Sunflowers in Grocery-Store Plastic
I caught a stranger stealing flowers from my son’s grave.
I want to tell you that right away, because for a long time afterward, that was how I told the story to myself. A thief. A woman in a gray coat with a shopping bag full of other people’s grief, picking through the cemetery like it was a farmers’ market.
I was wrong about almost everything. But I didn’t know that yet.
So let me start where it started. With the sunflowers.
Yesterday would have been my son’s thirty-fifth birthday.
Instead of a cake, I bought sunflowers.
I bought them at the Kroger on Wendell Street, in the little flower section by the front doors. Six stems for $9.99, wrapped in clear grocery-store plastic with a rubber band around the bottom. I stood there for a long time picking them out, turning each bunch around, looking for the biggest faces.
The cashier was a young girl with purple braces. She smiled when she rang them up.
“These are so pretty,” she said. “Somebody special?”
“My son,” I said. “It’s his birthday.”
“Aw. Tell him happy birthday!”
I said I would. I didn’t explain. What would I have said? That I was going to tell him happy birthday in a cemetery? That he couldn’t hear me? She was nineteen. She had braces. I let her keep her nice afternoon.
Sam used to bring me sunflowers.
Never in a vase. Never from a real florist. Always a bunch from the grocery store, still wrapped in that crinkly plastic, tucked under one arm. His toolbox would be in his other hand, because there was always something in my house that needed fixing and Sam could never walk past a broken thing.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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