William called a few weeks later, and Girl started on a Saturday in May, the week before Mother’s Day. She dressed again in the same pants from Little Caesars Pizza. She knew they weren’t trendy or cool by a long shot, but on the phone they had said no jeans, and they were all she had that wasn’t denim. When she walked back into the shop, she knew she should be assertive, smile, and hold her hand out firmly to shake, as Stepmother always told her, but she wasn’t sure she’d be able to. She had used up all her professionalism job-hunting, and now she was left timid. She twisted her rings around her fingers and tried not to tug at her clothes.
“Hello, my name is Ryan,” a tall, thin man said. The shop owner, she remembered, from talking with William. Something in Ryan’s phrasing reassured her. My name is, a phrase from kindergarten or Spanish class, unexpected from this someone who was closer in age to her mother than to herself.
“My name is Girl,” she said with a smile, parroting his phrase as she reached for his handshake. Ryan had dark black hair and the kind of thick mustache she didn’t normally like, but somehow looked okay on him. He was tall, easily over six feet, but rail thin. He couldn’t have weighed more than one hundred and fifty pounds, but she didn’t take it to mean anything. Brother was tall and skinny like that, too. It made him less intimidating, even though he wore dressier clothes than any florist Girl had ever seen. Ryan wore gray dress pants, not just khakis, and a dress shirt buttoned to the wrists. He sported a silver and turquoise bolo tie close to his Adam’s apple, the black leather strings dangling on his narrow chest.
“Come in the back and I’ll introduce you to everyone,” he said, and Girl followed him past the coolers into the empty space at the heart of the building where everyone worked. “This is Tony, and my partner Mike—they are our delivery and setup team. You met William, the manager, already.” She followed him to one of the counters like a little duckling imprinted on the wrong mother, but devoted nonetheless. “We’re getting another florist, Bob, but he hasn’t started yet. He’s moving here from Rhode Island.
“Do you know how to make a bow?” he asked. Shit. She had been trying and failing for over a year to make a bow. Jessie, her old boss, gave up on teaching her and said Girl would never learn because she was left-handed.
“Um, not really,” she admitted. Bet he’s regretting hiring me, she thought to herself, but tried to push it out of her head. She was supposed to be confident, cheerful, someone he’d like working in his shop, not some depressing girl-child.
“Here, I’ll show you, and we can chit-chat while we make bows.” Girl watched Ryan’s long, thin fingers intently as he twisted and looped the ribbon, mimicking him as best she could. She did it! It was actually pretty easy. She didn’t know why she had struggled so long.
“I love the windows,” she said.
“It’s the one thing no one else can touch here. I don’t arrange flowers much anymore—too much paperwork—but the windows are mine. Here, when you cut the loop, cut out a tiny triangle to make the tail prettier.” Everything he did was done with tiny, perfect details.
“How did you ever get the idea to frame sheet moss?”
“We were all getting high during the ice storm,” he said, “and there was this pile of gold frames in the attic. Someone, I don’t know, William, or Tony, or Mike, I don’t remember, but one of them said we should put moss in the frames so we did.” Girl didn’t have a brain that thought of things like that, but then again, she didn’t get high anymore. Something in the way that Ryan admitted to his drug use so casually made her protective of him, like he didn’t know better than to admit to stuff he shouldn’t. She was seventeen—she knew when to keep her mouth shut. Except she hadn’t, when she filled out that application at the dry cleaner. But at least she was ashamed of it, not so unapologetically matter of fact.
The front bell rang, signaling a customer.
“Follow me,” he said, and they walked back to the podium at the front of the store. Ryan showed her how to wrap fresh flowers in a bubble of cellophane leaving the stems exposed—the opposite of how they did it at her old shop—and tie the bottom with raffia.
“We tie everything with raffia, and attach one of our cards. It’s our signature,” he explained.
“When did you buy the shop?” she asked him.
“Oh, I didn’t buy it, I opened it fourteen years ago,” Ryan said.
“You didn’t just buy it, like in the last year?”
“No. We moved here on East Avenue from the South Wedge neighborhood two years ago. Is that what you mean?” She shook her head, confused. At her last job, Girl worked with a man named Bruce, who had come to Flowers for All Occasions after he said that the last shop he worked at—South Wedge Florist—had closed. Bruce said the owner died of AIDS. Jessie, her boss at the time, had asked if any of the fixtures were for sale.
“I used to work with a guy who said he worked at South Wedge Florist—Bruce. He said the shop closed because the owner died of AIDS.”
“I don’t got AIDS,” he said. “Bruce must
