My Sister Took Over Mom’s Flower Shop And Put Me On The Delivery Van At 61. On Valentine’s Day A Woman Read The Card On Her Roses, Looked Up At Me, And Asked How I Knew Her Real Name

On Valentine’s Day morning, I had forty-two deliveries on a clipboard and a van that smelled like eucalyptus and old coffee.

The heater in that van only works on high. So I drove around Chillicothe, Ohio, with my coat open and my face red, carrying roses up porch steps to women who didn’t know me from Adam.

“Rosalie’s Flowers,” I’d say. “Happy Valentine’s Day.”

Most of them said thank you. A few of them looked past me at the van, at the name painted on the side in the pink script my mother picked out in 1978, and said, “Oh, I loved Rosalie. Is she still there?”

“No, ma’am. She passed last March.”

“Well, who’s running it now?”

That was the question I’d been dreading for eleven months.

“My sister,” I’d say. And then I’d go back down the steps before they could see my face.

My name is Nora Dunn. I am sixty-one years old. I have worked in my mother’s flower shop on Paint Street, on and off, since I was fourteen, and on, without one single off, since 1997. For twenty-nine years I did the books, the wire orders, the payroll, the funerals, the weddings, the proms. I’ve wired more corsages than I could count.

And on Valentine’s Day, the busiest day of the florist’s year, I was driving the van.

Rosalie’s

Mom opened the shop with eleven hundred dollars and a used cooler she bought off a man in Waverly. She was a widow by then. Daddy died in a highway accident in 1974, when I was nine and my sister Tammy was two.

So the shop raised us, more or less. I did my homework on the workbench between the ribbon spools. Tammy napped in a nest of moss sacks in the back room. By the time I was sixteen, I could do a casket spray faster than Mom.

“You’ve got the hands,” she’d say, watching me. “Tammy’s got the mouth. Between the two of you, I’ll have a business.”

She meant it kindly. But Tammy heard it differently, I think. Tammy always heard everything differently.

I left in 1986 to get married. I lived in Columbus for eleven years with a man I won’t spend any more words on than this: he was charming at parties and nowhere else. When it ended in 1997, I drove home to Chillicothe with two suitcases and my son Ben in the back seat, and Mom handed me an apron like I’d been gone a weekend.

“The books are a mess,” she said. “Fix them.”

I fixed them. I kept them fixed for twenty-eight years.

Tammy worked the counter for a while in the nineties, then married a man who sold boats, moved out to Lake White, and came by the shop mostly at Christmas, when she’d pick up a centerpiece and forget to pay for it.

The Will

Mom had a stroke in January of last year and died in March, at eighty-four, in the hospice on Western Avenue with my hand on one side of her and Tammy’s on the other.

Two weeks later we sat in Walt Garrison’s law office on Second Street, and Walt cleared his throat and read Mom’s will.

It was dated 1991.

In 1991, I was living in Columbus. In 1991, Tammy was nineteen and working the counter at the shop full time. And so in 1991, my mother — who was practical about everything except paperwork — left Rosalie’s Flowers, the building, the van and the name to my daughter Tamara, who is working in the business.

“She always said she was going to update it,” I said.

“I know, Nora,” Walt said. He’d known Mom forty years. He looked miserable. “She told me so three or four times. She never came in to do it.”

“So what does that mean?”

“It means a will is a will.”

Tammy didn’t say anything in Walt’s office. But in the parking lot, she lit a cigarette, which she’d supposedly quit in 2010, and said, “Well. I guess Mom knew what she was doing.”

“Tammy, she wrote that before I came home.”

“She had twenty-eight years to change it.” She blew smoke at the courthouse. “Maybe she didn’t want to.”

The Van

Tammy came in the Monday after the funeral with her daughter Kayleigh, who was twenty-six and had a lot of followers online for making flower crowns.

“Kayleigh’s going to take over design,” Tammy said. “We need to modernize. Nobody wants carnations and baby’s breath anymore, Nora. Nobody wants your mom’s stuff.”

“Then who’s doing the funerals?”

“Kayleigh can do funerals.”

Kayleigh, God love her, looked at me like she wanted to crawl into the cooler.

“And the books?”

“I hired a bookkeeping service in Columbus. They do it all online.” Tammy handed me a set of keys with a pink plastic tag. “Ronnie quit. I need somebody on the van.”

I stood there holding those keys. I’d paid Ronnie’s salary out of a checking account I’d balanced by hand for twenty-eight years.

“You want me to drive deliveries.”

“I want you to work, Nora. Or not. It’s your choice.” She said it brightly, with her boat-salesman’s-wife smile. “But it’s my shop now.”

