Chapter 13: Fishtown

The third bride didn't even call.

She sent an email with one line in it.

"We've decided to go another direction. Please refund our deposit."

Wells read it over my shoulder.

"That's the September one," he said. "She cried at your sample board."

"She's crying somewhere else now."

I refunded all three deposits before lunch.

Two thousand six hundred dollars, gone in a morning.

The six weddings Wells gave me were still mine. Nothing else on my calendar was.

At two, the bell rang.

I braced for a reporter.

It was Maggie, with all three kids and a wagon.

The wagon was full of carnations. White and red and the striped kind, maybe four hundred of them, still in the wholesale sleeves.

"Don't yell," Maggie said. "I bought them with my money. They're a gift."

"Maggie."

"I said don't yell."

Her youngest held up a stack of index cards.

On every one, in purple marker, somebody had written POMEROY FLOWERS. STILL HERE.

The S's were backward on half of them.

"I did the S's," the youngest said.

"They're perfect," I said, and had to turn around and look at the cooler for a second.

The kids set up on the sidewalk in front of the green door.

One carnation and one card for anybody who walked by.

The oldest one, who was eleven and too cool for all of it, stood at the corner with a sign that said FREE FLOWERS. ASK US ABOUT THE VIDEO.

"No," I said.

"Yes," Maggie said.

By four o'clock half of Fishtown had a carnation behind its ear.

The man from the hardware store came by and bought a dozen roses he didn't need.

The coffee place across the street wrote STILL HERE on their chalkboard, under the iced latte special.

Two girls from the tattoo shop asked for the striped ones, then came back in an hour with their mother.

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