Page 114 of Smoke and Roses

He hums the harmony. He still can’t sing, and he’s never going to be able to. But he hums, off-key, standing in our kitchen in the half-dark with his coffee. I dance around him in my socks, and on the second chorus he catches me by the waist and pulls me in and sways with me against the counter.

“You’re going to be late,” I say against his chest.

“I’m never late. I was a Ranger.”

“You’re going to be late to your best friend’s wedding party.”

“It’s at four,” he says. “In the afternoon. In the Strongs’ shop. I’m not going to be late to something at four in the afternoon.”

“You have to pick up the boutonnieres.”

“From you.”

“From me,” I say. “And I’m not giving them to you until you kiss me.”

He kisses me slowly and deeply. He tastes like coffee and toothpaste and Travis. When he lets me go, my knees are useless and Dolly is on to a different song.

“Okay,” I breathe. “You can have the boutonnieres.”

“Thank you.”

It’s March. It’s been four months since a red flag afternoon at the Hollister ranch, when I sat in the back of a brush truck in the middle of all that black with a mask over my face and Travis holding my hand. And last Saturday, at sunrise, on an overlook facing the Uintas, with a retired judge and his wife as witnesses and mud and old snow under their feet, Rob Wallace married Cassia Hawthorne in her station boots.

Travis got the first phone call after. He was standing in this kitchen at 7:50 in the morning, and Rob was yelling so loud I could hear him from the bedroom. Travis listened for a minute and said, “Good,” and hung up. Then he stood at the sink with his back to me for a while, and I let him.

Nolene Strong has not forgiven them for eloping. So today at four o’clock, half of Eden is throwing them the party they skipped, in the Strongs’ big heated shop, whether they like it or not.

I did the flowers. All of them. Tulips and ranunculus, mostly, and armloads of forsythia I’ve been forcing in warm water in the back of the workroom for two weeks. Pussy willow and white roses. And one hothouse sunflower in the middle of Cassia’s bouquet that she doesn’t know about yet.

“Danny lands at eleven,” I say into his chest. “It’s the girls’ spring break. Little Lindsey wants to throw petals.”

“There’s no aisle.”

“She’ll make one.”

He laughs into my hair.

The rest of the day goes the way party days always go, fast and slow and crazy. I spend the morning in the shop with my hair in a clip, wiring boutonnieres.

Carol comes in at ten with doughnuts and stays to strip roses. Hank comes in at eleven for his Friday rose, even though it’s Saturday, and I give it to him for free, and he pays me anyway.

Danielle walks in at one with her curls blowing and her girls running ahead of her, and little Lindsey climbs onto the stool by the register and sings Jolene to a bucket of tulips at the top of her lungs.

At four o’clock, I stand in the big open door of the Strongs’ shop with Danielle on one side of me and Carol on the other while Rob’s truck comes up the muddy lane.

There are tin cans tied to the bumper, and Novak swears he didn’t put them there. Cassia gets out in a short white dress and her station boots. Little Lindsey marches up to her with a basket and throws petals at her feet, one handful at a time, dead serious, clear across the wood floor.

I hand Cassia her bouquet. She finds the sunflower and looks up at me and says, “Oh, you bitch,” with so much love that Nolene doesn’t even scold her.

Rob was crying before she got out of the truck.

Then Martin bangs a spoon on a glass and makes Travis give a toast, because somebody has to. Travis stands up on a hay bale in a dark shirt with the boutonniere I made him, a white rose and a sprig of pussy willow, with the string lights on his face. He looks at Rob the way he must have looked at him at nineteen, checking his straps.

“He came home,” Travis says. “That’s it. That’s the toast.”

Martin says, “Hear, hear,” and every glass in the shop goes up.

Then Travis finds me in the crowd.