Sunflowers in Grocery-Store Plastic
I caught a stranger stealing flowers from my son’s grave.
I want to tell you that right away, because for a long time afterward, that was how I told the story to myself. A thief. A woman in a gray coat with a shopping bag full of other people’s grief, picking through the cemetery like it was a farmers’ market.
I was wrong about almost everything. But I didn’t know that yet.
So let me start where it started. With the sunflowers.
Yesterday would have been my son’s thirty-fifth birthday.
Instead of a cake, I bought sunflowers.
I bought them at the Kroger on Wendell Street, in the little flower section by the front doors. Six stems for $9.99, wrapped in clear grocery-store plastic with a rubber band around the bottom. I stood there for a long time picking them out, turning each bunch around, looking for the biggest faces.
The cashier was a young girl with purple braces. She smiled when she rang them up.
“These are so pretty,” she said. “Somebody special?”
“My son,” I said. “It’s his birthday.”
“Aw. Tell him happy birthday!”
I said I would. I didn’t explain. What would I have said? That I was going to tell him happy birthday in a cemetery? That he couldn’t hear me? She was nineteen. She had braces. I let her keep her nice afternoon.
Sam used to bring me sunflowers.
Never in a vase. Never from a real florist. Always a bunch from the grocery store, still wrapped in that crinkly plastic, tucked under one arm. His toolbox would be in his other hand, because there was always something in my house that needed fixing and Sam could never walk past a broken thing.
He’d come through my back door without knocking. He’d hold out the flowers.
“For the prettiest girl on the block,” he’d say.
“I’m the oldest girl on the block,” I’d tell him.
“Same thing,” he’d say, and kiss my cheek, and go straight to whatever was dripping.
Seven months ago, on a Thursday night in March, Sam died in a car accident.
A police officer came to my door at eleven-forty at night. A young man with his hat in his hands. I knew before he said anything. You always know. There’s only one reason a police officer takes off his hat on your front porch.
He said Sam’s truck had gone off the road on Hollis Avenue. He said the road was wet. He said it was fast, and that Sam probably didn’t feel anything. They always say that. I’ve since learned they say it whether it’s true or not.
He said Sam had been on his way home from work.
I nodded. I signed something. I made a phone call to my sister in Dayton. And then I sat at my kitchen table until the sun came up, staring at the faucet, which was dripping.
I still reach for my phone to call him sometimes.
Not on purpose. My hand just does it. Something happens, a funny thing on the news, a squirrel stuck in the bird feeder, and my hand goes to the phone and my thumb goes to his name before my brain catches up.
His name is still the first one in my favorites. Sam, with a little wrench emoji he put there himself, years ago, as a joke.
I haven’t taken it off. I don’t think I ever will.
On his birthday, I drove out to Oak Hill Cemetery with the sunflowers on the passenger seat. It was a bright October Saturday, cold and blue. The maples along the cemetery road had turned red and gold, and the leaves crunched under my tires.
Sam’s grave is in the newer section, near the back fence, under a young oak tree. The headstone is gray granite. Samuel James Callahan. Beloved Son. Below that, I had them carve a small wrench. The man at the monument company looked at me funny when I asked. Then he said it was the nicest idea anybody’d had all week.
I knelt down on the cold grass. I cleared away a few dead leaves. I took the rubber band off the sunflowers, trimmed the stems with my pruning shears, and arranged them in the metal cup at the base of the headstone.
Then I sat back on my heels and talked to my son.
“Happy birthday, honey,” I said. “Thirty-five. Can you believe it?”
The wind moved the oak leaves above me.
“The kitchen faucet’s leaking again,” I told him. “The cold side. It’s been dripping for two weeks. I put a bowl under it.”
I could hear exactly what he would have said. I could hear his voice, the little exasperated laugh in it.
Mom. Why didn’t you just call me?
I sat there in the cold for a long time, with my knees getting wet through my pants. Then I said goodbye and drove home.
It wasn’t until I was back in my kitchen, staring at the bowl under the faucet, that I realized I’d left my pruning shears on the grass beside his grave.
Chapter Two: The Woman in the Gray Coat
I almost didn’t go back for them.
They were just shears. Twelve dollars at the hardware store. But they were the ones Sam bought me, the spring before he died, when he caught me trying to cut rose stems with kitchen scissors.
“Mom, you’re crushing the stems,” he said. “They can’t drink like that.” He went out to his truck and came back with a brand-new pair, still in the package. “Use these. Clean cut. Angle it.”
So the next morning, Sunday, I drove back out to Oak Hill.
It was early, a little after eight. The cemetery was empty and quiet. Frost still lay on the grass in the shady spots. Somewhere a crow was complaining.
I parked on the narrow road near the back section and started walking toward Sam’s oak tree. My shears were right where I’d left them, lying in the grass beside his headstone, the red handles bright against the frost.
But I didn’t go to them right away.
Because there was someone else in the cemetery.
A woman was standing about six rows over from Sam. She was old, older than me, maybe in her mid-seventies. She was small and a little hunched, and she was wearing a long gray wool coat that had seen a lot of winters. The hem was frayed. One of the buttons didn’t match.
She was holding a big reusable shopping bag. The kind you buy at the checkout for a dollar.
It was full of flowers.
Roses. Carnations. A few lilies, still tightly closed. Mums in orange and yellow. Baby’s breath poking out the top. The bag was so full the flowers were pressing against the handles.
I stood still behind a tall monument and watched her.
She bent over a grave. A big bouquet of pink roses sat in the vase, the kind of bouquet you buy at a real florist for forty or fifty dollars. She looked at it carefully. Then she pulled one rose out, a fresh one, still half-closed. She slipped it into her bag.
She glanced over her shoulder.
Then she moved to the next grave.
I couldn’t believe it at first. I actually thought I was seeing it wrong.
But she did it again. And again. At each grave, she bent down and looked carefully at the flowers. She didn’t take the wilted ones. She didn’t take the dead ones. She only took the freshest stems, the ones that still had days left in them.
I watched her pull a white carnation out of an arrangement in front of a stone that said Beloved Wife and Mother. I watched her take two orange mums from a pot on a child’s grave. A child’s grave. With a little ceramic angel on top.
She was choosing the freshest ones.
I was sure I knew why. You could sell flowers like that. Bundle them together, wrap them up, sell them at a stand on the side of the road or to a grocery store or at one of those weekend markets. Fresh flowers are expensive. Free flowers are pure profit.
I felt sick. Then I felt angry. The anger came up hot from somewhere in my stomach, and it felt good, honestly, because it was the first strong thing I’d felt in weeks that wasn’t sadness.
She kept moving. Row by row. Getting closer to the back fence. Closer to the young oak tree.
Closer to Sam.
I came out from behind the monument. I didn’t decide to. My legs just started walking.
She was standing over my son’s grave now. She was looking down at the sunflowers I’d arranged the day before. Their big yellow faces were tilted up toward the sky, still perfect, still bright.
She bent down. She reached out with one thin hand.
And she pulled out a sunflower.
“Don’t touch that.”
My voice came out loud. Louder than I meant it to. It rang off the headstones.
She flinched like I’d hit her. She straightened up so fast she almost dropped the bag.
