June’s Flowers

   She found peace in the rhythm of the sound and movement of the train, the gentle rocking soothing the vibrations of her body and the whine of the rails forcing the voices in her mind to focus on the moment and not tell her how badly she was doing. Back when they had had two vehicles, before Frank sold the one that shot up in value unexpectedly, mainly as it had so few miles on it as it was the one she drove, she would run it through automatic car washes on occasion, imagining being under the sea as the jets roared against the glass and the brushes as sea monsters trying to get in, but repelled by the cocoon in which she floated gently through the depths. 

He had come home early from work one day, before the car had fully dried, and calmly explained to her how a five-dollar trip though the ocean affected their budget and extracted a promise that she would only wash the car in the driveway from here on out. When she unwound the hose the next spring to wash off the night’s pollen and filled the bucket with soap and water, she laid the still-running hose on the ground as she began work on the hood with the soapy sponge, he burst from the front door, calling out to her as he race-walked to turn off the spigot. “You’re wasting water! Don’t just let it run while you’re washing.” He slowed his pace, but it was still deliberate as he approached her with hand out. “Here. Give it to me. I’ll do it. You can watch and you’ll know what to do next time.” 

She handed off the sponge and stood in front of the car until he asked her to turn the water on and lectured on how to properly rinse the car for maximum efficiency. “You start at the top, in the middle of the roof. See, there’s a high spot up there. Then, you move the water in circles, forcing it off all the edges and not just the side. This maximizes the area of run-off and it gets more of the soap off as it runs down. Why let gravity off the hook, when it can do part of the job for you?” 

He never sounded mad when he got to this stage of the explantation. In fact, he never sounded mad to her as she had come to believe him when he told her so. “I am not mad, Junie. I am just frustrated that we’ve gone over this before and I have to explain it all again, It’s not very efficient, is it?” Whatever they had gone over before, she would agree with him and tell him she’d do better next time.

Frank reached down and rummaged through the Macy’s bag that sat between them on the floor of the train and June pulled her legs tighter together and her shoulders shrunk into the space under the seat. He found what he wanted and pulled the foil packet up to his face, taking a deep breath. “This is how you know you’re alive,” he said and the volume of his voice woke the other other voices in her mind and she got even smaller in the space he and they expanded into.

The young woman sitting across from them wrinkled her nose as the smell of tinned fish and bright, red onions wafted her way. June gave her a tight-lipped smile with a little shrug of sympathy, but the woman lowered her nose to her shoulder, sniffing the fragrance June had deemed pleasant, if a bit strong, when she had gotten on at the last stop and walked past Frank and her to her seat.

They hadn’t been to Macy’s that day, or on any day that she could reliably associate with a date that included more than the season of a particular year. The bag was the by-product of a trip a few years before to look at the registry for Amanda, one of their nieces, where Frank picked out the second and third cheapest options to take to the wedding. He had turned down the cheerful offer of gift wrapping by the young man at the register, relying on June to make the gift into a presentation that would eclipse the butter dish and salt and pepper set within. In a bonus for Frank, which he added as a positive in the columns of constant budgeting running through his mind, having June take care of it saved him having to pay a tip on what was advertised as a free service. He wouldn’t have tipped anyway and would have made a joke about calling the FTC over false advertising, but the ledger would have been noted and the dollar he imagined as the appropriate gratuity was saved for something more important. When delivery of the gift was offered, he scoffed again, “We’ll take it ourselves. Got to make sure we get credit for it,” with an attempt at a conspiratorial grin. 

At the wedding, he fended off the bride’s appointed consigliare who tried to take the package to place it on the table with the others and put it there himself, shifting other gifts down the cascade of ivory packaging and placing the box up high before stepping back, clearing the view and accepting the compliments of those who walked by commenting on the beauty of the wrapping. “Nothing but the best for Amanda, right” he replied with a beaming smile, while June stood a few feet away. She thought of the lace of her own bridal veil which she had trimmed from the end to wrap over the plain wrapping of the gift, weaving daisies from the yard into the lattice of the material. Her veil’s bright whiteness had faded over the years as it received sun from windows in their bedroom, striking it as it hung from the little post protruding from the top of the mirror on the dresser, before she packed it away one day into a shoebox that lived on the shelf in her closet which was was only opened once or twice a year as she looked for some memory she had placed there, so the fading was slowed, but it never stopped. 

