And he left Mama to go ask Miss Annie, who headed the church’s auxiliary club, to bake him some cakes. “Little ones,” he said. “Dainty ones, because Daisy eats like a bird, you know? But they’ve got to be pink and white. That’s what she told me. Have to be pink and white.” Miss Annie grumbled about it, but she agreed to make him three cakes, because he was willing to pay for them.

A few days later, he saw me again on the road to Culver’s.

“Hey there, Black Gal.”

“Hey, yourself,” I said, wary. I could smell on him that he was unwell.

“I’ve heard,” he said, “you grow pansies nice.”

I paused. “I do.”

“I’ll give you a penny for five of them, for my Daisy.”

I knew I should not agree to give him anything for her. “But how are they going to stay fresh?” I asked.

“Won’t need to stay fresh long, because she’s here,” he said. But his voice was uncertain.

I felt a spasm of conscience. “I could,” I said carefully, “press them for you. If you’d like.”

“All right. But don’t cheat me, girl,” he said, smiling again.

“I can give them to you,” I said finally. “Find me after church.”

I did not tell my mother. By then, Miss Hannah had enlisted the reverend, and the three of them spent evenings talking about how best to fix his strange behavior. “Give it time,” Mama kept assuring. “It takes a while for the dose to even out.” She seemed to believe it, even though the reverend and Miss Hannah perhaps did not.

I do not know what I believed at that point. I thought my mother infallible. But I had also been up close to Ben Daisy, smelled the salt water of his breath and seen the dullness of his eyes. I trusted my mother, but I knew that Ben Daisy had no hope of becoming a steady man.

Still, I was a craven little thing. I wanted the penny he promised for myself. While I was tending the garden, I snipped off the heads of five pansies, big and wide. That was the least I could do for him—give him the hardiest ones. I dropped them into the pocket of my apron, and then, at night, when Mama was bent over her books, I bent over my own and placed each flower’s head between the pages of my ledger, right in the corner, up close to the spine. Then I shut the book and did not open it again until later that week, when they had dried and turned crisp and thin, their color only dimming slightly.

The Sunday morning I was to give them over to Mr. Ben, I wrapped them up in a piece of fine paper pinched from Mama’s writing desk.

Ben Daisy and I were to meet in the little copse by the graveyard. When I saw Mama and Lenore were caught up in the talk of the other women in the churchyard, I went closer to the trees, calling for him underneath my breath.