Emma started down that aisle, and the whole church gasped, and Brandi’s face went white, because the girl was not carrying the Tulsa arrangement. She was carrying nine roses, cream going to blush at the edges, tied with a piece of ribbon so old it had gone the color of weak tea.
They are called Muskogee roses in my family and nowhere else on this earth. My grandmother Ollie brought two cuttings up from Sallisaw in a coffee can in 1938 when they lost the place, and there has never been one sold, and there has never been one bought. There are four bushes alive in the world. Three are in my backyard. The fourth is at Ollie’s grave.
My mother carried them in 1951. I carried them in 1974. My son’s wife did not carry them, and I want to be fair here, that was not spite, that was just a girl from a different family who wanted lilies, and I did her lilies myself and I did them beautifully.
Three weeks before, Emma came up my porch steps crying and asked for the Bible.
It is the big one on the shelf by the window, and between Ruth and First Samuel there is a page of wax paper with a pressed bouquet on it, flat as a photograph, nine stems, the cream gone brown at eighty-eight years. Ollie pressed it herself the week she buried her husband. On the back of that page, in my mother’s hand, added later, is one line.
These do not go to the one with the finest wedding. They go to the one who keeps showing up at the garden.
Emma has been showing up at that garden every Sunday since she could walk. She knows which bush blooms first and which one sulks. She has deadheaded more of my roses than her daddy has.
So she asked, and I said yes, of course I said yes, and then that girl looked me in the eye and asked for one more thing. She wanted the ribbon off Ollie’s press. And she wanted me in the second pew, not the back, and she said if there was one word about it she would carry lilies and let the photographer explain that to the sponsors.
The Tulsa designer, bless her, was a professional about the whole business. She built a gorgeous altar spray and she never said a word, and when she saw my nine stems in the bride’s room she asked me what variety they were and I told her they do not have one.
Brandi found me at the reception, about an hour in, past the shrimp. She did not apologize with words. She stood there in that dress and she cried, and she asked me if her own wedding flowers were the same roses. I told her no, hers were peonies and larkspur out of the same garden, three hundred stems, and that I had been glad to do it, and that I remembered she cried then too.
She comes Sundays now. She is not much of a gardener and she gets sunburned in twenty minutes.
The bouquet is pressed and in the Bible, on the page behind Ollie’s. Emma did it herself, at my kitchen table, with the wax paper and the iron and the same phone book, and she wrote her line on the back, and I have not read it.
It is not for me. It is for whoever keeps showing up.