I took the keys. I needed the job. I’m sixty-one, and my 401(k) was a coffee can, because every time the shop had a bad year, I was the first one who didn’t take a paycheck.

I drove that van through the whole summer, through the proms and the weddings Kayleigh designed in pampas grass, through the fall and Christmas. I delivered funeral sprays somebody else made for people I’d known my whole life.

And I didn’t fight her. I don’t fully know why. Maybe because Mom never fought anybody either. She just kept her own books.

The Standing Order

On Valentine’s morning, the last ticket on my clipboard wasn’t printed like the others. It was a carbon slip from the old order pad, the yellow kind we hadn’t used since 2015, filled out in blue ballpoint.

I knew the handwriting before I read a word. The loops on the R’s. The way she crossed her sevens.

It was my mother’s.

“Where’d this come from?” I asked Tammy, holding it up across the counter. She was on the phone with a wire service, frowning.

“The bookkeeping people found it,” she said, covering the receiver. “Some standing order in the prepaid file. Your mom paid for it in cash in February of last year. Just deliver it, Nora. It’s paid.”

February of last year. Three weeks before her stroke.

The order said: One dozen yellow roses. Valentine’s Day. Hand-deliver. Do not ring and leave. Wait for her to read the card.

The address was on Cherry Street in Lancaster, forty minutes north. The name on the slip was Mrs. Diane Whitaker.

Paper-clipped to the slip was a small white florist’s card in a sealed envelope. On the outside, in Mom’s hand: Put this one in the roses. Do not open. —R.

I did my forty-one other stops. Then I put a dozen yellow roses in the passenger seat, made the arrangement myself in the back of the van in a mason jar, because Kayleigh’s were all in black boxes with satin ribbon and yellow roses in a black box looks like a funeral.

I tucked Mom’s card in with a plastic pick. And I drove to Lancaster.

Cherry Street

It was a little gray Cape Cod with a wreath of dried hydrangeas on the door and a good snow shovel leaning by the steps. A woman about my age opened the door. Silver hair cut short and neat. Navy scrubs under a cardigan, like she’d just come off a shift.

“Rosalie’s Flowers,” I said. “Happy Valentine’s Day. Are you Diane Whitaker?”

“I am. Oh, my goodness. Yellow.” She took the jar in both hands. “My husband doesn’t do yellow. He does red, from Kroger, on the way home.”

“I’m supposed to wait while you read the card,” I said. “I’m sorry. It’s on the order.”

She laughed and pulled out the little envelope. “Well, now I’m nervous.”

She opened it. She read it.

And her face changed, all at once, the way a window changes when a cloud goes over.

She read it again. Her hand started to shake so the roses trembled in the jar. Then she looked up at me — really looked, the way nobody had looked at me all day — and her voice came out about fifteen years old.

“Who sent these?”

“I don’t know, ma’am. It was a standing order.”

“This card says Deanna.” She held it out to me. “Nobody has called me Deanna since 1983. My own husband doesn’t know that name.” She took a step toward me. “How did you know my real name?”

I took the card from her fingers.

Deanna — You were never any trouble. Not one minute. The back room is still yours. Happy Valentine’s Day from the flower shop on Paint Street.

And I knew her.

The Back Room, 1983

It was the week before Valentine’s Day, 1983. I was eighteen, a senior at Chillicothe High, and I worked the shop after school.

I went into the back room for a sack of sphagnum moss and there was a girl sitting on the floor behind the cooler with her knees pulled up. Skinny, dirty-blonde hair, a jean jacket way too thin for February. She had a split lip and a garbage bag with her clothes in it.

She’d come in the alley door, which Mom always left propped for the delivery man. She’d been there, she told me later, since four in the morning.

“Please don’t call anybody,” she said. “Please. I’ll leave. I’ll leave right now.”

I went and got Mom.

Mom came back, wiping her hands on her apron, and looked at that girl for about five seconds. Then she pulled a moss sack over, sat down on it right on the concrete floor, and said, “I’m Rosalie. What do people call you, honey?”

“Dee-Dee,” the girl said. “Deanna.”

“How old are you, Deanna?”

“Sixteen.”

“Who did that to your mouth?”

She didn’t answer. She looked at the alley door.

“All right,” Mom said. “You don’t have to tell me today.”

Deanna stayed in our back room for nine days. Mom made a bed for her out of moss sacks and the old quilt from the van. I brought her my clothes, which were too big, and my school lunches, and my Walkman with batteries. She stripped thorns for us and swept up leaves, and she was the best worker we’d ever had, because she was terrified that if she stopped moving we’d send her away.

