes I wanted company when I opened it and sometimes I wanted the room to myself. This morning I wanted him close.
I took the loose ends of his tie and drew him towards me.
“You’re going to be late,” I said.
“So are you.”
“It’s my earring’s fault.”
He kissed me again, carefully enough not to disturb the hair I had spent twenty minutes arranging. I found that consideration so attractive I disturbed it myself.
By the time Ruth arrived, we were both laughing and his tie still wasn’t done.
“Hopeless,” she said from the doorway.
She had a small bunch of flowers in one hand and an umbrella in the other. Nina stood behind her carrying a box of buttonholes and wearing shoes I had never seen without their owner complaining.
“You said we weren’t doing flowers,” I told them.
“We said you weren’t doing flowers,” Nina replied.
The bouquet was small, bright and slightly untidy, with early tulips and a few delicate branches. A little yellow appeared where I would not have expected it. I loved it immediately.
“Who chose that?”
“Both of us,” Ruth said. “We had a meeting. It lasted four minutes.”
The business had learned to survive several kinds of meeting by then. Some were useful. Some involved discovering that I had already made a decision and was presenting it as a question. Ruth had become very good at identifying those.
We had made it through the autumn weddings and the Christmas rush. Not elegantly every day. There had been a week when the cold store needed repairing and a month when the money went out faster than it came in. There had also been a first profit-share payment, modest enough that Ruth refused to retire on it, and a repeat booking Nina had brought in under her own name.
The arch stood above the workbench where customers could see us making things. The blue panel had acquired its first scratch. We touched it up.
On the shop door that morning was a notice saying we were closed for a wedding and would reopen the next day. The bookings had been arranged around it. Nobody was waiting for me to finish a bouquet before I could get married.
Nina opened the buttonhole box and looked at Adam.
“Hold still.”
He obeyed. Ruth turned to me, adjusted a flower in the bouquet and frowned at my hair.
“You’ve been kissing him.”
“Possibly.”
“After all that trouble.”
“It seemed worth it.”
She smiled then, suddenly and completely, and I had to look down at the flowers for a moment.
The divorce had been completed during the winter. The final papers had arrived on an ordinary afternoon, while I was deciding whether we needed more wrapping for the following week. I had read them, called Harriet to confirm the last practical detail and put them away.
Richard and I no longer needed to arrange our lives through one another. News of him reached me occasionally, as news of people does in a town this size. Iris and the baby were well. I hoped they continued to be. I did not build my days around finding out.
Adam had asked me to marry him in November.
He had done it at our kitchen table after an evening during which we’d disagreed about a work trip. He wanted to go for longer than we’d planned. I had wanted him home for a weekend I had deliberately kept clear. We’d found a way that didn’t require either of us to pretend the other person’s wish was silly.
Then he’d taken my hand and said he wanted to keep making a life with me.
I had asked whether he was proposing because we’d successfully managed a calendar.
He had said the calendar was promising evidence, but mostly he was proposing because he loved me and wanted to be my husband.
I had said yes before he could become more eloquent.
Now he stood in the hallway with a buttonhole on his jacket and a look on his face I had not seen before.
“What?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“Nothing.”
“That’s an unconvincing answer on your wedding morning.”
He came towards me, ignoring Ruth’s attempt to hand him the umbrella.
“I know what I want to say. I just keep finding it doesn’t fit in a sentence.”
“Try two.”
He smiled, then took my hand.
“I love the life we have. I want the rest of mine with you.”
I felt my throat tighten.
“Those were very good sentences.”
“Thank you.”
“I’d like to keep them.”
“They’re yours.”
We walked out together beneath the umbrella, which was too small for both of us and entirely sufficient for how close we wanted to stand.
The ceremony room at the register office had tall windows and blue curtains. Peter and Marion were waiting inside, Peter looking as if he had been told firmly not to make a joke until afterwards. Val had sent a little painted card because she was away that weekend. I’d spent three afternoons helping with a theatre set the previous summer and had been trusted, eventually, with a whole door.
I put the card with my bag and went to stand beside Adam.
There were things to say that belonged to the ceremony, and we said them. Names, answers, promises spoken clearly enough for the room to hear. His hand was warm in mine. I could see the pulse at his throat.
When it was his turn to put the ring on my finger, he paused just long enough to look at me.
I looked back.
There was no room in that moment for comparing him with the man I’d married before. There was this man, who could be impatient and impossible and tender, who had stood in a public room and corrected his own promise, who disliked marzipan being criticised and drew my crooked chairs without measuring them. This man, whose mornings I knew and whose future I wanted to share.
The ring slipped over my knuckle.
I put his on more slowly because my hand was shaking. He smiled at me, and I laughed once, quietly, with tears already making the room bright.
Then we were married.
When he kissed me, Ruth made a sound behind us that might have been a laugh or a badly concealed sob. Nina supplied tissues without comment. Peter waited until the kiss had ended before applauding, with obvious relief at having found something useful to do.
Outside, the rain had stopped.
We stood on the steps while Marion took photographs. She moved us twice, complained about Peter’s thumb appearing in the corner of one picture and instructed Adam to stop looking at me long enough to look at the camera.
He tried.
The photograph caught us both laughing.
We had lunch in a small room above the pub where Adam and I had played the wooden game on our first date. I had chosen it because the food was good and because I liked the memory of discovering he could lose badly and still make me want to kiss him.
There were no speeches long enough for the food to cool. Ruth said my mother would have had opinions about the flowers and would have been pleased. Nina said she expected us both at work on the days we’d actually agreed to work. Peter raised a glass to Adam finally learning that an appointment could be more important than a building.
Adam accepted that with a wince and a smile.
After lunch, while the others argued amicably about coffee, he took my hand beneath the table.
“Happy?”
“Yes.”
The word felt simple in my mouth.
I was not happy because nothing would hurt again. I was happy sitting beside him, with my friends making too much noise and my mother’s handwriting waiting safely at home. There would be work tomorrow. There would be years we could not predict from the warmth of this room. I wanted them.
Adam lifted my hand and kissed the ring, then the small space beside it.
“I love you, Mrs—”
“Careful,” I said.
He laughed.
“Elena.”
“Better.”
Later, we found the game board still on the windowsill downstairs.
He set it between us with the air of a man preparing to correct a historical injustice. I selected a brass disk and felt its familiar weight against my fingertip.
“No special rules because we’re married,” I told him.
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
His first disk stopped just short of the line. He examined it, considered objecting and looked up at me instead.
I was already smiling.
“Your turn,” he said.
I took it.