WHEN MY GIRLS WERE GROWING UP I BELIEVED THEM to be the beating heart of the world, the very center of the universe. Unfortunately, they knew I believed this and so they came to believe it themselves. As far as they were concerned I was their mother, pure and simple. I thought it would be different after they were grown, but even when Sandy had children and Nora took on her huge career, they still never thought of me as the same sort of living organism that they were. They were in their thirties now, competent women in every way, but if we were all in the kitchen together, they would read the newspaper while I chopped the tomatoes for their salads. They painted their nails while I set the table. I knew I was to blame for this, something I had done had made them this way, but as far as I could tell, the horse was gone and shutting the barn door was nothing more than a gesture.
So they had made me promise and swear and do everything short of stick a needle in my eye to keep me from seeing Romeo again. They could not imagine that I wouldn’t do what they wanted me to do, as that was the nature of our relationship. And maybe they were right. We were talking about Cacciamanis, after all. In life we are defined by what we hate as much as we are by what we love, and maybe it would be bad to give up all that definition. Maybe without the Cacciamanis to hate, the Rosemans would simply be unable to carry on. Maybe the hate was our skeletal system, the very thing that allowed us to walk upright, and without it we would be nothing more than a lump of skin and muscle on the floor. I could hate him again, I was sure of it, even though I had been thinking of him all morning in distinctly unhateful ways. Sixty years of hate versus one plate of decent spaghetti and a long walk? No contest.
Sandy had dropped out of college in the beginning of her junior year. She was bored with the work and happily in love with a fellow whose name was also Sandy. They married and became Sandy and Sandy Anderson, believing the novelty of a shared name would be enough to sustain their relationship. They were wrong. Now Sandy the husband lived in Maui, where he taught surfing, got stoned, and forgot to pay his child support, and Sandy the wife went to school three nights a week in hopes of becoming a licensed practical nurse. During the day she helped me out at the flower shop and I paid her a salary I could not afford in hopes of giving her a sense of independence. I was in all ways a flexible employer, and when she came in she was a good worker. She was charming to the customers and had a nice way with flowers. Her arrangements were pretty and cheerful, just like the kind my mother used to put together. (Mort’s flowers, on the other hand, had aspired to look as much like the FTD promos as possible. They appeared to be two-dimensional even as they were sitting in front of you.) Sandy was also very good about deliveries. She never dawdled in the heat and she had a brilliant sense of direction, which she certainly did not inherit from me. The day after my dinner with Romeo, Sandy and I went in early to get the morning’s deliveries ready and then packed them into my car, which had a more reliable engine than hers.
Sandy looked over the delivery sheet. “Well, at least everything is nice and close today. I shouldn’t be gone long at all.”
I told her to be careful. I always worried about her knocking on strange doors. I stood on the sidewalk and waved as she pulled away. In the days of my parents, and later under the administration of Mort, we had a white Ford van with the name ROSEMAN’S painted on the side along with a big bouquet of roses. I loved that van. It made me feel successful. But when times started getting tight, the van was the first thing to go. The insurance alone was eating me alive.
I liked being alone before the store opened, and I took my time sweeping up and wiping down the glass door. I moved the bucket of stargazer lilies out to the sidewalk. It was a cool day and we needed to sell them soon if they were going to have any petals left on them. I took out the little chalkboard and wrote $10.00 a bunch. Then I thought better of it, wiped the board off with my sleeve and marked them down to eight dollars.
The phone rang, some guy wanting to send an apology bouquet. “I’ve been bad,” he told me.
“I understand.” He said he wanted to spend seventy-five dollars, not including tax and delivery, so I figured he had been really bad. “What do you want to say on the card?”
The line was quiet for a while. “Don’t know. What would you want to hear?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “You haven’t done anything to me.”
“But what do other guys say? I’m no good at this.”
“The basics are usually safe: ‘I love you.’ ‘I’m sorry.’ ”
“I like that. Write that down.”
“And her name?”
“Catherine.”
“Catherine with a C or a K?”
Again there was quiet. “No idea.”
I sighed and wrote it out with a K. “If it’s wrong, I’ll tell her it was my fault.”
“That’s brilliant,” the man said. “I only wish I could blame the rest of it on you, too.” He gave me his credit-card number and I wrote it down.
I pinned Katherine’s order to the corkboard and then went into the cooler and started changing the water and clipping back the stems so that everybody would get a better chance at life. For all the years I’d been in the store, I’d never gotten tired of the flowers. I’d gotten tired of the bills and the credit-card companies and the bad checks. I’d gotten tired of people who bring their bouquets back five days later for a refund because they died. But the flowers themselves still amazed me. I will always be moved by the sight of a hundred pots of hydrangeas crowding the floor on Mother’s Day weekend or the row upon row of trembling orchid corsages when the proms roll around. I was in the business of happiness. There were funerals, of course, hospital stays, but even then the role of the flowers was to cheer. Mostly it was about love. Flowers provide a means of expression for people who don’t know what to say. Hand the person you love a bundle of flaming poppies, their twisted stems heading in every direction, their petals waving out like windblown flags. They look so promising, so much like life. They’ll get the message.