When the bridal couple got back from their honeymoon, the flowers had dried and started to wither. “Wow, I bet there’s something good in here,” the groom said as he picked it up and gave it a little shake. 

“Wanna bet,” Amanda replied. “That’s from Uncle Frank. I bet it's the butter dish from the set we picked out. Aunt June is just really good at wrapping things.” She took the package from his hands and held it for a moment. “We’d get so excited as kids whenever we’d see one of her presents until we figured out that Uncle Frank was the one buying them and they were always the cheapest things and were usually for kids a lot younger than us, but she would always put something special for us on the package.” She instinctively reached for her neck and her fingers found the St. Christopher hanging there. It had been tied on a ribbon wrapped around floral paper that had recently been the padding in a box for a used crock-pot sold at a church bazaar. The crock-pot had a green, $5 tag and June handed the bill over without any attempt to haggle, but the lady from the church who took it gave her $3 in change and said, “tell him you wore me down.”

While June used the pot every week on Tuesdays for corned beef and cabbage and Sundays for roast and potatoes, she used the box as ground cover that spring and saved the paper for later, ironing it smooth and keeping it carefully under the  bed in the spare room until she had used it for Amanda’s thirteenth birthday, wrapping up the Nancy Drew hardcovers Frank had found for a nickel each at one of the garage sales he haunted on Saturdays, bargaining the sleepy-eyed homeowner down from a dime as they set up in the pre-dawn dark, thirty minutes before the start time scrawled on the sign at the corner of the cross-street. 

June took a ribbon she’d won for a pie at the State Fair the year before she and Frank married and cut it into strips, tying the ends in butterfly bows until it was long enough to run the length and width of the box holding the books, looping the Saint’s medal under the larger bow she created on the top so it would peak out. “It’s for your travels, dear, to keep you safe,” she told Amanda who’d been nervous about an upcoming school trip to France in the summer with her eighth-grade class and she had worn it on a silver chain on that trip and every trip since, including the honeymoon, holding it as the planes took off and landed.

Amanda took the package and inspected it, making a note to ask where the lace had come from. The flowers were from June’s yard. Amanda helped plant them years before and took delight every time she had driven past since and seen them emerging in the first warmth of spring. Her bridal bouquet had been primarily daisies which had caused a tense-faced discussion with her mother who thought daisies too common for the event, but Amanda had held firm, acquiescing to a secondary bouquet of tropical flowers handed to her by her mother for the photos of the wedding couple with their respective parents. Her mother never said anything overtly negative about June, who was her husband’s younger sister, but her comments over the years had always contained an element of “bless her heart” without a hint of actual blessing. 

Amanda’s father adored his sister and remained friendly with Frank for her sake, but made comments to him about his purchasing habits that would have raised ire in the heart of a more perceptive man. Frank, though, took every comment as a validation or compliment and deflected every one of them back, gushing about the great deal he had gotten. He had tried to argue back at Frank at first and for a few years afterwards, but his love for June and the weariness of trying to make points against a brick wall wore him down and he finally stopped pushing back. Frank took the non-responses as agreement and his and June’’s conversations were peppered with “Even your brother agrees with me,” from then on out.

Amanda turned the package over, looking more closely, not expecting to find anything extra tied up in the bows as the tokens had started their absence years ago, as had June’s presence at family events. She still came, but seemed to get smaller with each occasion, appearing quietly, walking in a few steps behind Frank and gently hugging a few who came up to her before heading to the kitchen and futzing about, offering help over the mild objections of the hostess while Frank was glad-handing around the main room or front porch, commenting on all the vehicles parked outside, digging at the dependability of the brands and the wasteful costs expended by the other uncles who hadn’t checked out the used-car issue of Consumer Reports from the library as he had to get the “best deal in town.”

