“They paid me to plant roses. I couldn’t afford one for her grave.”
I’ve put flowers in the earth for forty-seven years.
Petunias, zinnias, marigolds. Tulips that never come up quite straight. Hydrangeas that sag in the rain. And roses. Always roses.
You’d be surprised how rich folks love their flowers. Big white houses, wraparound porches, polished brass knockers — but it’s the flowerbeds that really say money. They don’t plant them. That’s what I was for.
I never had a business card. Just a name passed from neighbor to neighbor. “Eli’s cheap, and he works like hell.” That was my reputation.
And I did.
By God, I did.
—
I met Mary when I was twenty-two, back when I was working odd jobs after a short stint in the Army. She worked the cash register at Murphy’s Diner off Route 9. Had a crooked smile, and the kind of patience you don’t see anymore. The kind that sits with her mother every Sunday even when dementia set in and her own name was forgotten.
We didn’t have much. A one-bedroom rental with a leaky sink and a front step that wobbled if you stepped too far right. But we had each other.
I started picking up landscaping work from a guy at the VFW. Then word spread. Retired folks in the suburbs liked me because I didn’t talk much, didn’t take breaks, didn’t steal. They called me “reliable.” It meant more than they knew.
I worked with my hands. That’s important.
People forget what it means, that kind of life. There’s a pride in calluses, a rhythm in raking mulch under an August sun. When you finish a bed just right, when the edges are crisp, when the dirt is tucked in like a made blanket — you stand back and nod. No one needs to clap. The work claps for itself.
But I never brought flowers home.
—
Mary liked wildflowers anyway.
She’d take a walk along the back fields, pluck Queen Anne’s lace and goldenrod, and stick them in an old jelly jar on the kitchen table. Said it was better than anything I could buy. We never made it out of the rental. She didn’t care. “It’s home because you’re in it,” she’d say, and I’d grunt like a fool, pretending I wasn’t tearing up.
We never had kids.
We tried. God knows we tried.
But after the third time, she stopped talking about it. Just started baking more. Biscuits every Saturday. Peach cobbler when we could afford the fruit. In time, it was just us. And it was enough. It had to be.
—
When Mary got sick, I was trimming boxwoods at a lawyer’s house downtown. She didn’t call me — didn’t want to worry me. Just walked herself to the clinic and sat there for three hours, waiting.
Stage four. Ovarian.
She told me over meatloaf like it was a weather report. “Rain’s coming Thursday. Also, I’m dying.”
Six months, they said. We got ten.
I kept working. We needed the money. She said not to stop.
She never asked for much. Just wanted the window open during her naps and soft music playing — old hymns, mostly. And every once in a while, she’d ask me to bring back a flower I found at work. Not a bouquet. Just one.
I’d press it in the pages of her Bible. After she passed, I found eleven of them, dried and flat as paper. Each one labeled in her neat handwriting.
She died in our bed, my hand in hers, just after the sunrise.
The nurse asked if I wanted to clean her up. I said yes.
I bathed her like I had on the worst days of her pain, and I put her favorite dress on — the blue one with the faded collar. I brushed her hair with the little pink comb she kept since we were first married.
We couldn’t afford a casket. Just a simple pine box and a burial out by the church.
I wanted to buy roses.
I stood there at the florist’s with a five crumpled singles and some change. The man looked at me like I was lost.
“Do you want one stem, sir?”
But even that was four dollars.
I walked out empty-handed.
—
I buried her with nothing in her hands.
I told myself she would’ve wanted it that way. But it burned.
All those years, planting beauty for others — and I had none to give her.
At the funeral, the pastor tried to say something comforting, but I didn’t hear it. I just stared at the fresh dirt and felt ashamed. Ashamed of every petunia I ever planted for a stranger. Every manicured hedge I shaped with care while my own home crumbled.
No one came but her sister.
No cards. No casseroles. Just a man in his work shirt and a woman in a dress too big for her frame.
—
That was four years ago.
I still work, though slower now. Knees ain’t what they used to be. Hands stiff in the cold.
Folks don’t talk much anymore. They pay by Venmo. Leave instructions by email. Sometimes they don’t even look me in the eye.
“Leave the invoice under the mat,” they say.
But last week, something strange happened.
I was working outside a big new place in a new development. The kind with doorbell cameras and fancy solar lights. I was digging a spot for some red Knock Out roses — easy ones. No scent, but they bloom big.
A little girl came out, maybe seven or eight. Blonde hair, dirt on her knees. She watched me for a long while, then asked, “Do you like flowers?”
I said yes. Quietly.
She disappeared and came back with a paper cup. Inside was a mess of dandelions and something else — maybe clover. All wilting. She handed it to me.
“For your wife,” she said. “In heaven.”
I froze.
Didn’t know what to say.
I just nodded and took it.
Damn cup’s still in my truck.
—
The world’s changed, and not all for the better.
People like me — we’re fading. Phased out. Replaced by machines and apps and big companies with printed vans and fake smiles.
But when I close my eyes, I see Mary’s hands reaching for that jelly jar. I see the sun catching her face as she hummed over biscuits. I see the backyard field in full bloom, before the weeds took over.
No matter how much the world forgets me, she remembered every flower I brought home.
And that, I think, is what love really means.
Not what you buy.
But what you plant.
And who you plant it for.
The day they told me I had to stop working was the day I felt myself disappear.
It was the new HOA supervisor in the development I’d been working in for six years. Same neighborhood with the roses. The one where the little girl had given me the wilted cup of weeds and called them “for your wife in heaven.”
“Eli, we appreciate everything you’ve done, but the board voted to go with a bigger landscaping company,” he said, not even looking up from his clipboard. “They’ve got apps now. Drones. Soil moisture sensors.”
He was twenty-something. His hands looked like they’d never dug into earth a day in their life.
I didn’t argue.
Didn’t beg.
Just nodded and walked to my truck. That old Ford — rusting on the bottom, door that only opens if you hit it with your hip. I sat behind the wheel, stared straight ahead.
That was the last contract I had.
