Third shelf from the top. On the right side. A label in neat, slanted handwriting.
Samuel Callahan.
I couldn’t breathe.
I turned to her slowly. My voice came out strange, like it belonged to somebody else.
“This isn’t the first time you’ve taken his flowers.”
“No,” she whispered.
“How long?”
She didn’t answer.
“How long, Marta?”
“Since April,” she said.
Since April. Since the first time I brought him flowers. Every single Saturday for seven months, I had driven out to Oak Hill with a fresh bunch from the grocery store. And every week, I had come back to find the old ones gone, and I’d assumed the groundskeepers took them. I never thought about it. Why would I?
“You’ve been stealing from my son,” I said. “Every week. For seven months.”
She closed her eyes. When she opened them, they were wet. Not from the cold this time.
“Please,” she said. “Look first. Then you can say anything you want to me. Anything. I will deserve it.”
She walked to the shelf. She reached up to the cloth above Sam’s name.
I watched her fingers take hold of the edge. I watched her lift it, slowly, the way you’d lift a veil.
The moment I saw what was underneath, I felt all the color drain out of my face.
It was a shadow box. A deep wooden frame with a glass front, about the size of a big picture book.
Inside, arranged on cream-colored paper, were sunflowers. Pressed sunflowers. Dozens of them. Their petals flattened and dried to a deep golden brown, their centers dark. They were arranged in a circle, overlapping, like a wreath. Each one had a tiny date written beneath it in pencil.
April 6. April 13. April 20. All the way around the circle. Every Saturday I’d been to the cemetery. Every bunch I’d brought.
My sunflowers. She’d kept every single one.
But that wasn’t what made the room tilt under my feet.
In the very center of the wreath, inside the circle of pressed petals, there was one more sunflower. Bigger than the others. Pressed flat and perfect.