“Frank, it's amazing how you’re the one that always gets the best deal,” Amanda’s dad said in one of his last dig attempts.

“Well, I pay attention, unlike most people.” Everyone knew the next line that was coming and said it in unison. “It doesn’t cost anything to pay attention,” causing him to beam and raise his glass in a toast to himself. 

Today, they  were on the way to a concert in Piedmont Park that he had suggested the week before. “That’d be nice,” she replied when he’d told her of his plan.  

“Aren’t you excited?”
“It’ll be nice. I hope the weather is good for it.”

He huffed a bit at her flat responses. “You are always bugging me about doing more things and here I go, finding something nice for us to do and you don’t act like you want to even go.”

“No, I do want to go and it’ll be nice. Thank you for thinking of it.”

That mollified him a bit and he moved on to describing the event: some young artist that had enough backing to pay for their up-and-coming status by putting on a free show in the park on a Saturday afternoon. As he told her what a great deal it was to be able to see such a promising artist for free, she thought that, fifteen years ago, she would have been excited if he had planned this kind of date, but she had stopped asking to him ten years ago and stopped even hoping after two more, so there wasn’t much of a reservoir from which to pull enthusiasm for his effort.

“Did you hear me?” That snapped her back to the moment.

“I’m sorry, dear, I was thinking about the concert. What did you say/”

“I said it’ll be $200 a ticket to see her soon. You can tell all your friends that you ‘knew her when she was just starting’ when they’re spending the big bucks to see her in a few years. That’ll show them.”

She didn’t ask what exactly that would show them and she didn’t know who “them” was anymore. Her friends had drifted away over the years, tiring of asking her to join them on their trips and special occasions and having her make excuses why she couldn’t. They had tried to kidnap her once by stopping by, wearing wide-brimmed, floppy hats and thick-framed sunglasses, informing her they were all taking an impromptu trip to the beach and she was going to come with them. She was almost convinced by their enthusiasm and their kindness made her tear up, but on the walk to her bedroom to pack, she passed through the kitchen and saw the crockpot on the counter. Vapor was condensing and dropping from the underside of the lid and the thought of him walking through the door and finding a note and explicit instructions on how to finish the meal exhausted her immediately and she froze as her friends collided behind her in a slow-motion traffic jam in the middle of her kitchen. They tried to get her back on the idea as she explained how she couldn’t go today and that she wished she’d had more notice and that “next time’ she would make sure to set everything up so she could definitely make that trip. 

Next time never happened and the best she could do were afternoons downtown on occasion when Frank was away at a work conference. His job had to let him attend at least one annually even though he made a bad impression on a few of their customers over the years, but the amount of waste he found in their operations during reviews and his suggestions for eliminating it kept the business for them despite his personality. His value warranted more out-of-town excursions, but he and the company seemed content with one or two. With that, he could accumulate enough swag at the conference and gather enough receipts, from his table and those left behind on others, to massage his taxes at the end of the year to make it a net positive. More trips wouldn’t help the math without adding fear of being caught, so he didn’t complain once they established the yearly routine

On those weekends, she’d shyly call one or two of her friends and inquire if they were free for a movie and cocktail. Some didn’t answer. Some gave polite, but clear, “nos,” but a few still held out hope and would join her, gently asking if she was ok and if there was anything they could do for her while she would sit and sip on her drink with the hint of a smile. “I’m fine,” she would say. “He’s a good man and works hard. He just wants to make sure we have enough when he retires and it’s so tough when I can’t contribute.” Her friends had almost stopped listing her contributions as they couldn’t see it had any positive effect on June, so they were reduced to patting her hand gently and changing the subject.

At those lunches, she actually would feel a spark and memories of her previous life would almost inspire action. A plan would start to formulate of applying for jobs or researching how to turn her decorative eye into income, but her mind would reset as soon as she’d get home and check all the doors and windows before changing for bed. She would turn the thermostat up or down three degrees depending on the season, a change which would horrify Frank as he calculated the cost. He questioned her after one of his trips when the bill was $4 higher than it had been the previous August. “This doesn’t make sense. I checked the almanac and the average temperature last August was two degrees hotter than this year. How did we use more power?”

