I wrote the address on my hand, told my daughter I was running to the store, and drove across town to the house those flowers had been going to, every month, for twelve years.
Eighty-four dollars a month since 2013. The same standing order, the same note card the shop never had to ask about, to an address I had never seen. My husband, who told me flowers were a waste because they just die, had been sending them somewhere faithfully for twelve years.
I sat in my car outside a small house with a well-kept garden, and finally I made myself walk up and knock.
The flowers had not been going to another woman at all, they had been going every single month to the grave-side care of a family my husband had never once mentioned, the parents of a young man he had worked beside long ago, who died in an accident my husband always believed he could have prevented.
The woman who answered was near my age, and when I said my husbands name she put her hand to her mouth. She was the mother. Her son had died young at the plant where my husband worked as a foreman, decades ago, and my husband had carried it every day of his life, sure he should have caught the danger sooner.
He could not bring the boy back. So every month, quietly, he had paid a florist to keep fresh flowers on that young mans grave, and on the note card, the same words twelve years running: still watching over him, and over you. He never signed his name. He never told me, because, the mother said, he did not want thanks, he only wanted the boy remembered and the mother not left to tend the grave alone.
She had wondered for twelve years who her quiet benefactor was. I got to tell her. And she got to tell me the kind of man my husband had been when I was not there to see, a man who could not save a life and so spent the rest of his own making sure that life was never forgotten.
I keep the standing order now. The flowers still go every month, and the note card still says the same thing, because my husband was right that some griefs you carry by tending them.
I thought that address would break my heart. Instead it showed me the best of the man I married, the part he was too humble to ever let me see, and the mother of a long-lost boy and I tend a grave together now, two women loved by the same quietly good man.