Page 105 of Smoke and Roses

“Mom,” she says.

I step aside. Carol Hayes walks across the airport with her yellow roses and her face falling apart, and her daughter walks to meet her. They hold each other in the middle of the Salt Lake City airport, by the baggage claim for carousel six, rocking back and forth. Carol keeps saying, “My baby. My baby.” The roses get crushed between them.

I’ll make her a hundred more.

I back up until I bump into Travis’s chest. He wraps his arms around me from behind and rests his chin on top of my head. I lean back against him and cry while Carol holds her daughter, and I can feel his heart beating against my back, steady and even.

“You okay?” he asks.

“No,” I say. “Yes. I don’t know. I think I’m the happiest I’ve ever been, and I can’t stop crying.”

“That’s allowed.”

“Is it?”

“It’s an airport,” he says. “People cry in airports. It’s practically the rules.”

I laugh. He doesn’t let go.

After a while, Danielle lets go of her mother long enough to turn around and look for Hank.

He hasn’t moved. He’s standing exactly where he was by the bottom of the escalator, turning his hat around and around in his hands. An old man in suspenders who kept his promise for seventeen years.

She walks over and stands in front of him.

“Hi, Hank,” she says.

“Hello, Danielle.”

“You kept every card.”

“Every one.”

“You checked on her. Every Friday. With the roses.” Her voice shakes. “She told me on the phone. She said you came in every Friday for years and bought a rose for June.”

Hank looks down at his hat.

“It wasn’t for June,” he says. “Not all of it. Some of it was so I could see she was all right. So I could tell you.” He swallows. “In my letters. I always told you. She’s running the shop. She’s singing. She’s all right.”

Danielle puts her arms around him.

Hank Simmons, eighty-one years old, holds her and pats her back with his big, shaking hand, gently, like she’s still seventeen and standing at his kitchen door at two in the morning.

“You did good, girl,” he says. “You did so good.”

Something tugs on my sleeve. It’s the little girl with the gap in her teeth.

“Are you Aunt Lindsey?” she asks.

I crouch down so we’re eye to eye. “I am.”

She studies me with Danielle’s eyes. Then she points up at Travis, who is standing right behind me.

“That’s the firefighter,” she says. “From the phone.”

“That’s him.”

She tips her head back to look up at him. It’s a long way up.