“…closing date of January fifteenth,” I read aloud from the offer letter, and I turned the page over to see the signature at the bottom, a signature I had watched grow from a child scrawl into a businessman flourish. My son Philippe had signed a letter of intent to sell Delacroix Flowers, my shop, my name, my forty one years of work, to a company called Gulf Retail Partners, for seven hundred and twenty thousand dollars. He had signed it three weeks earlier. He had signed it as owner. I put the letter down on the dining table beside the roast, and I did not raise my voice, because I did not need to.
The dining room was quiet. Philippe stood at the head of the table with his wine glass in his hand, a tall, handsome man of fifty in an expensive blue suit, and he had stopped smiling. His wife Camille looked at her plate. His teenage daughter, Margot, stared at the offer letter with wide eyes. Brittany, the young woman in the blazer, stood beside the framed photograph on the wall, with her tablet clutched to her chest, and I saw that she was trembling. She said, “Mrs. Delacroix, I did not know. He told me you had agreed.”
I told her that I believed her. I told her that I had known girls like her all my life, honest girls who took the jobs they were offered and asked fewer questions than they should. I asked her, quietly, whether she remembered the hospital waiting room in December of 2003. She said she did. She said her mother had been in a coma for nine days, and she had been seven years old, and that the only warm thing in the whole world had been a bouquet of white carnations from a woman in a delivery van. She said, “I kept one of the petals in my Bible for twenty years.”
An offer letter with a closing date, a framed photo from 2003, and a single dried white petal pressed between glass.
Philippe set his wine glass down. He said, “Mom, I was going to tell you. It is a very good offer. They would keep the staff, keep the name. You could retire with dignity.” I looked at my son, at the careful tilt of his head and the practiced warmth in his voice, and I thought of the boy who had once sat on the shop counter eating a sugar cookie, swinging his legs, and telling every customer that his mother made the prettiest flowers in Louisiana. I said, “Philippe, whose name is on the lease?”
He did not answer. Camille did. She said, in a low voice, “Philippe, tell her.” He closed his eyes. He said that the lease for the Government Street shop was in my name, and that Gulf Retail Partners could not buy a business without a lease, and that he had hoped to persuade me to sign a transfer at the closing. He had thought I would be pleased to retire. He had told the buyers I would be glad. He said, “Mom, I am in trouble. The commercial deals went bad in the spring. I owe the bank.”
I let him finish. It took a while. He told me about a shopping center in Denham Springs that had lost its anchor tenant, and about the loan he had personally guaranteed, and about the night he drove around Baton Rouge for three hours, afraid to go home. He said the offer for the shop had looked like a rope. I listened. When he stopped, I stood up, walked around the table, and put both hands on his face, the way I had when he was little. I said, “You could have asked me. I would have helped. I would not have sold my name.”
We spent that evening at the dining room table, the four of us, and Brittany, who had refused to leave. She was a clever girl with a business degree from LSU, and she had a plan. She said she would be glad to manage the shop, but only for me, and only to expand, and only if the name Delacroix Flowers stayed exactly where it was. She proposed an online ordering system for weddings, a wholesale arrangement with the hotels downtown, and a small apprenticeship program for high school students. I hired her on the spot, at a salary I could afford.
Philippe I helped in a different way. I took a modest loan from my savings and paid his bank enough to stop the foreclosure, on the condition that he sell the Denham Springs shopping center and work out a repayment schedule with a financial counselor. He would also spend one Saturday a month at the shop, learning to make a corsage. He accepted, red eyed, with a grateful look I had not seen in twenty years. When he left that night, he kissed me on the cheek and said, “Mom, I do not deserve you.” I said, “Nobody does. That is what mothers are for.”
In the spring, Brittany launched the new online ordering page. Orders tripled in six weeks. She took the Toys for Tots flower drive back to the schools, and the children who came to the shop in white shirts to assemble bouquets lined the sidewalk in a ribbon of pink and yellow. On the first Saturday in May, Philippe stood behind the counter in a green apron, wrapping a corsage with white tape, his tongue between his teeth, cursing very softly under his breath when the stem snapped.
I watched from the back of the shop, with a cup of coffee, for a long time. Beside me, on the wall behind the register, hung the framed newspaper photograph from 2003. A little girl in a red bow. A van. A bouquet bigger than she was. Brittany had put a second frame beside it that winter, a smaller one, which held a single dried white petal pressed between two panes of glass. Underneath it, in her own neat handwriting, she had written: The reason I stayed.