twenty years of snow

3- exploring

Emmaline Johnson is the owner of Anna Loves Flowers, a little tiny flower shop at the edge of town that she inherited from her mother. It's just me, her, Magnolia, and Burt working there. I honestly love my job; the customers are all sweethearts, I don't have to wear any uniform, and my coworkers are all great friends.

Burt, a big round black man with twin granddaughters, tips his baseball cap at me as I walk in the door. I can never tell if he's smiling because his thick black mustache hangs down over his mouth, but his eyes sparkle with kindness. He never gets mad at anybody for anything. Sometimes he brings his granddaughters in to work and shows them how to arrange flowers; I love seeing his bald head bent down between the two little girls' curly poofs of hair at the worktable, working the scissors for them and helping them stick the flowers into jars.

Emmaline is at the sales counter, leaning her elbows on the flaky wood surface. Her eyes are staring off into the middle distance and her eyebrows are gently raised, lips parted, wistful and sad. Sometimes working at her shop makes me a special kind of miserable, gives me a wish for how things could have been. She's twenty-four and tall, beautiful, with a green thumb and a smile that could make the sun shine. I wish her sun was always shining; I know where she goes when she's staring off into space.

See, Emmaline was friends with my brother from day one of grade three. They did everything together. I looked up to her, admired her, wanted to be like her. Jackson and Emmaline were inseparable. Best friends forever. They always came to our house and sometimes Emmaline played Polly pockets with me, patient and silly and sisterly. Then they grew up and fell in love, and then Jackson proposed. I was ecstatic. They were so, so in love.

Neither of them went to college but they were getting ready to move out of their parents' houses, move into the tiny rooms above Anna Loves Flowers. Jackson was working at the bookshop near my school. Emmaline was keeping the flower shop in order while her mama went through chemo. They were getting on their feet slowly, slowly, but they were getting there. Emmaline was picking out curtains for their future bedroom window.

And then one day Mama and I had to stumble to her tall gruff daddy's big house and knock on the big door, small and puff-eyed and empty, and tell calm, beautiful, loving Emmaline in her yellow sundress that the funeral was on Sunday.

All the air rushed out of her lungs and she folded over on herself, crumbled like a stale piece of bread, lips going paperwhite, mouth gaping in a soundless sob that quickly turned real and urgent and Mama and I were on each side of her helping her sit down.

My family always suffers silently, alone, stone faced and standoffish. I'd never seen a person so affected by grief before, never seen clear blue eyes cloud over and leak so quickly, never heard what pure, all-consuming loss sounds like. Emmaline taught me.

That was almost three years ago.

When I turned sixteen I applied to work at the flower shop. Emmaline's mama Anna had died a few months after Jackson did, a complication with her last surgery. Emmaline was quieter, fragile seeming, with leaky faucet eyes. Her father had retreated into his work, staying away on business trips for weeks at a time. She was alone in this big empty house, walls hung with portraits and portraits and portraits full of heartache and memories. I called her whenever she didn't come in to work, determined not to let her join Jackson wherever he was.

Since then I've helped Emmaline move into the apartment above Anna Loves Flowers. She's become one of my greatest friends, even though she's six or seven years older than me. We bonded first over my Polly Pockets when I was five, then again over my boy troubles and eventually my girl troubles too, and then we bonded over the loss of our loved ones. She's the older sister I never had.

I walk past her counter into the back room. There are flowers everywhere in here, blooming wildly in industrial sized planters, reaching up for the light lamps they know as their sun, spilling out the back door into the tiny patio area we share with Mamé's Antiques. During the winter we have flowers delivered, but during summer and spring and fall we grow our own. Till the frost settles and the air gets too cold for flowers to grow. Right now everything is thriving, blooming like crazy in the August sunlight.

I start out on the patio, picking up the old green water can that feels hot in my hands. Taking it inside, I fill it with room temperature water. Then I start watering.

It's repetitive work, tiring, makes my arm shake with the weight of the water I'm carrying, but it's somehow rewarding. I guess I just love the feeling of making a difference in the little lives of green things.

There's a tapping sound from across the small patio, a hollow sound like someone's hitting glass.

Looking up from my plants I see Mamé Lacoste in the window of her shop, a tiny French Creole lady from Louisiana, eyes fixed on me from behind her lacy curtains. She hardly even comes up to my chest and always dresses in flowing skirts and tops and ties her short kinky hair underneath a rag. Been the proprietor of Mamé's Antiques for thirty-seven years, but nobody knows how old she is. She never tells. Likes to keep us guessing.

When I was a little girl, her paper-bag skin scared me, but Mamé always invited me and Jackson in for lemonade when we were walking by with Mama. And her fresh cold sugary lemonade was always enough to make me forget about how the whites of her eyes weren't exactly white anymore and how her veins stood out like rope underneath her papery thin skin.

Once she sees that I spotted her, she raises a thin hand and crooks her finger at me. Come here, child, I've got a secret, that gesture says. I look between my plants and the sizzle-hot metal watering can and Mamé's dim shaded shop with the prospect of lemonade and of course I pick Mamé.

My sandaled feet clop across the doorsill into Mamé's shop and I walk straight into a scene from my childhood. Mamé's shop is a child magnet, always has been. As long as they don't break the dolls or stand on the furniture or spill lemonade on the rugs or scream, Mamé allows all the younguns in town to congregate at her little safe haven. Today there's roundabout six children sitting on a patchy rug in the corner, playing a guessing game. As my eyes adjust to the gentle dim light, I look around for the old lady.