“I’m sorry if you thought . . .”

“We don’t have to say another word about it.”

___

After dinner that night, Julia asked me to go with her to the flower tunnel. “I need to teach you more of the names,” she said “We won’t have long before it gets too dark, but I have to cut stems for a friend’s dinner party in town. Might as well teach you something as I do.” We stepped in, all soft light and color and fragrance. “Do you remember the names of these?” she asked, pointing to the bruise-colored flowers I had loved from before.

“Anemones,” I answered.

“Good girl.”

She showed me the heirloom chrysanthemums, the Henriette dahlias, the zinnias. “That’s all I’ll ask you to remember for today,” she said. “A few at a time, over time, does the trick. Now help me cut. The best harvesting times are very early morning and night. The heat of the day shocks them, shortens their life. We want them to last several days cut, if not even longer.”

A pair of sharp scissors in my hand, I cut where she told me to and set the stems in buckets of water. We worked quietly for a little while, and then I confessed, “I read about you in the newspaper.”

“When?”

“Before I came. An article from a long time ago.”

“They like to romanticize us,” she said.

“Like a fairy tale,” I said softly, more to myself than to her.

But she heard me and agreed.

“Very much like a fairy tale. Yes. Fairy tales are full of orphans and mistreated children. The movies make them romantic, but the original stories are not. And there’s nothing romantic about giving a home to young people who need one. It’s a necessity, and it’s something Terry and I like and are good at.”

“So, a new fairy tale,” I said. “Except with ghosts.”

She brushed a white curl off her forehead with a gloved hand and paused. “Are there no ghosts in fairy tales?” We thought and thought and couldn’t think of any. Not in Snow White or Cinderella. Not in Sleeping Beauty or Rumpelstiltskin or Rapunzel. Not in the Twelve Dancing Princesses or The Goose Girl.

Night was falling. Soon it would be too dark for us to keep cutting and filling the buckets.

Julia wiped her hands on her work apron. “So, now we load up the wheelbarrow and take them to the cooler. They’ll chill overnight and then, first thing in the morning, I’ll arrange the bouquets.”