The Homecoming (Thunder Point #6)(24)

Damn the luck, Grace thought as she saw her customer. It was old Barney Wilcox. He came by every week or so, poked around at the flowers, made conversation, left after spending a couple of bucks on a single flower for his wife of fifty-two years. He was there as much out of boredom as affection for his bride.

Grace took the bull by the horns. “Barney, so nice to see you. Listen, I’m rushing to meet a deadline and don’t have much time. Can I fix you up with a beautiful hydrangea stem in a vase for about three dollars?”

“That would be nice, I suppose,” he said. “But I—”

Grace dashed to the back room, plucked a stem out of her arrangement, plopped it in a slim vase, tied a length of white ribbon around it and sped out to her customer.

“Think that will make Mrs. Wilcox happy today?”

“I think so. Thanks,” he said.

“Three even,” she said. He paid her and she rushed back into the workroom. “Okay, I think I left you somewhere around ‘meaningless nudity,’” Grace said.

“I didn’t realize he didn’t mean any of it,” Iris said. “I was so inexperienced. I was a virgin. I figured it out when he clearly didn’t remember it. By the time I got my clothes buttoned, he’d passed out. And when he asked me if I wasn’t making too big a deal out of that prom thing I knew—he had no idea. He’d blacked out.”

“Oh, Iris. That’s been hurting you all this time?”

“I don’t know what hurt me more, his forgetting or the fact that I let it happen. But a couple of weeks ago he was cutting my grass on Saturday morning and I stormed outside to tell him to go away because I was sleeping. Sometimes I get a little crabby when someone wakes me up before I’m ready,” she said. “And he said exactly the same thing that he said that night in the flower van. ‘Come on, Iris. I need you.’ And I totally lost control. I decked him.”

Grace’s mouth fell open. “As in hit?” she whispered.

Iris nodded. Her chin quivered.

“You hit a police officer?”

She nodded again. “Knocked him flat. A felony. Maybe.”

The bell jingled. Grace looked at the ceiling of her little flower shop. “Am I being punished for something?” she said. She dashed into the store.

“Jeremy,” she said. She sighed. Another infrequent customer who never bought much and loved to talk. Jeremy was one of the young guys from down at the marina, so in love with his pretty little wife but without much to spend. She’d been fixing him up with single blooms for a long time. “How are you?” she asked.

He puffed up a little. “I guess you could say I’m perfect. Janie had the baby! A boy! Just like we thought! And wow, is he big—over nine pounds, twenty-one inches, and we sat up through the night before he decided to come. His feet are so big they’re like skis. I was there the whole—”

“I have just the thing,” Grace said. She ran back to the workroom. She looked at her stash of accessories, grabbed a pair of blue baby shoes, pulled a length of blue ribbon from the ribbon dispenser, stuck the shoes in the arrangement she’d been working on, tied the ribbon around the vase in a nice bow, filled the vase half-full with water and ran it back into the shop. “Here you go, with my sincere congratulations!”

“Wow, that’s pretty big. I don’t know if I can—”

“From me to you,” she said. “To celebrate the birth of your son!”

“You can’t believe how hard that labor was and how much I really had to help,” he said, holding the arrangement in the crook of his arm. “And the doctor said—”

“I can’t wait to hear all about it, Jeremy! Please promise to come back and tell me all the details when we both have more time. I’m in a rush and I know you want to get those flowers to your lovely wife.” She walked around her counter, led him to the door, tried not to push him out too zealously, and flipped the Open sign to Closed. She locked the door and ran back to the workroom. “Okay, when I left you, you had just committed a felony. And I closed the shop.”

“You closed?”

“I’m not opening that door again until I know everything! Did you knock him out?”

“No. But it sure surprised him. He had no idea why I’d do that.”

A big spider suddenly appeared on the worktable, probably having hitched a ride in a flower shipment. Grace gasped and nearly fell over her stool trying to get away from it. Iris made a fist and slammed it on the spider without hesitating. She wiped her fist on her skirt.

“So I had to tell him,” Iris said.

Grace reached for a paper towel to wipe up the squished spider. “Apparently you’re a very physical person,” she said, making a face at the mess.

“Didn’t anyone ever tell you—you can’t be in the flower business if you’re squeamish or scared of bugs?”

“I’m fine with bugs. I just don’t like them here. So you told him,” Grace said.

“And just as I always suspected, he had no memory of it at all. He had no idea. He was basically doing it in his sleep. I could have been any woman.”

“Yeah, I knew that about men. Did he say he was sorry?”

“Of course. He was devastated. He was worried that he’d hurt me, which he had not. At least not until he ignored me and forgot about me and about it. He thought I was mad about the prom and he got mad right back, saying it was stupid and melodramatic, that I knew he had a girlfriend and they’d just had a fight and... Well, you know all that.”