thanks.
“Hello,” I said to the old woman who was manning the flower stand. “These are beautiful.” I picked up a handful of flowers and held them to my nose, and took a big inhale. Wow. There was no other smell like that anywhere in the city where I lived.
“Thank you,” she smiled, and the corners of her eyes wrinkled up. She eyed me in my business suit and then looked over my shoulder at my Audi. “You’re not from around here, are you?”
I laughed. “Actually, I grew up not far from here. Just down the road a bit,” I answered.
“Ah, well, welcome home then,” she said as I handed her the flowers I had chosen, and she wrapped them up for me in a brown paper which she tied with a string.
It was strange to hear those words—welcome home. I hadn’t ever felt at home here, at least not in my own house anyway. I always felt more at home on Scott and Clara’s farm.
When I got back on the road, the sun was just starting to set and soaked the skyline in a burnt-orange hue that made all the tops of the trees look like they were on fire. It was beautiful here, and I was on my way to see the most beautiful thing I could imagine.
“Hey, welcome back,” Scott smiled when he opened the door. “Dude, flowers?”
I knew it. There was the raised eyebrow. Scott had the whole over-protective brother image down perfect.
“They’re for Clara since she’s cooking dinner,” I said with as little emotion as possible.
“Well, yeah, I figured that they weren’t for me,” he chuckled. “But bringing flowers to my sister is kind of weird, don’t you think?”
“Relax, man,” I teased. “It’s not often that I get a home-cooked meal anymore. Next time you cook dinner, and I’ll bring you flowers.”
Scott burst into laughter, and I sighed with relief at the fact that I had been successful at diffusing the situation. I could see Clara over his shoulder in the kitchen, getting ready to make dinner.
“Hey, Clara,” I said as I walked inside.
Scott went to reach for some beers for us again.
“Thanks for cooking dinner tonight and for having me. I brought you these.” I held out the flowers to her, and she barely looked at them.
Come on, they were beautiful.
“Thanks,” she said without bothering to take them from my hand and smell them.
She was missing out. They smelled like heaven. She didn’t seem at all happy to see me, and I wondered why. “Just put them in one of the glasses for me, please,” she directed.
Scott came back and handed me a beer, and then I fished around in the kitchen cupboards until I found a glass that was tall enough for the flowers.
“I see she’s got you doing chores now, too,” Scott joked while he sat at the table and watched me try to squeeze all of the flowers into the glass of water.
“Speaking of which,” Clara said to him. “How about you pour me a glass of wine?”
I laughed. Clara was feisty, always had been. She and Scott were super close, but she also didn’t put up with his shit. That was always a quality that I loved about her. She didn’t put up with my shit, either. Even when we were teenagers, and she was a lot younger than both of us boys, she would put us in our places without hesitation. By all accounts, she was tougher than both of us put together. Even so, she deserved to be taken care of sometimes, too.
I set the flower glass down in the center of the table and sat down to join Scott with a beer. It was nice to have some time to spend with him, too. He and I had been best friends since we were little kids, and for all essential purposes, we were more like brothers than friends.
“So what’s it going to take for me to get you to—”
“Not tonight,” Scott laughed as he cut me off mid-sentence. “No talk of work tonight. Let’s just have an enjoyable meal and take a stroll down memory lane. I’ve missed my friend, and I’m ready to kick back some beers and talk about all the trouble that we used to get into when we were kids.”
“Can’t think of a better way that I’d like to spend an evening,” I agreed with a smile.
We both lifted our beer bottles up and clinked the rounded edges of the glass together.
“You guys aren’t