“You don’t have to do that,” she said.
I ignored her. “Eighty of those? That’s a lot.”
“Plus boutonnières, corsages, and six bridesmaid bouquets, but those I can knock out in the morning
“Give me a job,” I said. “Please.”
“Can you strip and cut stems? I’ll show you the length.”
“I’m on it.”
Esme handed me a pair of floral shears and pulled a bucket of roses toward the edge of the table. “Take the leaves off below here.” She marked a spot on the stem with her thumbnail. “Cut at an angle. About this long.” She held her hands apart, roughly twelve inches. “Flat cuts will dry them out too fast.”
“Angled cuts. Yes, ma’am.”
She watched me do the first three, adjusted my angle once, and nodded. “That’s perfect.”
“My mother loved her roses. I used to help her in the garden.” I rarely mentioned my mother and hadn’t intended to just now, but roses always made me think of her.
“Really? You never told me she was a gardener.”
“Yeah, she had a rose garden at the—.” I cut myself off before I said too much.
“Was it a big garden?”
I struggled to think of what to say. “Sure, I guess so. I don’t remember exactly. She died when I was sixteen. Gardens were the last thing I noticed back then.”
“And then it was just your dad, you, and your sister, right?”
I nodded. “That’s right.” All that was true. Esme just didn’t know the details, but I’d shared a little about my family over the years. Usually when she asked. But for the most part, I avoided the subject. Given her own complicated relationship with her parents, she seemed to understand, never pressing too hard.
We fell into a rhythm. She built the arrangements, starting with the eucalyptus base, then the dusty miller, then layering in the roses and ranunculus. I prepped the flowers, stripping,cutting, and sorting them into buckets by type so she could grab what she needed without stopping.
“I don’t know how you make them so perfect every time,” I said.
“Helen used to say that the art of arrangement was in the composition.”
She often talked about Helen, who had been her mentor before retiring and selling the shop to Esme.
“Composition is about structure and balance. She would always tell me not to crowd the center. That sometimes less was more. The foundation’s important too. It has to be layered right so the whole thing doesn’t fall apart.” Esme tilted her head, studying the centerpiece from a different angle, then rotated the vase a quarter turn, assessing it again before reaching for another ranunculus.
“Helen was a riot. She always assigned our customers a flower—what they would be if they were a flower. Toward the end, I used to try and guess what she’d assign them before she told me.”
“Did you ever guess correctly?”
“Sometimes but not often. All in the eye of the beholder, I guess. I might guess a dandelion but she’d see a daffodil.”
“What flower did she say you were?” I asked.
She stared at me blankly for a second. “You know, I don’t think she ever did. Isn’t that funny?”
“I know what you’d be.” I smiled. “You’d be a sunflower.”
She made a face. “A sunflower? So ordinary?”
I laughed, shaking my head. “There’s nothing ordinary about a sunflower. Their little seed just sits in the dark, waiting. It has everything it needs inside it already and just needs to be coaxed out with a little warmth, a little water. And when that happens, it cracks open and pushes through the soil. So brave. And bold.”
“You really do love sunflowers,” Esme said, looking at me sideways.
