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THIRTY-THREE

Al has quit his job, just as he said he would, and now, on a bright and hopeful December morning, ten days before Christmas, they are working together in the shop.

Al is doing the accounts and Martha is attaching jingle bells to holly wreaths.

Christmas music is playing through the speakers and she feels a swell of joy in the pit of her stomach.

This is it, she thinks, no more stupid job.

No more last-minute emergency chases across the country.

No more overnights. No more switched-off phone.

Just her and her husband, side by side, sharing their space, sharing their beautiful life.

The door opens and a customer walks in. Al straightens up and takes off his reading glasses. “Good morning,” he says to the middle-aged man, in his most welcoming tone.

“Good morning,” the man replies, his stern face softening. “Can you help me? It’s my wife’s birthday. The big five-oh. I want to take something home tonight that will knock her socks off.”

“In which case,” Al says smoothly, “I will hand you over to my beautiful wife, who is the most skilled and knowledgeable florist in the southeast, if not the world.”

Martha shrugs off his compliment with a dry laugh, but her stomach rolls gently.

She likes how proud Al is of her, how much respect he has for her trade, her craft.

And more important, right now she really likes Al.

Ever since he quit his job a week ago, he’s been amazing.

So warm with her, so attentive with the children, especially, strangely enough, with her younger son.

Over the past few days, something remarkable seems to have happened between the two of them.

Jonah had come home early from school last Friday, feeling ill.

Al, who’d been at home with Nala, sat him at the kitchen table with soup and sympathy and then, apparently, had some kind of seismic conversation with him about his gender identity.

Jonah told Al that someone at school had said he looked like a girl and that he’d liked it and now he didn’t know if he was a boy or a girl, and that someone in his class had changed their pronouns and now he was wondering about it too, and Al had told him that whatever he wanted to be was absolutely fine and that he should not rush into anything and that he and Martha would support him in whatever he decided to do.

This whole episode had elevated Martha’s feelings toward Al to a level higher than they had been even at the beginning of their relationship.

That her son, who had always been so delicate, so sensitive, so interior, had chosen Al over her or his father to share this moment with spoke volumes about the caliber of Al’s character.

Martha had suspected for some time that Jonah was troubled by his gender identity and she had just been waiting for the right time for the conversation to blossom.

She should maybe feel a little betrayed by being left out of this moment, but she doesn’t.

She feels vindicated. Justified in her choices.

Justified in her decision to give Al another chance.

She goes to the customer and helps him to put together a ￡100 bouquet of all his wife’s favorite flowers, then she arranges them for him and wraps them in brown paper and pink satin ribbons and puts them into a pink card bag with pink rope handles and the winter sun is picking its way across her shop as he leaves, lighting bits of it up as if to remind her how good she has it, how beautiful her life is.

Al looks up from the paperwork and says, “We’re so lucky, aren’t we?” as if he’d been reading her thoughts.

“Yes,” she says. “We really are.”