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.

“Ben Daisy,” I hissed. I stepped past the stones of my father and Mama’s sister with no name, past where the land dipped and sank over their final resting place, into the cold shadow of the fir trees. “I have your pansies for you.”

There he was. I could see his back was straight. He was the sweetest I had ever smelled him. But when he turned to me, his face was broken. “Forget them.”

“But why?”

“She’s already here. Saw her last night. On her finger was three wedding bands—one, two, three—all real gold, too. I said, ‘What’s the meaning of this Daisy?’ And she only laughed.”

He began to cry, great shaking sobs, while I stood beside him with the dried flowers on their sheet of paper, wishing he would stop.

“She betrayed me,” he said. “She betrayed me all over again.”

“At least take your flowers, Mr. Ben,” I said. But he was sobbing so hard, his hands shaking, that he couldn’t hold them.