On the fourth night she told Mom about her stepfather. I wasn’t in the room. I only know that Mom came out the back door afterward and stood in the alley in the cold for a long time without her coat.

“Nora,” she said to me the next morning. “If anybody asks, we don’t have a girl in the back. We have deliveries. You understand?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

On the ninth day, a woman drove down from Dayton. A cousin of Mom’s from church, a social worker who knew people. She had papers. Mom had made a lot of phone calls from the pay phone at the Sohio station so nobody could trace them to the shop.

Deanna stood at the alley door with her garbage bag and a new coat Mom had bought her at the Elder-Beerman downtown.

“I’ll pay you back,” she said. “Every penny. I swear.”

“You were never any trouble,” Mom said. “Not one minute.”

Then the car pulled away. And we never heard from her again.

Deanna

“Nora,” Diane Whitaker said, standing on her porch in Lancaster. “You’re Nora. You gave me your Walkman.”

“You never sent it back,” I said, and we both started to laugh and cry at the same time.

She brought me into her kitchen and made coffee. Her husband, Phil, was at work. Her two grown sons were in Cincinnati and Akron. There were grandkids’ drawings on her refrigerator and a nursing school diploma in the hallway: Ohio State, 1990.

The cousin from Dayton had placed her with a foster family in Xenia. When she turned eighteen, she changed her name legally. Deanna Lusk became Diane, and later Diane Whitaker.

“I didn’t want him to ever find me,” she said. “So I didn’t let anybody from before find me either. Not even your mom. I wanted to. Every Valentine’s Day I thought about that back room. But I was so afraid that if I opened one door, all of them would open.”

“He’s dead,” she said after a moment. “My stepfather. Since 2002. I didn’t go to the funeral.”

“Nobody would blame you for that.”

“I’ve been a labor and delivery nurse for thirty-five years. I always thought — I don’t know. That I’d caught enough babies to pay it back.” She turned the yellow card over and over. “How did she even find me?”

I didn’t know. I said so.

“Then who’s going to tell me?”

I thought about Mom’s desk in the back office, the bottom drawer, the one with the key she kept on a ribbon around the coffee can.

“I think,” I said, “there’s a book.”

The Other Book

When I got back to Paint Street it was almost seven. Valentine’s Day was over. The cooler was nearly empty, the floor was covered in stems and torn cellophane, and Tammy was sitting at the counter with a calculator and a glass of wine from a box.

“You were gone four hours on one delivery,” she said.

“I know.”

I went straight past her into the back office. I took the little key off the ribbon on the coffee can. I opened the bottom drawer.

It was still there. A green clothbound ledger, the kind they don’t sell anymore, with ACCOUNTSstamped on the spine in gold. Mom started it in 1978. She used to call it the other book.

I brought it out and set it on the counter in front of my sister.

“What’s that?”

“Read it.”

She opened it. On the first page, in Mom’s blue ballpoint: March 1978. Funeral spray, Mrs. Lottie Hines, husband passed, no insurance. No charge. Do not tell her.

Under that: Corsage, Brenda Salyers, junior prom. Her mother can’t. Told her it was a returned order.

Page after page. Forty-seven years. Free funeral flowers for families who couldn’t pay. Hospital bouquets for nursing-home residents with nobody. Wedding flowers at cost for a girl from the children’s home. Groceries left on porches with a carnation on top. My handwriting started showing up in 1997, because Mom made me keep it after I came home. That’s why she always said I did the books. Not just one set. Both.

February 1983, Tammy read out loud, slowly. D.L., sixteen. Back room, nine days. Coat from Elder-Beerman, $38. Bus fare. Phone calls. Never any trouble.

Tammy turned the pages forward. She stopped near the end. Last January.

Found D.L. through the nursing board. Lancaster. Diane Whitaker now. Married, two boys. A nurse. Standing order, yellow roses, Valentine’s. Nora delivers it.

“Nora delivers it,” Tammy said. “She wrote that a year ago. Before the stroke. Before the — before anything.”

“She wasn’t thinking about the will, Tammy. She just knew I’d be the one on the van on Valentine’s Day. Ronnie always took Mondays off.”

But Tammy wasn’t listening anymore. She’d turned back. She’d found a page from the fall of 2009, and she’d put her hand flat on it like she could hold it down.

2009

I knew what was on that page. I’d written it myself.

Oct. 2009. T.’s mortgage, Lake White. Three months, $4,100. From shop account. Nora’s salary deferred. Do not tell T.

That fall, Tammy’s husband, Rick, had walked out, and the boat business went with him. She’d been about to lose the house with Kayleigh in middle school. And then, three months in a row, the bank had received a cashier’s check from an anonymous family friend.

