He asked about his life instead. About his family, school, what he wanted, and what was hard. Nick said it was the first time an adult had asked him that without immediately telling him what the answer should be.
After the diner, Jack said he had one more stop. They walked together to the flower shop. Jack said the florist knew him by name.
He said she knew his order without asking: one yellow tulip, every Sunday, stem trimmed at an angle.
“Why yellow?” Nick had asked. Jack looked at the tulip in his hand for a moment. Nick had gone quiet.
“I’ve been doing this every Sunday for 32 years,” Jack continued. “Not once have I missed it. It started the day I met Shirley.
She dropped her groceries on the sidewalk, and I picked them up. I had just bought this flower. I gave it to her on impulse.
She looked at me like I’d said something in the wrong language. And then she smiled… 32 years… that smile has never changed.”
Nick stood at the grave in front of me with his hands pressed together. “When Jack passed away,” he said, “I just kept thinking about all the arguments.
All the careless things I said.” He looked at the headstone. “I never said thank you. Not properly.
I just kept thinking about how I’d treated him and then how he just… how he just grabbed me like I mattered.”
I blinked quickly, but it didn’t stop my eyes from stinging. Nick wiped his eyes quickly.
“I didn’t want to tell you, Shirley. I thought you’d say I had no right. After all of it.”
I took his hands in mine.
They were cold, the way a teenager’s hands are cold when they’ve been riding a bike in the early morning without gloves. Nick looked up at me. “He talked about you the whole time at the diner.
Every 10 minutes… there was always something about you.”
I laughed through the tears running down my face. “That sounds exactly like Jack!”
The following Sunday, I arrived at the cemetery at the same time as Nick. He was already there, standing at the headstone, and this time, he was holding two tulips instead of one.
He held the second one out to me without saying anything. I placed it beside Nicks’s. Then I set down a small white box tied with kitchen twine, Jack’s favorite lemon pie from the bakery on the corner, and stood back.
We stood together at the headstone, the 16-year-old boy Jack had saved and the 60-year-old woman Jack had loved, and neither of us needed to say anything at all.
