2019-06-26 - The Finality of Flowers

It's become more of a ritual than a tradition.

Bennie buys the cheapest fifth of liquor from the store, usually TAAKA vodka unless something else is on special, and then she sits down to open the mail.

The dining table was probably second hand when her parents brought it home, but it's been in the trailer for as long as she can remember. Once, her and her brother made a fort out of it, drawing a crayon landscape on the underside of some far off mythical place they'd run away to someday. Their father drug them out by their ankles and gave them a whooping. One of the few times he decided to parent. Betty told him the next day she made the kids scrub it clean, but she didn't. He never bothered to check.

She sits there now at the same place she sat as a child, never taking over the 'head' of the table or her mother's place, just as she never moved into the master bedroom now that they're gone. There's something final about those changes, and finality is just something Bennie can't stomach. Like throwing out the fading bouquet of flowers that Easton bought her, sitting in the center with drooping blooms and fading colors. A petal falls off onto the Government printed envelope, and for a moment, her vision blurs with tears.

No use putting this off.

With one finger, she pries open the paper flap and pulls out the check from the Treasury, scanning the front memo line where it mentions the death benefits for the estate of Private First Class Judd Oakes and quickly flips it over. Seeing his name in print is finality enough. Copying the account number carefully to a bank she doesn't use, and a name she doesn't know, she writes FOR DEPOSIT ONLY and then endorses it before adding it to a wrinkled stack of bills from her tip money and the majority of her salary from the City. She'll never see a penny of it.

Sitting back with the plastic bottle of liquor, she takes a swig. Now all that's left is to wait for the courier to come make the collection.

Before she realizes it, Bennie's finger nail starts tapping the label along with the tick of the second hand from the plastic clock hanging on the wall. The repetitive noise makes her glance to the bottle of pills next to the glass vase the flowers came in from the florist. One more couldn't hurt. One more would help her focus. Wake her up from this doldrum. One more.

Reaching out, instead she snags up the dying flowers from the vase, and walks with purpose towards the trashcan but it's there she pauses to enjoy their existence one last time. With a heavy sigh that sticks in her throat with a choked up sob, the blooms get lifted to her nose and cradled to her face to feel the soft velvet of the petals and the drying curls of the leaves before releasing them blindly into the bin and twisting away.

Not realizing the flowers regained their vibrancy.