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you a check today. How does two grand sound?”
“Honestly, I’m just not comfortable—”
“Three, then.”
The elevator set us down at street level, offering escape.
“Elizabeth, I’ll think about it, really I will. Right now, I’ve got an appointment with your florist. Are you sure you don’t want to be there?”
“Too busy,” she said. “You know the look I’m after. But don’t think too long. The bridesmaids’ fitting is tomorrow.”
“I know that. I’ll see you there.” And I’ll put on that pink dress when hell freezes over.
Rather than walk in the strengthening rain, I battled the traffic down to Pioneer Square in Vanna. A brand-new engine noise, a sort of muffled clank, reminded me once again to call my mechanic. Or maybe I should call a faith healer. The metered spaces were all full, so I used an exorbitant parking lot on Occidental and walked along a block of restaurants, blues bars, and touristy shops, most of them closed on a Monday, to reach Nevsky Brothers Flowers, which was open seven days a week.
Boris Nevsky’s floral business was unusual—just like everything else about Boris Nevsky. For starters, he didn’t have a brother in the flower business; he just thought the name sounded good. A small army of young men, most of them named Sergei and all of them darkly handsome, joked and squabbled in Russian as they hauled in wholesale flowers, assembled them under the master’s savagely perfectionist eye, and trucked away the finished creations. If someone inquired about the Nevsky siblings, Boris just collared the nearest Sergei and introduced him ardently as “my only family here in your country.” It worked like a charm.
Boris also didn’t have a typical retail showroom, with display coolers of the standard flower arrangements and racks of hard goods—vases, mugs, picture frames—or impulse buys like greeting cards and scented soaps. Instead, he ran a tiny bucket shop out front, tended by a tiny Russian crone named Irina who sold blooms by the stem, bought wholesale for the purpose or left over from his design work.
I greeted Irina, shook the rain off my jacket, and braced myself for the patented Boris bear hug.
“Kharrnegie!” Sure enough, when Boris emerged from the workroom, he clamped me to his broad, sweater-clad chest and expelled all my oxygen. Then he held me at arm’s length—quite a length, too, given the simian stretch of his arms—and beamed at me with blue-flame eyes that gleamed beneath his thatch of wiry hair like lanterns in a cottage window. “You luke rravished!”
I ducked the big wet kiss that often followed the hug. “I think the word you want is ravishing. Nice to see you, too, Boris. How are things?”
He frowned. “My things are well, but not your things, I think. A corpse at your party, that is very bad for you.”
“Pretty bad for her, too.”
He shrugged. Strangers were nothing to Boris, friends were everything.
“Come inside and have tea.”
The Mad Russian Florist was an oversized man, and his workroom was built to scale. There were long sturdy design tables and vast humming storage coolers, with skylights high overhead and exposed brick walls bearing shelves of supplies and photographs of various floral triumphs. The fanciest restaurants in Seattle relied on Boris, and savvy wedding planners booked him a year ahead.
Boris’ private office, as far as anyone could tell, was in his car, and his employee break room was a samovar in the corner and an alley behind the building, perpetually blue with the smoke of Russian cigarettes. The workroom itself smelled like springtime, like roses and freesias and lilies of the valley all at once, which was why I loved to visit. And today, of course, I had an ulterior motive.
“I must work while we talk,” he said, nodding at a half-completed biedermeier on one table.
Biedermeiers are formal bouquets made in concentric circles, each tightly-packed ring composed of a different flower. This one had a center of creamy white tulips surrounded by pink lisianthus, then a ring of deeper pink sweetheart roses. A pile of hydrangea blossoms, white and palest blue, lay ready to form the lacy outer border. At the far end of the room the Sergeis came and went, but this bouquet was getting the Boris touch. He never staffed out the bride’s flowers.
I perched on a stool to watch. “That’s charming. Who’s it for?”
“Bah, a silly liddle girl who will not appreciate. I should give her kharnations and cabbage leaves. Bring us tea.”
The deep-seated belief that women were born to serve had been a sticking