PART 2 — THE FLOWERS
Mr. Holloway unfolded the photograph with careful hands and set it on the table in front of Bradley. It was the veterans cemetery on a May morning, every headstone lined with flowers, the grass bright with color as far as the picture reached.
The week before Memorial Day last year, he said, vandals had torn through that cemetery and destroyed every arrangement on every grave. His wife was buried there. His two brothers too. He had gone to visit and found nothing but broken stems and overturned pots, and he had sat in his truck and wept.
Then, the morning of Memorial Day, he came back. And the whole cemetery was in bloom. Two thousand flowers, planted overnight by one woman from a greenhouse on Route 33, who had asked for no thanks and left no name.
The petunias Bradley sneered about had covered the graves of men who gave everything, so no soldier in that field would be honored with bare dirt.
It took me a while to find her, Mr. Holloway said. The nursery finally told me. Then he looked at Bradley. You build strip malls. She grew two thousand flowers in the dark for men she never met.
Bradley set down his mimosa.
Laura just put another vase of lilies on the table and said the cemetery deserved better than what those vandals did. That was all.
My daughter plays in the dirt, her husband said. That spring, the dirt she played in gave an old soldier back the grave of his wife, covered in flowers.