“You,” Tammy said. “It was you and Mom.”

“It was the shop.”

“It was your paycheck, Nora. It says right here. Nora’s salary deferred.“ She looked up at me, and her face had gone completely to pieces. “I told everybody at church God sent that money. I told Kayleigh it was a miracle.”

“Well,” I said. “Maybe it was. A small one.”

She put her face in her hands at the counter, there among the stems and the cellophane, and cried the way she used to cry when she was little and fell off the porch steps.

When she could talk, she said something I didn’t expect.

“The shop’s broke, Nora.”

“What?”

“The bookkeeping service. They told me in November. We’re three months behind on the building insurance. The new cooler Kayleigh wanted is on a credit card. I put you on the van because I couldn’t afford to pay you to do the books and I couldn’t stand to have you sitting at that bench looking at me knowing I was ruining it.” She wiped her face with the back of her wrist. “Mom said you had the hands and I had the mouth. My whole life, that’s what I was. The mouth. I thought if I could just run it without you, for one year, I’d be — I don’t know. Something.”

I looked at my little sister, fifty-four years old, with her mascara running and a box of wine at her elbow.

“Tammy,” I said. “You’re in the book. That’s something.”

What Diane Did

On the Saturday after Valentine’s, Diane Whitaker walked into Rosalie’s Flowers with her husband, Phil, behind her, carrying a cardboard box.

She’d told him everything that week. All of it. Deanna, the back room, the stepfather. Phil was a big, quiet man who worked for the gas company, and he kept one hand on her back the whole time she was in the shop, the way you steady a ladder.

In the box was a Walkman. Not mine — a new old one she’d found online, with the orange foam headphones.

“Thirty-eight dollars,” she said, and put an envelope on the counter. “For the coat. Plus forty-three years of interest.”

Tammy opened the envelope. It was a check for five thousand dollars.

“We can’t take this,” Tammy said.

“It’s not for you,” Diane said. “It’s for the other book.”

Then she told us she’d already been on the phone with the hospital in Lancaster, and the labor and delivery nurses wanted to start a standing order. Every baby born to a mother with no one in the waiting room would get a little bud vase from Rosalie’s. The hospital would pay. Diane would deliver the first ones herself.

Phil cleared his throat. “And I know a guy who does roofs,” he said, looking up at the water stain over the cooler. “He owes me.”

That spring, word got around Chillicothe the way it does. Somebody posted about the ledger on the Ross County community page — not us, I promise — and for three weeks people lined up out the door on Paint Street. Women came in to tell us their mother’s funeral flowers had been free in 1986 and they’d never known why. A man brought in a prom picture from 1991. Brenda Salyers came in and ordered flowers for her own granddaughter’s wedding and paid double.

We caught up on the insurance in April.

The Bench

Tammy didn’t give me the shop. I didn’t ask her to. A will is a will.

But in March, on the anniversary of Mom’s death, she came in early with two coffees and a manila folder and set them on the workbench.

It was a partnership agreement Walt Garrison had drawn up. Fifty-fifty. Tammy had already signed it.

“You do the books,” she said. “Both of them. And design. Kayleigh’s going to do the weddings and the internet stuff, because she’s actually good at it, and you’re going to teach her how to make a casket spray that doesn’t look like a hay bale.”

“And you?”

“I’ve got the mouth,” she said. “I’ll work the counter. And drive the van on Mondays.”

I signed it. She cried again. I told her she was going to dehydrate.

Kayleigh, for what it’s worth, turned out to have good hands too. She just needed someone to stand beside her at the bench and say, Don’t guess. Look at the stem. The stem will tell you.Which is what Mom used to say to me.

The Cold Room

Valentine’s Day came around again this year. Forty-nine deliveries. The van heater still only works on high.

At six in the morning, before the phones started, Tammy and I stood in the cold room together. It’s the walk-in cooler in back, thirty-six degrees, where the roses wait in their tall white buckets in rows, red and pink and white, and the air smells green and wet and sharp.

There’s an upturned five-gallon bucket in the corner Mom used to sit on to strip stems. Tammy turned it right side up and set the green ledger on top of it.

Our breath fogged in front of us. Tammy held the pen.

She opened to a fresh page and wrote the date in her big loopy handwriting, which, I noticed for the first time, looks a lot like Mom’s.

Feb. 14. One dozen yellow roses. Lancaster. Standing order.

Then she held the pen out to me.

I took it in my cold fingers and wrote the last line underneath, the way Mom would have.

Nora delivers it.

Behind us, in the bucket closest to the door, a dozen yellow roses stood waiting with a small white card tucked in among them, and the condensation ran slowly down the cold glass of the door.

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