We weren’t open yet, but I had unlocked the door to put the lilies outside. I was in the back, working my knife across a bunch of rose stems, when I heard the bell chime. I wiped my wet hands on my jeans and went out to the front. There was a time I would have sent whoever it was away, told them I wasn’t open yet, but these were different times: If I’m in the store, I’m open.
There between a display of potted chrysanthemums and a bucket of terribly expensive freesias stood Romeo Cacciamani.
“You’ve got a real nice store,” he said, checking out the inventory. “You know, I’ve never actually been in here before. My parents used to tell me the Rosemans sold voodoo stuff, dried bats, eye of newt. Do you have any eye of newt?”
What I thought: Why am I wearing this disgusting shirt of Mort’s?
What I thought next: How long ago did Sandy leave?
What I said: No newts.
He nodded. “You’ve never been in Romeo’s, have you?”
Romeo’s was the name of his store, named for him by his parents, a tribute to their one and only child. It was a romantic name, of course, a flower-giving sort of name. It also drove my parents insane because they came before us in the phone book. At one point my father actually considered changing the name of our store to A. Roseman’s.
“I’ve never darkened your door.” I was so glad to see him you would have thought he was dropping off my lottery check. How could I be that glad?
He knelt down beside some sweet peas I had just gotten in and began to fluff them out a little. I was thankful he was focusing on the sweet peas, which were hard to come by, reasonably priced and dazzling in their freshness. If he had paid close attention to the stargazers, I would have killed myself. “I think you’d brighten the place up.” He did not look in my direction at all, and it would have been reasonable to assume he was talking about the flowers.
“So maybe someday I’ll see your store.” What was he doing here, exactly? Out at the Mount Alburn cemetery, my father was doing loops in his grave. Cacciamani hands on our stalks. Besides, if Sandy was to walk in the door there would be a meltdown to rival anything in Chernobyl.
“Julie Roseman,” he said to the flowers. He said my name exactly the way he had in the dream when he was standing underneath my window, and it caused my heart to stop for one beat and then start itself up again from memory. “I had a very nice time last night.”
“I did, too,” I said. “Until I got home.”
Then he looked up at me. “You didn’t tell them, did you?”
“I thought it was funny. I don’t know what I was thinking. It was a huge mistake.”
Romeo shook his head. “I told everybody I went to a movie by myself. I do that sometimes.”
“A movie. I wish I’d thought of that. How many do you have at home?”
“Well, there’s me, and there’s my mom. Plummy’s living at home because I am barely making tuition at B.C., and room and board is just not a possibility. Then Alan, he’s my youngest son, he’s thirty-two, he got laid off last year. He had a really good computer job and then nothing, so now he’s home with his wife, Theresa, and their three kids, Tommy and Patsy and Babe. They’ve got a dog, too. Junior. Do you count the dog?”
“I do.”
“Okay, so there’s nine of us. I’ve got a duplex, but it all gets mixed up as to who is living where.”
“Well, you’re making me feel better about my own life.”
“One daughter, two kids.” He shook his head. “You have privacy. I don’t want to hear any complaints out of you.”
“You were smart not to tell them. Privacy is having the good sense not to tell. But my God, dinner. You’d think we’d committed a crime.”
“Remember how you felt when you found out Tony and Sandy had dinner?”
“Yeah, but they were kids. It’s a little different.” I looked at my watch. I didn’t want to be rude, but even more than that, I didn’t want to be caught. “Listen, I don’t mean to rush you, but Sandy is going to be back here any minute and I’m just not up for a repeat performance. I know that’s terrible. Everyone should be over this dreaded curse by now, but they aren’t, so …” I shrugged. He was still down there with the sweet peas and I didn’t know what else to say.
“So why did I come?”
“We might need to jump ahead to that point, yes.”
“I had a really nice time at dinner last night.”
“Really nice,” I said. I could feel the sweat coming up under my arms, and I swear to God it was the sweat of fear, Sandy looking for a parking space, Sandy locking the car.
“I haven’t done this in such a long time. I was nineteen when Camille and I got married. Did you know that?”
I told him I did not.
“A guy gets out of practice.”
And then, of course, I saw it. I’m not being coy when I say I was so out of practice myself that I couldn’t even see the glacially slow lead-up to the question. Maybe in another setting, another time, I would have taken some pleasure from this. I would have strung it out and enjoyed it, but now I was only in a hurry. “Would you like to have dinner with me?”
He smiled a smile so grateful, so relieved, that I wished I had asked him the minute he’d walked in the door. He nodded his head.
“Good. When?”
“Tomorrow.”
Curse fate and baby-sitting. “Can’t happen,” I said. “Sandy has school tomorrow and I’ve got the kids. Sandy, Sandy. You really need to get out of here.”
“Tonight.”
