April's Flowers

         Melanie put her face to a striking red rose, inhaling its sweet, fresh smell. Her eyes scanned the floral section, resting on more roses, red and white, and pink, roses everywhere; on every imaginable color of carnation; but on nothing that felt right. She sidled over to a flowering corner where a refrigerator held green buckets of cheery daisies. Melanie loved daisies. She put her hand on the door and slid back its cool glass, a moment later pulling out a makeshift bouquet of twelve: six pink daisies and six yellow. She smiled, remembering something. “I believe if God didn’t make heaven out in pink and yellow,” her grandmother Margaret had once said, “he should have.”
She approached the counter, where an old woman peered at her through thick, misty glasses. “You’re not here all alone, are you, precious?” She spoke in a soft, honeyed whisper.
“Oh, no, Ma’am,” Melanie declared without a breath. She had meant to sound cool and confident and grown up; but she hadn’t spoken much lately. The woman wrapped the pink and yellow flowers in green paper, and Melanie hastily paid for them—out of her own money, saved from Christmas and birthdays—and quickly exited the floral section. She was allowed to be at the grocery store on her own, since it was so close and she was ten now, but she hadn’t told her mother she was going. Mom would have wanted to go with her; but this was something she had to do alone.
It was raining when she stepped outside. But there was no time to wait for the mid-spring storm to pass, because if she didn’t arrive home in time her mother would worry. So she flipped up her hood and pulled it tight, then slipped her bouquet under her sweatshirt. She kept her head down, but somehow icy droplets of rainwater made their steady way into her eyes. Her feet plodded one after the other onto the wet slabs of sidewalk.
No one would understand about Grandma Meg. This was the grandmother who had moved in when Melanie was only four years old. The grandmother who read her to sleep every night, even though Melanie could now read herself. Grandma Meg made the words come alive; that was special. When Melanie was very young, she had decided that she had two mothers: Mom and Grandma Meg. She had thought “Grandma” meant the same thing as Mom, only grander, more vivid and colorful. Even now, the memory brought a crinkle of smile to her eyes. Then the tears came.
Hot saltwater mixed with cold rainwater. Still her persistent feet passed crack after crack in pavement. But the walk home was longer than usual. When she finally arrived, Melanie found displaced eyelashes on her cheek and pink and yellow petals clinging to her chest.