“Oh, Frank. You know I don’t understand that stuff. Do you need to change the filter or something?’ This was a sore spot as he took out the filter every month, checked it closely for tears, and, if it passed inspection, spend thirty minutes with it in the yard, spraying vinegar and water over it and using a medium-bristle brush to work out as much dust as he could before he would wave it in the air a few times and then leave it in the sun to dry for an hour. He’d go out and bring it back in with a wave of it above his head. “Saved $6.00 again. Looks like we’ll have to replace it four times this year because I think they’re making them out of inferior materials. You know they aren’t going to cut the cost to us though. That’s $48.00 to the top of the ledger though.”

After she asked him about it, he didn’t even look at the filter before driving straight to the hardware store to buy a new one and walked with it into the house without the triumphant wave, silently replacing it while muttering about the cheapskates that ran the filter supply company. She breathed a sigh of relief at the success of her ruse, but worried enough that she didn’t change the thermostat on his next three trips, only starting again when he left during a record heat wave and wouldn’t have suspicion over a higher bill, though he complained about the crooks at the electric company as he wrote out the check the next month at the kitchen table in the Friday night ritual of paying bills on the eve of the Saturday household budget discussion at the same table Saturday mornings.  

On the train, the smell of the sandwich brought her thoughts to the present. Frank had made sardine sandwiches with red onion and pickle for their day in the park. He went through stages of eating the same meals for breakfast and lunch for months at a time after finding a deal on a staple which he had stocked up on or reading an article with a title such as “Eating Healthy on a Budget.” A sale of .49 a can and an article detailing the high omegas and low mercury of sardines had prodded him into buying a hundred units of the fish which he mixed into his scrambled eggs in the morning and  made into the smelly sandwiches for lunch during the week. 

He had made one for her for the trip to the concert, not asking and not knowing she had decided not to eat it as soon as she saw him make a second and place it into the bag. As she sat there and watched the other woman continue to breathe into her collar though, she caught a glimpse of herself in the window over the woman’s other shoulder. Her hair had started to grey years before in a uniform march down the length, like a slow-moving burn of a lawn after the thatch had accumulated. She had considered coloring it, but was tired of the  budget discussion it would entail before it even started, so she let it advance unabated, the shiny black portion shrinking year by year as she shrunk from her friends and family events and everything else.

Her gaze in that direction caused the woman to look at her, first in a quick glance and then a stare, her nose wrinkling further up her face. The look of disgust lit a small fire in June’s stomach and she remembered her mother telling her father many times, “tell me not to do it and see what happens.” Maybe if she had lived to see her marry Frank, she would have been able to stoke that fire for her, but she had died when June was away at college her sophomore year and she had met Frank the next semester. He had loved her hair, which was anthracite at the time and reflected purples and blues in any light available and she could recall the gentle strokes of his hand as they were watching TV in the common area of his dorm so long ago. 

When the first gray patch appeared on her crown a few years after they married, he told her, “It’s turning to ash. You are burning too bright, my dear.” It was the sweetest thing he had ever said to her, but as the years passed, she realized it was an admonishment and not a compliment and it continued to burn slowly down, now leaving the last two inches of life that still shone purple occasionally in the golden hour.

The woman continued to stare and June returned the energy as she reached into the bag, feeling around the sunscreen and water bottles until her fingers found the aluminum foil of the second sandwich. Her eyes never left the woman as she unwrapped it slowly and took a bite. Even as the tears started to fall, which she first thought was due to the acridness of the onions, she chewed slowly and watched the woman’s face as it screwed up even tighter. When she finally looked away, June felt a pang of satisfaction, an unfamiliar feeling that was sharp in her abdomen and she looked down at the sandwich for a moment before she looked back up and noticed another woman whose gaze was fixed on her. This one was smiling though and June didn’t recognize her until she saw she was eating a sandwich as well, her face framed by beautiful hair that glimmered a bit at its dark ends, but seemed to be burning brighter in the glass opposite her with every moment.