deliberately for a symbolic message I wouldn’t know unless I looked it up. He probably had the receptionists at Rise and Smile find the closest florist and told them to choose whatever was on sale today.
I can see his frown. A shake of the head. Impractical. He knows exactly how much gas he could have put in his tank for the cost of that jasmine. He knows its conversion rate for groceries or our cell phone bill.
I catch myself lamenting that I didn’t keep at least one flower before remembering there’s no point. I never should have brought up the whole jag about not getting flowers from him. I’m not at all gratified by the jasmine, because I had to nag to get it, and he didn’t send it out of love. He sent it because he felt obligated, just like he does for his mother. But where Deborah can somehow still derive satisfaction from that, I can’t.
It’s an empty gesture, a dark condemnation. In all the places it’s supposed to please, it stings instead.
It’s Tuesday, and something’s up with Nicholas. He called the office to say he wouldn’t be coming in, then left the house without a word to me. He’s been gone all day. While I check my phone for calls or texts and wait for him to come home, I wander from room to room. It’s a short tour, because our house is small. It fits two people if those two people love each other and don’t mind being close. In the near future, it will fit one person comfortably.
My phone rings and I jolt, expecting to be told Nicholas surrenders and is never coming back, but it’s Mrs. Howard.
I steel myself before answering. I love Mrs. Howard, but she has the voice of two bricks grating against each other from fifty years of chain-smoking Virginia Slims.
“Hi, this is Naomi.”
I say that specifically because she always asks—and then she still does, anyway: “Is this Naomi?”
“Yes.”
“Hon, this is Goldie Howard.”
I smile. “Hello. How are you?”
“Dear, I’m great. Actually, not so great. You got a minute?”
My heart sinks into my stomach. Last hired, first fired. It’s curtains for me. “Uhh, yes. Just, uhh …” I reach for a notepad and pen for some reason. My brain buzzes. Paranoia, anxiety, and nausea pull me into their familiar huddle and squeeze. “Yeah, what’s up?”
She launches right in. “I’m sure you know that business at the Junk Yard isn’t what it was twenty years ago.”
“It’s … not that bad,” I squeak.
“Hon, it’s that bad. Melvin and I have been going over the books, and it looks like we’ve got no choice but to clean house.”
I can’t cry. Mrs. Howard has been so good to me, and I won’t make her feel any guiltier for doing what she has to do. “You’re letting me go.”
“I’m letting everybody go. We’ll move some stuff around, relocating what’s left on the shelves to our other businesses, but we’ll be closed down by mid-November. I’d sell the Junk Yard the way it is to a new owner, but Morris real estate is in a slump.”
She’s right. After she closes the store, it’ll probably sit there empty for ages before some optimistic sucker turns it into a bakery that won’t last six months. All of our small businesses are closing and Morris will be a ghost town in ten years.
“We’re trying to see what else we can do for you kids,” Mrs. Howard says kindly. “We’ve always got a few different irons in the fire. I do burlesque, Melvin’s an ordained minister. We go to a bunch of Midwestern fairs in the summer and do the carnie thing. And then there’s Eaten Alive and House of Screams.” She clears her throat, making me think of brick dust drifting loosely down a chimney. “I know Tenmouth is out of the way for that boyfriend of yours, but if you want to move here, we’ll line something up for you.”
I envision myself with a mask and chainsaw, jumping out at patrons in a haunted house. Or with a mask and chainsaw at Eaten Alive, gutting gelatin desserts inspired by The Blob. I think about my decision not to get a college degree and Nicholas telling me I don’t need to work.
This is what my life has come to.
“Thanks, Mrs. Howard. That’s a really generous offer.”
“Think about it, okay? You don’t have to let me know yet. Take your time, talk to your boyfriend. If you decide no but you eventually