“You do what you need to do,” she said, and smiled like a locked door. “We’ll do what we’re required to do.”
He turned on Susan. “Say something.”
She looked at Evelyn, then at the floor.
“I brought you the teacups with the violets,” she whispered. “They’re in the car. I thought you might want a pretty thing.”
It did something to the air. Evelyn’s face softened. “Bring them in, dear,” she said. “But only if you promise to come back to drink from them.”
Robert made a strangled noise. “We’re leaving,” he snapped, at no one who mattered, and left.
The door sighed behind him. The building exhaled.
Susan didn’t follow. She sat very still. Then she said, in a voice that sounded like a girl waking up, “May I see the hummingbirds?”
I took them all to the window—the three women, the three generations of what you choose. The feeder flashed like little gemstones with a heartbeat. Outside, the world kept moving without permission.
Evelyn slipped her hand into mine, quick as a dare. “Do you know what I brought that he didn’t check?” she asked.
“A weapon?” I offered.
“Close.” She pulled a small tin from her pocket. Seeds rattled inside. “Zinnias. They don’t ask much and they keep coming.”
“Where do you want them?”
She looked at the strip of earth under the feeder where the maintenance crew pretends nothing grows on purpose.
“Right there,” she said. “So when he comes back expecting the same view, something colorful will be in the way.”
Maria laughed, sudden and bright. Susan smiled like someone tasting her first slice of summer.
We planted that afternoon, three women and a nurse on her break, knees in the dirt, a hummingbird scolding us for being interesting.
Evelyn told us which colors meant what in a language she might have invented on the spot. Red for nerve. Pink for mercy. Orange for the part of life you can’t plan that turns out to be the good part.
When I stood to go back to my rounds, she pressed an envelope into my palm. It was addressed in tidy script: “For when he forgets I am mine.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“Insurance,” she said. “Not the legal kind. The real kind.”
“Understood.”
That evening, after meds and bed checks and a ukulele encore that improved marginally with practice, I walked past Maple.
Evelyn was sitting up in her blue blouse, pearls glinting, teaching Mr. Langley the rules of bingo like they were commandments.
Maria was writing out a list of items to bring tomorrow. Susan, of all impossible things, was washing the violet teacups in our little kitchenette, sleeves rolled, small and busy and present.
At the feeder, a hummingbird hovered in the last light and wrote its tiny name on the air.
Part Two didn’t end with a gavel or a headline. It ended with a pie dish cooling and a square of freshly turned soil by the window.
But as I locked the med cart and slid the envelope into my desk, I heard the front door open and a voice carry down the corridor, smooth and dangerous as a salesman’s smile.
“Good evening,” a man said. “I’m here to speak with the administration about an emergency guardianship.”
The hummingbird lifted and vanished, leaving the air shivering.
And I thought: tomorrow, the zinnias will need watering.
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This story is a work of fiction created for entertainment and inspirational purposes. While it may draw on real-world themes, all characters, names, and events are imagined. Any resemblance to actual people or situations is purely coincidenta
