Ash snipped, twisted, and pulled so quickly Truman hardly noticed he was seeing bouquets come together. So far, he’d only seen Ash slow and deliberate, but this was him adroit and in total control. Truman wondered which version of Ash he would see if they—

Nope. No. Nuh-uh.

“What do you do for work?” Ash asked as Truman stuffed down all thoughts of Ash in bed and began to photograph.

“I’m an accountant.”

“Come on.”

Truman looked up. “What?”

“You’re… Sorry. I thought you were…” Ash shook his head. “That’s not what I was expecting you to say.”

“What were you expecting?”

“I suppose some kind of photographer or social media management…thing. An accountant is like…my great-uncle Morty.”

“Well, sure, me and your great-uncle Morty are like that.” He held up crossed fingers. “Nah, I’m not creative really.”

Truman is our practical child.

“How’s that? You’re being creative right now.”

Truman waved that away. “This is just practical. Like, you need pictures for the website so we’re taking pictures. My sisters are the creative ones. Miriam is a painter and Eleanor is a singer.”

Ash put together another bouquet, this one darker and more somber. “Do you like it? Accounting.”

Truman looked through the camera’s viewer at the beautiful colors and forms. When he’d started college, he hadn’t known what he wanted to study. He was curious about all the subjects and excited to learn. He’d hoped interest and skill might make the choice for him, but he liked most of them, was good at most of them. He found himself, at the middle of his junior year, meeting with his advisor and having no clue what he wanted to major in, much less do after college.

Sent away with the mission to pay attention to what he particularly enjoyed the next semester, he found an intro to accounting course unexpectedly soothing. In a moment when everything seemed to be moving quickly and unexpectedly, Truman enjoyed the neat boxes of data and predictable equations.

There were solutions in accounting, and if you simply followed the process the correct answer emerged like magic. There was no uncertainty, no second-guessing. Just clean, definitive numbers.

“You’re a natural,” his professor had said, and he’d been equal parts flattered and embarrassed. When he’d gone home for his mother’s birthday in April and told his family he was going to major in accounting, his eldest sister, Miriam, had laughed.

“That’s so totally adorable,” she’d said. “It’s like when you were a little boy and you dressed in that tiny suit!”

The tiny suit in question had been for Christmas and insisted upon by his parents, but he’d enjoyed putting it on and playing dress-up even afterward.