I would be lucky if I had time to get my hair washed tonight, and forget about buying a dress I couldn’t afford. Still, he had seen me wearing jeans and Mort’s old shirt, so his expectations couldn’t be too high. “Tonight. Would you mind going out the back?”
“Fine,” he said. He started to stand up and then reached for my hand. He had been squatting with those flowers a long time. I pulled him to his feet. For a second I held his warm hand. For one more second he covered my hand with his other hand. I felt a small current zip up my arm and go into my chest.
“I’ll pick you up.”
“No, no,” he said with a certain panic in his voice. “Can’t do that. What if we meet at the library?”
“My grandson likes to go to the library. He’d tell.”
He closed his eyes. “Why can’t I think?”
“The CVS in Porter Square,” I said. “Seven o’clock.”
And then I saw her, Sandy, through the window. “Out,” I said, pointing to the back. “Go, go, go!”
For a sixty-year-old man whose legs were stiff, he managed to fly when he needed to. Romeo Cacciamani was out the back in a flash and I, for the first time in thirty-nine years, had a date.
All day long I worked to keep my fingers free of the scissors’ blades. I knew that I was bound to chop one off. I mixed up orders, filled in twenty-five-dollar arrangements with roses, and forgot to hand out a single packet of floral-life food for fresh cuts.
“What is it?” Sandy kept asking me. “Are you mad at me about this morning? Are you worried about Tony and Sarah?”
I assured her it had nothing to do with her, but Sandy could never have believed such a thing. “I’m just tired,” I said. “I didn’t sleep well.”
Finally she relented. It was time to go and pick up Sarah from preschool. We weren’t busy and so I told her to take the rest of the day off. I tried to sound magnanimous, but she’d probably planned on taking it, anyway. Once she was gone, I called my best friend, Gloria. Gloria had suffered mightily through her first marriage and had been rewarded in her second one. We had been friends since the seventh grade. She was my maid of honor and the person who drove me to my divorce hearing. Gloria and I go way back.
“Cacciamani!” she said. She was laughing so hard that she finally had to put the phone down and get herself a glass of water.
“I’m insane.”
“You were insane for hating the guy all those years. You aren’t insane for going out with him. I think he’s nice. He’s good-looking.”
“You know him?”
“I don’t know him, but I’ve bought flowers from him. I’ve talked to him—‘Hello, how’s the weather?’ sort of thing.”
This seemed inexplicable to me. “What were you doing buying flowers at Romeo’s? I thought you bought your flowers at Roseman’s.”
“I always buy them at Roseman’s now and I usually did before but, honey, I’ve got to tell you, Mort drove me insane. The man could not stop talking. If I was in a hurry, it was just so much easier to go to Romeo’s.”
“You have a point there. So you don’t think I’m awful? The girls are going to hate me.”
“The girls will never know if you have an ounce of discretion in you. You’re an adult, after all. You deserve to go out. Besides, I never could figure out what in the hell this family feud was all about, anyway. Why did all of you hate them so much? I can remember when we were kids, your dad used to go on about the Cacciamanis so long I thought he was going to rupture an artery.”
“That’s the weird part. I don’t know why we hated them. And Romeo doesn’t know why they hated us. Just a tradition, I guess.”
“So the tradition is over. What are you going to wear?” Gloria had more experience in the world of dating than I did, which is to say she had some in comparison to my none. “Where are you going?”
“We’re meeting at the CVS in Porter Square.”
“That pretty much leaves all of your options open, though I’d say nothing too fancy for a drugstore. Do you know what he likes to do?”
“He likes to walk.”
“So flat shoes. We’re not getting very far.”
I sat down on a stool and rested my head against the corkboard. “Maybe I should call him, tell him just to forget it.”
“Put perfume behind your knees. Men love that.”
“I don’t think he’ll be coming in contact with the backs of my knees.”
“What about birth control?” she said soberly.
I laughed. “Nonissue, thank you very much. Isn’t it enough that I’m worrying about dinner? Do you have to make me worry about the things that aren’t going to happen, anyway?”
“You’re better off if you’re prepared, emotionally speaking. You have to think through all of the scenarios.”
But I couldn’t think through any of them. Not even the one where I made it to the drugstore. Suddenly I was paralyzed with a kind of fear I hadn’t known since Mort told me about Lila. “Listen, Gloria, be a best friend, will you? Come over tonight and pick me up. Show everybody that we’re going out to dinner and then drive away with me. The girls will get suspicious if I go out again tonight.”
“What am I? The beard? You want me to drive you to the drugstore?”
“If you could,” I said. I was ashamed of how small and pathetic my voice sounded.
“Sure, Julie,” she said. “I’ll be your alibi any day.”
I closed the shop a half hour early and went home to go and sit in the tub. The house was miraculously empty and the quiet gave me a false sense of peace. Maybe it would be all right. Maybe we would have a nice dinner and nobody would find out. Gloria was right. This was not a crime. The only thing I disagreed with her about was the perfume. Florists never touch the stuff. We understood there were too many beautiful smelling things in the world to even try and compete.