Sumi assumed he was lying. Surely a place like that didn’t exist in the real world, where jobs were something one primarily looked forward to leaving each day and where consumers couldn’t be bothered to support an entire business specializing in monsteras and hanging jades.
There were flower shops that sold the odd planter, home improvement superstores with seasonal greenhouses, and if one was lucky enough, a year-round garden center, but even those tended to place their emphasis on outdoor growing. A houseplant store. It was such a silly, stupid thing to lie about. She’d huffed, rolling her eyes at the mere thought.Does he think you were born yesterday?!Perhaps it was because she spent her days with middle-schoolers who lied as often and easily as the most hardened criminals, but Sumi considered herself a good judge of truthfulness, and this seemed as probable as all of her students showing up on time on standardized testing day.
ChaoticConcertina:I’m going to save your photo, if you don’t mind.
I’ll pop in tomorrow on my way to work and show her.
I’ll let you know what she says!
He’d done exactly that. She’d not actually expected a response from ChaoticConcertina, outside the lingering threat of an unexpected dick pic. When the top left corner of her phone screen displayed a notification from the chat server app two days later, Sumi expected another unhelpful response from another member of the server, swiping open her phone with only half-interest.
ChaoticConcertina:The most likely culprit is a bit of rot at the root
beneath the point you can feel with a finger.
Probably started when you repotted last month.
If you’re using vermiculite, swap it for perlite and an equal part orchid bark.
If you have access to fresh bone meal, a little bit works wonders.
She’d stared at her phone on her lunch break that day, eyes widened, shocked that he responded at all and flabbergasted by the photo he had sent. It was an example of each of the items he’d mentioned, assuming she was a novice. She was familiar with perlite and bone meal, but she hadneverin her life seen anything like the shop in the background, looking like something from a dream.
Antique cabinets and mismatched marble-topped tables stood behind him, topped with ceramic pots and glass Mason jars, beakers and bud vases, all bearing clippings from various plants. From the ceiling, the trailing vines of pothos and jades, strings of hearts and strings of turtles, zebrinas and ivies. On top of the closest table was a sawhorse draped in a scarf of rich emerald, and on top of that was an old-fashioned librarians card catalog cabinet, the drawers pulled out, with vibrant green strings of pearls cascading to the surface below.
The hand that held the container of orchid bark was large and well-formed, tawny with an olive undertone, with long fingers and raised veins, the kind of hand one envisioned if one were fantasizing about being held down and fucked within an inch of one’s life—
“Whatcha lookin’ at?”
Her room para had startled her from the inappropriate thought that day, nearly causing the phone to escape her grasp. Sumi had squeaked in shock and fumbled the phone, hand moving over hand as if it were a slippery fish intent on evading capture.
ChaoticConcertina:If you don’t have access to it, you can buy it online.
The bone meal, I mean
Like, that wasn’t advice to go commit murder just for fresh bone meal
You definitely shouldn’t steal someone’s bones
Unless it’s areallynice philo
Then it’s your call
He was real. If his hand was anything to go on, and it was all she had, he was gorgeous.You can’t tell that from a hand, what’s wrong with you?The shop was real as well, like something out of one of her most fevered dreams. Someone out there, wherever it was that ChaoticConcetina called home, had a plant shop, living their best life, she had no doubt. It was everythingshewanted.
It was the very first time Sumi admitted it to herself —shewanted her own little shop, airy and bright and full of flowers, a place that was hers, where she would never be in charge of standardized testing preparations and would never again have to break up a fight between twelve-year-old girls.It’s giving aspirational. It’s giving dream life.It’s giving manifesting.
She’d wandered into the pretty little flower shop in her neighborhood later that same day, feeling an itch beneath her skin, her feet propelling her to the shop almost without her full conscious consent.The Lucky LilybyBloomerang. There was a tree growing right through the center of the sales floor and a wall of refrigerated cases containing buckets and buckets of flowers. She could choose a premade arrangement from the case or select her own individual stems à la carte, which was her preference.
“Bloomerang is your parent company?” she asked the friendly woman who checked her out, whom she knew to be the owner. Sumi had been in the smaller shop at least a dozen times before, but never before had she felt compelled to ask questions. She’d never had a reason to. Now, though . . . the thought of that plant shop whispered at the back of her mind. She loved all of her plant babies but knew she was nowhere near knowledgeable enough to run a store like that.
Flowers, on the other hand,thatwas a language she spoke. The way other women joined book clubs or took voice lessons or horse riding lessons or playing intramural sports, she had done workshops at the Arboretum, volunteered at the garden, taken several different courses on advanced floral arrangement, offered through various community centers and enrichment programs. As a young teen, she had completed several summers’ worth of certification at summer camp, and developed what was probably a not completely healthy obsession with the Victorian’s secret language of flowers. Sumi heated, remembering her “vicious Victorian” phase, when she carried a tussie mussie around the halls of her school and gifted friends and enemies alike carnations in symbolic colors.
A flower shop had been something she’d long dreamed of, although it was never something that she considered realistic. She was captain of theSS Sunk Cost, and there was no port in sight.
“Yup, we’re technically a part of their franchise. It’s nice though, because they really let each shop operate independently.”
Her lungs had felt overinflated, pressing on the walls of her chest as if they might buckle outward, turning her into a balloon.A franchise!She had never seriously considered this latent little fantasy of hers, always reminding herself that she had spent too many years on teaching to throw it away.And you don’t know the first thing about starting up a flower shop.But then again, she had never asked.
