Something She's Not Telling Us - Darcey Bell Page 0,3

say she was in another country, relying on Aeromexico to get her back that night.

The organizers wanted something stark—maybe just bare branches—to reference how much land has been deforested. Maybe they could do something to suggest palm trees blown over.

The costs need to be low because they want the money to go to the islands, not the dinner. Charlotte (they said) has a reputation for thinking out of the box. They hope that the exposure will compensate for the modest fee.

If not for the margaritas, she would never have emailed back: WHAT’S “MODEST”?

It was twice what she’d ever been paid for any job. And the list of celebrities on the benefit committee was long and growing daily.

In the taxi home from the airport, Charlotte was already making sketches on the back of her boarding pass.

THIS MORNING, IN the cab ride from the East Village to Hudson Yards, where the meeting is being held, she’d rehearsed how she would communicate her enthusiasm and her ideas for the project.

But now that the meeting has been postponed . . . She’s still determined to go. If it threatens to run late, she has all day to find someone to pick up Daisy.

Eli has to leave the theater. It’s as simple as that. Or she can ask Alma.

PERFECT, she texts, though it isn’t perfect at all.

It could hardly be less perfect. SEE YOU AT 4.

CHARLOTTE HAS LOVED flowers ever since she was little. Not a day goes by when she isn’t grateful for having flowers in her life. They are her life. Though she’s worked at the business six days a week for over a decade, she still loves opening the shop.

Alma would be happy to do it. But Charlotte loves waking up early, leaving Eli and Daisy asleep, and walking—even in winter—all the way from the East Village to the Meatpacking District.

Some blocks are darker, emptier, windier, but she never feels cold or lonely or scared. The word she thinks is: private. As if the city were made for her. Every morning, she buys coffee from Ali or Felipe at the all-night bodega and brings it to the store. The warmth and smell of the coffee is happiness in a cup printed with Christmas holly all year.

She loves turning on the lights, seeing the flowers, and thinking (though she knows it’s ridiculous) that the flowers are happy to see her. She loves the everyday details: signing for the deliveries, talking to the drivers who take such pride in their fragile cargo. She knows the names of their wives and kids. She gives them huge tips at Christmas.

She even loves reading her email. More job offers are coming in, charity dinners and weddings. When she clicks on her business account, she feels as if a stranger is going to give her a present: money—and something to think about, a fun problem to solve.

Charlotte was high on weed—that was pre-Daisy—when she came up with the name for her shop: Buddenbrooks and Gladiola. It seems a little twee to her now, but there’s a story that a certain kind of reporter likes to tell. She leaves out the weed when she explains that she named her shop after a novel she’d never understood and a flower she’d never liked—until one day she realized how amazing they both are. It’s the perfect early-midlife lesson: a second shot at wisdom.

That story, which was true, got her a write-up and a photo in O, The Oprah Magazine.

Charlotte has gotten some lucky press, a helpful interview in W in which she said that her influences were the Victorian language of flowers, punk rock, and 1960s science fiction. The people who run charity benefits like her brand, a little edgy and modern instead of old and stodgy, and she charges less than people who have been in the business longer, though her fees are increasing.

When the commissions began coming in, Charlotte opened a studio in Bushwick and hired more help: smart kids who know and care about flowers. She pays decent wages with benefits, and she arranges cars when her workers need to go home late.

She keeps the Gansevoort Street shop open, though the rent has skyrocketed and it barely breaks even, because that’s where she started. That’s where she still likes to be. She loves opening boxes of perfect pink roses, each wrapped in white tissue paper and cellophane. She loves the birds-of-paradise, cleomes, zinnias, cosmos, and bachelor buttons, which are basically weeds but look stunning in masses. She loves