Page 64 of Smoke and Roses

He lets go. He doesn’t ask what for.

I go into the cooler and pull the door shut. I stand in the middle of it with my arms wrapped around myself and wait to fall apart. Somehow I don’t.

I stand there breathing cold air as I sift through memories about Hank Simmons at the graveside in the rain, holding an umbrella over my grandma’s casket and me, with his own shoulders getting soaked. I picture Hank coming in every Friday, counting out his money one bill at a time. One yellow rose for June, if you’ve got it.

I’ve always got it. I keep them in the back left bucket, just for him.

I pull one out. The best one, tightly formed, just starting to open. I strip the thorns off with my thumb, the way Grandma taught me, and wrap the stem in a wet paper towel and a square of foil.

When I come out, Travis is leaning in the curtain between the workroom and the shop, with his arms crossed, watching the door to make sure nobody else comes in. He looks at the rose in my hand.

“For June,” I say. “It’s Thursday. But he’ll want one.”

For a fraction of a second, Travis’s eyes soften. He nods, once.

“You sure?” he asks. “You can be mad at him. You’re allowed.”

“I know and I am.” I look down at the rose. “I’m going to be mad at him in his kitchen with his wife’s rose on the table.”

His mouth tips up. “Rob said you’d take it hard,” he says. “Said not to try to make it stop.”

“I’m not taking it hard. I’m taking it mad. Tell him he was wrong. He’ll hate that.”

“Gladly.”

I untie my apron. I hang it on the hook.

“Take me to Hank’s,” I say. “Right now. Both of us go in.”

He picks up my coat off the hook by the door and holds it open for me.

Chapter Twenty-Two

The door creaks when it opens. “Lindsey,” Hank says. “I figured you’d come.”

Standing in his front door in his suspenders with a dish towel over his shoulder, he doesn’t look surprised. He looks like a man who’s been waiting at a window for years and just saw headlights turn into his lane.

Lindsey stops on the bottom step of his porch. Her hand is in mine. It’s cold, and it’s lightly quaking.

“Hi, Hank,” she says.

He looks at her, and then at me, dead in the eyes. “You told her,” he says.

“I told her what I think, what Gabe knows. It’s her time now to ask questions.”

Hank studies me with those pale cop’s eyes, and his face eases.

“Come in,” he says. “Both of you. There’s hot water in the teapot. Lindsey still takes tea at night, I expect. June always said you were the only young person in the valley with any sense about caffeine.”

Lindsey lets out a weak laugh.

His kitchen is warm and smells like bread. He gets down three mugs, and one of them has June painted on it in blue. Hank holds that one a moment before he puts it back and takes down a plain white one instead.

Lindsey and I sit at the table while he moves around the kitchen. While he’s working, she takes the yellow rose out of her coat, still wrapped in its square of foil, and lays it on the table in front of his chair without a word.

When he turns, Hank stands there looking down at it. After a moment, he sits down across from us with his hands wrapped around his tea.

Lindsey doesn’t touch hers and wastes no time. “You towed her car,” she says.