by its owner, Joanie Graham. Today, there was a tiny, stick-figured girl holding a bouquet behind her back, shyly ready to present it to a stick-figured boy on the windows.
Jax should own stock in the place, with as much money as he’d dropped at Joanie’s over the years, but he’d never come to pick out flowers for a funeral before.
He tried the door but found it was locked. When he knocked on the glass, Gwen appeared out of the back room and came to let him in.
“Romeo, too? Is that okay?” Jax asked, halting in the open doorway. “He won’t bother anything.”
“Of course.” They came inside, and Gwen knelt down to talk to Romeo. “Hi, baby. Did you have a good run?”
Romeo made sad-puppy eyes at her and touched his nose to her cheeks, first the left then the right. Gwen grinned at him.
“His version of a kiss.” Jax rolled his eyes. “My sister Kim taught him that trick.”
“What a sweet thing.” Gwen fussed over him some more, petting him and kissing his snout. “He looks tired. Is he thirsty, too?”
“Oh, yeah. We’re both kind of a mess. Sorry about that.”
Gwen glanced up at Jax. He’d wiped himself off as best he could.
“It’s okay. Come on into the back. We’ll see what we can do.”
Romeo trotted after her, taking only a moment to sniff at a few of the more outlandishly bright sprays of flowers in big, bright pink containers spread around the room. Joanie often mixed her bouquets right out here in front of her customers, letting them point and choose what they wanted and her filling in with whatever it took to finish an arrangement.
The shop was done in a wildly bright palette of colors—teal, lime green, pinks and purples. It positively shouted cheerfulness and made the woman who stood before him stand out all the more in contrast to the attitude and color of the shop.
He wondered why Joanie had hired her, because she definitely didn’t seem to fit in. Gwen was a study in browns. Brown hair, brown eyes, khaki slacks and a plain, loose, chocolate-colored T-shirt beneath a trademark green Petal Pushers apron with more stick kids and flowers on it, a very plain, tentative woman in a shop that was anything but plain or tentative. She stood in the back room looking serious and uneasy, as if Jax might do just about anything in the next few moments. He stopped where he was, a quick glance telling him they were alone among the refrigerated compartments and industrial-size sinks.
He didn’t want to spook her, as he had last night.
She found a bowl that was probably meant to hold flowers and filled it up with water and sat it on the floor, for the dog, then handed Jax a small, white towel and a bottle of water from one of the big refrigerators in back.
“Thanks,” he said.
“You’re welcome.”
“And thanks for meeting here today.”
“It’s no problem. I didn’t have anything to do and…” She frowned, looking away. “It’s fine.”
Scared and at loose ends, in a town where she probably didn’t know a lot of people, Jax figured. And kindhearted, just as he’d suspected.
He took a long drink of water and then started dabbing at the sweat on his arms and face with the towel.
She glanced at him, and then just as quickly looked away.
Shy, scared and lonely, he corrected himself. Not at all his type. “I’ll hurry,” he promised.
“Okay. I’ll be uh…I’ll be out front. Whenever you’re ready.”
Jax wiped off the worst of the sweat. When he came back to the front of the shop, with Romeo trotting after him, Gwen had her head stuck in a cooler full of flowers by the front window.
“Gwen, is it okay for me to be here with you?” He hesitated five feet away once again. “Last night…I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”
She whirled around to face him. He saw heat blooming in her cheeks. She closed her eyes for a moment, then managed to give him the barest of smiles. “It’s all right. And it’s not you. Not your fault.”
Yeah, but it was some man’s.
“So…” She put a determined smile on her sad face. “Did your mother have a favorite flower? Do you have any idea what she would have wanted?”
Which meant she didn’t want to talk about this with him, which was fine too. Her right. He was just curious, thinking there might be something he could do to help. But he’d leave that for another day.
Not one when he was planning his mother’s funeral.
“She liked anything bright and cheery,” he said, frowning at the flower case, full to overflowing. “You know, I just thought of something. She made her own funeral arrangements, and she might have specified something in her instructions. Which I just left on the refrigerator at home.” He frowned yet again. “Sorry.”
“It’s all right. I know how difficult this is. I mean, I don’t really know. My mother’s…She’s fine. But we do a lot of flowers for funerals, so I’ve seen a lot of people trying to handle this and…I understand. You’re welcome to use the phone by the cash register, if you think anyone’s home.”
“Sure. I’ll try that.” He found the phone, made the call. Kim was there, and he frowned as she read the arrangements his mother had made.
“Couldn’t find it?” Gwen asked once he hung up.
“No. We did. She didn’t want any flowers. She said people had already spent a fortune on flowers for her, while she was sick—”
“They had. She had a lot of people who cared about her.”
“Yeah. And she was really into her cancer support group, said the group needed money for their programs a lot more than she needed more flowers, so she asked everyone to make a donation instead.”
“Lots of people make requests like that. If you’ll leave a name and address for the support group, we’ll keep it here, in case people call to order flowers.”
“Okay. Thanks.” He rubbed his hands against his forehead, which absolutely ached, and then remembered. “I’m sorry. I took up your Sunday afternoon for nothing.”
“No,” she said. “It’s fine. I didn’t have anything planned, and honestly, it’s…Well, sometimes the days are so long, you know?”
“Oh, yeah. I know. Cancer time, we called it, like the regular rules of time didn’t even apply.” Days could creep along so that every minute was agony.
“You miss her terribly, don’t you?”
He nodded. “And it’s selfish of me, that I’d wish one more day like that on her, but…I guess everybody thinks they’re going to have time to say everything they wanted to say, and now I wonder if anyone ever gets enough time to say it all or to do everything they always thought they’d do.”
Jax looked up self-consciously, realizing he’d said a lot more than he intended. Judging from the look on Gwen’s face, he’d either said way too much or something terribly wrong.
“I’m sorry. Did you lose someone recently?”
“No.” She hesitated. “Not really. I just…I almost lost myself.”
Chapter Five
She said it with a sad, apologetic smile, as if that wouldn’t really count, losing herself. And he wondered if she meant it literally—if she’d nearly died—or if she was talking figuratively.
How out of line would he be to ask that question? Not that they seemed to be observing any of the boundaries of what ordinarily constituted polite conversation. He