Mrs. Pruitt, the quiet photographer with the gray braids, lowered her camera and walked to our table with a printed photo in her hand, and she set it down in front of Vanessa.
It was a picture of an old woman in a wheelchair, holding a bouquet of hydrangeas, smiling like the sun had come out, with a hurricane-wrecked nursing home behind her.
That is my mother, Mrs. Pruitt said. After Hurricane Milton, she lost her home and everything in it, and she did not speak for two weeks. Then a young florist drove a van all the way to Sarasota and made a bouquet for every single resident who had nothing left. My mother held hers and smiled for the first time since the storm. I took this picture. It is the last photograph I have of her before she passed in November, and it is the only one where she looks happy.
The room had gone very quiet. Jolie had her hand over her mouth.
Vanessa called it playing with daisies, and a florist in an apron gave a grieving old woman the last happy day of her life.
Mrs. Pruitt said she had carried that printed photo in her camera bag for eight months, hoping she would one day find the girl who made it, to say thank you. She had been hired to photograph a retirement party, and the florist at the family table turned out to be her.
I am Jolies mama. She straightened the roses on our table and said thank you, Aunt Vanessa, and took the joke, because a florist who has driven a van through a hurricane does not measure herself by a surgeons wife. Vanessa did not finish her champagne. She asked Jolie, very quietly, if she could keep a copy of the photo, and Jolie said yes.