I didn’t forgive her all at once. I want to be honest about that. Forgiveness doesn’t work like a light switch. It’s more like a faucet with a bad washer. It drips a little at a time.
But that morning, standing in that room, I reached up and took hold of the edge of the white cloth that lay folded beside Sam’s frame.
I covered his frame again, gently. Not to hide it. Just to keep the dust off. The way you’d tuck a blanket over a child.
“It’s not finished yet,” I said.
Marta looked at me.
“There’s going to be more sunflowers,” I said. “Every Saturday. I’m not going to stop bringing them. So you’re not going to stop keeping them. Okay?”
She nodded. She couldn’t speak.
“And Marta?”
“Yes?”
“Next time your sink drips,” I said, “you call me.”
Chapter Eleven: Two Mothers on Hollis Avenue
The next Saturday, I brought two bunches of sunflowers.
I put one in the metal cup at Sam’s headstone, like always. I trimmed the stems with the shears he gave me. Clean cut. At an angle.
Then I walked across the cemetery to Section C, row four, by the chapel.
Marta was already there. She was sitting on a little folding stool beside Tomasz’s grave, in her gray coat, with her hands folded in her lap. When she saw me coming with the flowers, she looked up, confused.
I knelt down and put the second bunch of sunflowers in Tomasz’s empty vase.
“Ruth,” she said. “They’ll throw them away on Monday.”
“I know,” I said. “So tomorrow you’ll come get them.”
She stared at me. Then she looked at the sunflowers, bright yellow against the gray stone, the first flowers on her son’s grave in eleven years.
“He liked yellow roses,” she said quietly.
“Next week, I’ll bring yellow roses.”
She reached over and took my hand. Her fingers were cold and thin and very strong.
We sat there together for a long time. Two mothers, in the cold, beside a stone. Neither of us said much. We didn’t need to.
On Monday morning, I went to the cemetery office and asked to speak to whoever was in charge.
It turned out to be a man named Harold Pruett, the cemetery manager, who wore a tie with little cartoon ducks on it and seemed alarmed that anyone wanted to speak to him. I sat in his small office and told him about Marta. About the dumpster. About the two hundred and twelve keepsakes in her back room.
He listened. He knew some of it. Pat had told him years ago.
“We can’t change the policy,” he said apologetically. “Four thousand graves. We have to clear them. The board would never…”
“I’m not asking you to change the policy,” I said. “I’m asking you to tell people.”
“Tell them what?”
“That their flowers are going in the trash on Monday,” I said. “And that if they want them saved, there’s a woman across the street who’ll save them. Put it on the sign by the front gate. Put it on the website. Put a little box in the office where people can leave their name if they want a keepsake made.”
He looked at me for a long time. Then he looked down at his duck tie.
“My mother’s buried in Section F,” he said quietly. “I bring her lilies every Mother’s Day.” He paused. “I never thought about where they went.”
“Most people don’t,” I said.
The new sign went up by the front gate three weeks later. It was a simple wooden board with white letters.
Fresh flowers are cleared every Monday at 7 a.m. If you would like your flowers preserved as a keepsake, please leave your name and plot number at the office. This service is offered free of charge by a neighbor who understands.
Marta cried when she saw it. She stood in front of it in her gray coat with her hand over her mouth and cried for five minutes. Then she told me the letters were crooked and the board should have been oak, not pine.
“Sam would have built it better,” she said.
“Sam would have built it better,” I agreed.
The first week, eleven families left their names. The second week, nineteen. By Christmas, there was a waiting list.
Marta couldn’t do it alone anymore. Her hands were too slow, her eyes not good enough for the tiny arrangements. So I started going over on Tuesdays and Thursdays. She taught me how to press flowers flat between blotting paper. How to change the paper every two days so they didn’t brown. How to handle a dried petal with tweezers so it didn’t crumble.
“Gently,” she’d say, every time, watching my hands. “Like they’re still alive.”
We worked at her kitchen table with the radio on, drinking her terrible strong coffee. Some days we didn’t talk at all. Some days we talked for hours. About Tomasz, who rode a motorcycle and played the accordion and was going to marry a girl named Agnieszka. About Sam, who once fixed the toilet at his own high school graduation party.
About how it feels to wake up in the morning and forget, for one second, that your child is gone. And then remember.
“It’s like stepping down a stair that isn’t there,” Marta said once.
I had never heard anyone describe it so exactly. I put down my tweezers and cried, and she let me, and then she handed me a cookie.
Chapter Twelve: The Faucet
In January, the faucet in my kitchen finally gave up.
The cold side stopped dripping and started running. A thin, steady stream I couldn’t turn off. I stood in front of it at six in the morning in my bathrobe, staring at it, with a towel in my hands.
My hand went to my phone. My thumb went to the first name in my favorites. Sam, with the little wrench.
I stopped. I stood there with my thumb over his name.
Then I put the phone down and went out to the garage.
