Keep in Water

The rain arrived in Harborview the way bad news always does: without warning and all at once.

Clara Hayes watched it come down through the front window of Petal and Stem, the flower shop she had owned for six years and worried about for seven. The street outside blurred into watercolor, umbrellas blooming along the sidewalk like the tulips she could not sell fast enough this season. It was a Tuesday in late October, the kind of afternoon when nobody buys flowers because nobody is in love on a wet Tuesday, or so Clara had decided somewhere around three o'clock.

"You're doing the staring thing again," said Tessa from behind the counter, where she was wrestling eucalyptus into a bridal sample that refused to cooperate. Tessa Nguyen had worked at the shop for four years and had appointed herself, without a vote being held, the official manager of Clara's personal life. "The staring-at-the-rain, thinking-about-the-lease thing."

"I'm thinking about the tulips."

"You're thinking about the lease."

Clara sighed and turned back to the workbench. She was thirty-two, with her mother's dark curls and her father's habit of frowning at numbers as if they might apologize and rearrange themselves. The lease renewal sat in the back office, third drawer down, under a box of ribbon she never used. The rent was going up. Everything was going up except the number of wet Tuesdays people spent falling in love.

The bell over the door rang.

The man who came in with the weather was tall and soaked and holding, of all things, a broken umbrella in one hand and a cardboard tube in the other. He had the look of someone who was usually put together, which made his current state almost funny: dark hair plastered to his forehead, a gray coat gone charcoal at the shoulders, rain sliding off his jaw. He stopped just inside the door and dripped, politely, onto the mat.

"I'm so sorry," he said. "I'm not even here for flowers. I just need to not be outside for a minute."

"That's the best reason anyone's come in all day," Clara said. "Take your time. The roses don't mind an audience."

He laughed, and it changed his whole face, made it younger and less careful. He set the ruined umbrella by the door like a soldier laying down a fallen comrade and looked around the shop, at the buckets of dahlias, the wall of dried lavender, the crooked hand-painted sign that said ASK ME ABOUT PEONIES that Tessa had made as a joke and Clara had never taken down.

"This place is great," he said, and he sounded like he meant it. "It smells like my grandmother's garden. That's a compliment. She'd want me to be clear about that."

"Compliment accepted on her behalf."

Tessa, who had gone suspiciously quiet, leaned on the counter with the expression of a woman watching her favorite show. Clara ignored her with the skill of long practice.

The man shifted the cardboard tube under his arm, and Clara nodded toward it. "You're protecting that better than yourself."

"Occupational hazard. Drawings. I'm an architect." He grimaced. "I have a site meeting two blocks from here in, oh, twenty minutes, and my umbrella lost a fight with the corner of Fifth and Marine."

"That corner takes no prisoners," Tessa said solemnly. "The wind comes off the harbor sideways. We've lost customers. Whole bouquets. A small dog, once, allegedly."

"Tessa," Clara said.

"The dog was fine. It was very aerodynamic."

The man laughed again. He had a good laugh, Clara noticed, and then was annoyed with herself for noticing, and then was annoyed at being annoyed, which was a spiral she decided not to examine. He crossed to the counter and held out his hand. "Adam Mercer."

"Clara Hayes. This is Tessa, who exaggerates."

"Only about dogs."

Adam's handshake was warm despite the rain. Up close he had gray eyes, the exact color of the weather he'd escaped, and a small scar through one eyebrow that made him look perpetually about to ask a question.

The narrator will admit what Clara would not: she liked him immediately. Not in the way of songs, nothing so dramatic. It was smaller and more dangerous than that. It was the feeling of a familiar chord played in another room, the sense that the afternoon had quietly reorganized itself around a stranger with a dead umbrella.

"So," Adam said, "since I'm here, and since I'm apparently buying something out of guilt for dripping on your floor. If a person wanted flowers for a grandmother who thinks all modern architecture is, and I quote, boxes for sad people, what would that person buy?"

"Is the person apologizing for something?"

"The person is always apologizing for something. It's his profession. He builds the boxes."

Clara came around the counter and walked the buckets. This part she never had to think about; her hands knew it the way other people knew prayers. Ranunculus, a coral one, then two. Dusty miller. A stem of snapdragon the color of butter. She worked while the rain played the window like a drum with no rhythm, and Adam watched her with an attention she could feel between her shoulder blades.

"Grandmothers pretend to want roses," she said, wrapping the stems in brown paper, "but roses are what you buy when you don't know a person. This says you know her."

"It's perfect. She'll say it's too much and then put it in the exact center of the kitchen table." He took out his wallet, then paused. "Can I ask you something? You'll say no, and that's fine, it's a strange day."

Tessa stopped pretending to work entirely.

"The building I'm meeting about," Adam said. "It's the old cannery on Marine Street. We're turning it into shops and studios and trying very hard not to make it a box for sad people. I keep telling the developer the ground floor needs something alive, and he keeps showing me renderings of a phone store." He nodded at the shop, the lavender, the ridiculous peony sign. "This. This is what I mean. Would you ever let me show you the space? Purely professional. You'd be doing me a favor."

Clara thought of the lease in the third drawer, under the ribbon.

"Purely professional," she repeated.

"Well," Adam said, and the scar over his eyebrow did its questioning thing, "mostly."

Outside, the rain eased, as if it had only been sent to deliver him and, its errand finished, was free to go. Clara wrote her number on the back of a care card that said KEEP IN WATER, TRIM STEMS DAILY, and did not look at Tessa, because looking at Tessa would make it real.

"Thursday," she said. "I close at six."

"Thursday." Adam took the card like it was something that might bruise. At the door he picked up his broken umbrella, considered it, and left it leaning by the mat. "For the shop," he said. "It's decorative now. Ask me about peonies."

The bell rang. The door closed. The shop was quiet except for the last of the rain.

"So," said Tessa.

"Don't."

"I'm just saying that in four years I have never once seen you give a customer the KEEP IN WATER card, and I feel that Thursday-you should trim her stems and wear the green dress."

Clara threw a piece of ribbon at her, and missed, and laughed anyway. Beyond the window, the clouds were pulling apart over Harborview, and the wet street shone like something newly made.