“We’ve been frantic!” Melanie’s mother paced the kitchen, stumbling in her own hasty steps.
“Do you let the child run wild like that, Alice?” Melanie spun to face her aunt April, her father’s sister and her grandmother’s only daughter.
“Well, I hardly call it wild,” her mother began. “We live just three blocks—”
Aunt April had turned to the window, where a grim black limousine sat outside. Waiting.
“Go and change, honey.”
Melanie took the stairs two at a time, still carrying the daisies in her hand; to one who could not feel the thrill of apprehension that had passed through her, she would have seemed a happy child. She reappeared a minute later wearing a knee-length black dress and small black shoes with a miniature heel.
At a look from Aunt April, the three were out the door, into the cool mid-spring air. Soon they were ensconced in the black leather of the limousine, taking up a single row of seats. Melanie was squashed between her aunt’s hard form and her mother’s warm one. She kept her eyes on her lap, where she had placed her cheery flowers, saving them from Aunt April’s weight, trying not to listen to the conversation around her.
“…got everything arranged for today.”
“Mmm.”
“I want it to be perfect.” Aunt April spoke as if she were planning a wedding. “I owe her that.”
The limousine soon arrived in front of a large white church and dumped Melanie and the women into the parking lot. Her mother took one of her hands, and her aunt took the other, and the daisies were left mercifully pinned under Melanie’s arm. The deluge of water had passed now, and the spring breeze was cool on Melanie’s face, blowing her hair about; she felt almost alive again.
“Goodness!”
“What is it, April?” Melanie’s mother’s shoulders tensed and rose an inch.
“Her hair!”
Melanie’s mother’s jaw tightened, and she did not turn to examine her daughter’s hair. “She’s a child, April—she looks fine the way she is.”
“It’s disrespectful.” Aunt April fished through her black leather handbag and withdrew a  small comb, its points ominously jagged.
“You’re expecting too much of her right now,” her mother persisted. “We’re all struggling.” And as Aunt April was discovering that it is difficult to brush another’s hair and walk at the same time, she gave in and returned the comb to her bag. Melanie was deemed “passable,” and the three composed themselves and entered the church.
Good Shepherd was spacious, with wide rows of pews and a small, delicate casket at the front. (The lid was closed, since Aunt April found open-coffin funerals “distasteful,” as she told her sister-in-law in the limousine.) Melanie and her mother took seats in a pew up front, and as they neared the casket Melanie saw that it had been covered in red and white roses. What a silly thing to do, she said to herself. Grandma Meg hadn’t liked red and white. But Aunt April, who had strode up front to examine the coffin, was admiring the flowers as if they’d been her own idea. They probably had, Melanie realized. She wondered if Aunt April had ever bothered to ask her mother what colors she liked. Besides, roses were far too somber. She was just considering how her grandmother would have arranged things if she had been here, when she remembered the daisies in her lap.
She whispered to her mother, who joined Aunt April, pulling Melanie along. “Is there somewhere Melanie could put her flowers? She’s worked very hard to get them.”
“Certainly.” But when Melanie proudly held up the bouquet still wrapped in tissue paper, April frowned.
“What?”
“You see, dear, pink and yellow daisies” –she spoke each word scornfully—“don’t really complement red and white roses.”
“Well, I’m sure we could just work them in here,” said her mother, gesturing.
“What would people think?” demanded April, her voice turning shrill. “No.”
So that was that. Melanie and her mother tried to protest, when a man, wearing a gray suit and a mortuary name tag, with a mustache that looked as if he trimmed it under a microscope, came forward. Melanie scuttled back to her seat, followed by her mother and her aunt, then was cushioned between them once more. After a moment’s speechmaking the man was gone, and the service began. Melanie sat through it all with her head down, a few leaden tears falling like dew on the innocent flowers.

When it was all over, the mortuary man returned and slid back the lid of the casket, offering everyone one last chance to “view” the body. Aunt April approached first, holding her head high, but there was something tentative in her steps that Melanie had not noticed. When she returned to their shared pew, she seemed smaller, somehow.
After a few others had looked on Grandma Meg, Melanie’s mother stood up and stepped forward to face the sight. Her shoulders tensed and her back arched. Suddenly Melanie realized, Mom’s been hurt too. Even though Grandma Meg wasn’t her real mother, Mom had been struggling. Why hadn’t Melanie seen?
Soon, Melanie’s mother was squeezing her hand and motioning her forward. Melanie took a deep breath and approached the coffin, still holding her daisies automatically. She had thought she would recoil from her grandmother’s dead body, but she did not. Grandma Meg was wearing her favorite yellow dress, the one with fragile pink lace at the collar and sleeves, but it wasn’t Grandma Meg. She had gone on.
Melanie wondered where her grandmother was now and with a rushing feeling fervently wished she could ask  whether heaven was indeed pink and yellow. Was Grandma Meg looking down now? Could she see the young girl looking down at the empty body and seeming so small against the tide of people and emotions? Or, Mom, or Aunt April? All three of them were grieving. Melanie looked down at the daisies in her hands; then she took them out one by one, laying them on the body to form a smiling face. “We’ll be okay.”
She took careful, self-assured steps back to her seat, carrying the green tissue paper that had held a smile lying in wait. When she sat down, Aunt April glared at her, and she met her gaze with cool, bright eyes.
         Soon the close-shaven man from the mortuary was back. He was preparing to close the lid of the coffin when Aunt April stood up. He stared at her, alarmed, and sank back into the shadows. Aunt April strode toward the casket again. Someone gasped: April had already had her turn! But Melanie knew.
         All it would take was one sweep of the hand, one gentle motion, to knock away the smiling daisies, to shatter Melanie’s last chance of honoring her grandmother. Aunt April grimaced at the flowers; but then she looked up into Melanie’s young, innocent face, those eyes so alive, so vivid, so familiar. April nodded to the mortuary man, and, when she returned to her seat, she did not shrink from Melanie’s gaze.