Chapter 8 - THE FLOWERS I CHOSE MYSELF
The following spring, Sophie had a school presentation on the solar system.
She had rebuilt the model Marcus once helped her carry to class.
The new Saturn was larger than the old one. Its rings were slightly uneven because Sophie insisted on cutting them herself.
We placed it carefully in the backseat of my car.
Before closing the door, she looked toward the sidewalk.
“Is Dad allowed to come?”
“He can attend public school events if the coordinator approves and he arranges transportation through his brother.”
“Will he?”
“I don’t know.”
Marcus had been transferred to a federal facility several hours away. The sentence allowed no school visits, but Sophie still asked questions in the present tense.
Her father remained alive.
That made the grief more complicated.
“He sent another letter,” she said.
“I know.”
The letter had arrived through her therapist.
Marcus had written twelve pages.
The therapist read it first and removed several sections that blamed me, Lena, the company, and the economy.
What remained was three pages.
An apology.
Or the closest thing Marcus could offer without fully surrendering the story he told about himself.
“Do I have to answer?” Sophie asked.
“No.”
“Did you answer his?”
Marcus had written to me once.
He said prison had given him time to understand how much he had lost.
He asked whether I ever thought of the early years.
Before the money.
Before Lena.
Before he became, in his words, “someone he no longer recognized.”
I had not responded.
“I don’t know what I would say,” I told Sophie.
She considered that.
“Maybe nothing is an answer.”
“Sometimes.”
We drove to school.
Sophie carried the sun. I carried the box containing the planets.
Inside the auditorium, parents arranged themselves in folding chairs. Teachers tested the microphone. Students hurried behind a curtain painted with stars.
One seat beside me remained empty.
Sophie had not asked me to reserve it.
Still, each time the doors opened, her eyes moved toward them.
Marcus did not appear.
He could not.
The presentation began.
Sophie stood beneath stage lights and explained how gravity held the planets in orbit without making them collide.
Her voice shook during the first sentence.
By the third, it steadied.
Afterward, we stopped at a flower shop on Broadway.
The refrigerator case contained roses, tulips, hydrangeas, and white peonies.
For years, the sight of them had brought back the taxi.
Lena’s radiant face.
The photograph on her phone.
Marcus standing in a kitchen that belonged to neither of us.
Sophie pointed toward the peonies.
“Those are pretty.”
“They are.”
“Do you hate them?”
The question surprised me.
“No.”
“Dad used to buy them.”
“I know.”
“Then why don’t we?”
I looked at the white petals.
Marcus had not invented them.
He had only attached his lies to them.
“I suppose I forgot they could belong to anyone else.”
Sophie chose six stems.
At home, she placed them in a glass pitcher because we had broken the last vase during the move.
The flowers stood in the center of our small kitchen table.
Beside them rested Marcus’s unopened letter.
Sophie touched the envelope.
“Not today,” she said.
She carried Saturn into her bedroom and left the letter where it was.
That evening, I trimmed the flower stems and changed the water.
I did not move the envelope.
I did not throw it away.
Outside, rain began tapping against the apartment windows.
Softer than the storm that had followed me into the taxi.
Sophie came into the kitchen wearing pajamas and stood beside me.
“Maybe I’ll read it when I’m older,” she said.
“Maybe.”
“Do you think he’ll still be waiting?”
I looked at the letter beneath the white flowers.
“I don’t know.”
May you like
She nodded as though uncertainty was no longer something that frightened her.
Then she switched off the kitchen light, leaving the envelope unopened and the peonies glowing faintly in the rain-darkened room.
