Doug Dorst - The Surf Guru

The roses were still drying, and I didn’t have any other deliveries, so I told Smiley I was going for a walk. He told me to check behind Charlotte’s store and see if any packages had been left there.

“I’m not going to steal anything from Charlotte,” I said.

“There’s a fifty in it for you,” he said. His eyes looked lidless, reptilian.

“Forget it,” I told him.

I walked a circle around downtown. I watched a swarm of boys play kill-the-carrier on the middle school field until one kid got tackled on his face and came up bloody. I walked past the bank where Katie worked, but I didn’t see her car in the parking lot. I looked into Charlotte’s flower shop and saw her sitting at the counter, her chin in her palms, the place empty except for her. I called the hospital from a pay phone to find out about Trace, and when the girl asked if I was family, I said I was his brother. She shuffled some papers and clacked some keys and told me they didn’t have any information yet. When I got back to the store, Smiley was in the back room, laying the black roses to rest in a long white box. He put the last one in, fitted the lid on, and tied the box with a black bow. I could see he was having fun.

“These are ready to go,” he said. “Got another one for you, too.” He passed me a delivery tag. It was an order for a dozen roses, red, long-stemmed, in a Deluxe De-Lovely decorative vase. The tag said the roses were for Mo.

I was about to ask Smiley if Trace could use my employee discount, so maybe he could get back some of what he’d paid, but I stopped myself. Trace couldn’t have ordered these roses. Not while he was laid out in a white room with masked people looming over him and wielding lasers and blades, all to fix the damage done by a steel-toed nobody he’d caught pissing on the rug in Mo’s bedroom during a party.

“Who ordered these?” I said.

He went out to the counter and came back with the sales slip. “Guy named Archer,” he said. “You know him?”

I didn’t. I’d never met any Archer.

“Here’s the note,” Smiley said. He handed me a sealed envelope. Maureen was written on the front in bold blue ink. On the other side, this guy had drawn a blue heart over the flap, like it was a seal. He’d drawn badly. The heart was uneven, distended on one side like it had a valve about to blow.

“Can we open this?” I asked. “I need to read it.”

“I can’t do that,” Smiley said. “It would be a serious breach of professional ethics.” He took an electric hot pot off one of the shelves above the workbench and filled it in the bathroom sink. He set it in front of me. He plugged it in. “You, on the other hand,” he said, “are not bound by any such code.”

The water bubbled hot and I waved the envelope gently in the rising steam until I could peel the flap open. On the card inside, the guy had written Mo a poem. A poem that rhymed. Heavy with the platitudes of love. The last line: Til the next sweet time our bodies meet. The whole thing was one big sloppy overshare. I’d have been embarrassed for the guy if I didn’t already hate him, whoever he was.

“That’s some of the cheesiest shit I’ve ever read,” Smiley said over my shoulder. “She ought to dump his ass on principle. Though I do admire his rhyme of ‘lilacs are mauve’ with ‘plush treasure-trove.’ ”

“Is this a joke?” I asked. “Are you behind this? Is someone fucking with me?”

“What’s the problem?” Smiley said.

I told him what the problem was. How Mo was Trace ’s girlfriend, how they’d been together for some crazy number of years already. How Mo, who was older and had money, had bought us alcohol since we were way before legal, and she hadn’t ever minded cleaning me up whenever I got sick on myself or talking me down when the night suddenly turned hopeless. How the two of them had written a toast for me to give at my dad’s fourth wedding when all I wanted to do was curse everyone there. How, as combustible as they could be, Trace and Mo were the one thing I could count on anymore. How there wasn’t any room for some rhyming motherfucker named Archer.

“Hmm,” Smiley said. I knew he’d quit believing in borders like these a long time ago. “The guy paid with a credit card,” he offered. “I’ll give you the number, if you want.”

I told him I needed the rest of the afternoon off. He put his hand on my shoulder. “I’ll make you a deal,” he said. “Take these to your friend, and deliver the black ones, too, and then you can call it a day. Take the van home with you, just in case Charlotte’s thinking about slashing the tires again.” Then he disappeared into the front room, carrying a pail full of lark-spur and Queen Anne’s lace.

I stood at Mo’s door, holding tightly to the smooth female curves of the vase. The day remained cloudless. A bluer sky never existed.

I rang the bell three, four times. I knocked. I called her name.

She answered the door in a thick green terry-cloth robe big enough for a boxer. Her face was pink and small and her hair was wet. She smelled like lavender.

“I was in the bath,” she said. “I was thinking.”

“You’ve had a hard day,” I said.

“Like you wouldn’t believe.”

I handed her the flowers. “Maybe these will help.”

“They’re beautiful,” she said. “Thanks, Phil.” She led me into the living room and set the flowers on the coffee table. The air was cool and sweet. Ringo, her German shepherd, was lying on his side in a rectangle of sunlight. He was an old, old dog, arthritic and crooked. Around his head was a plastic cone to keep him from chewing himself open.

“How long does he have to wear that?” I asked.

“Until the end,” she said. “Which is probably going to be soon.”

“That’s sad,” I said. “He’s a good dog.” All around the house were photos of Mo and Ringo growing up alongside each other.

She closed her eyes and smelled the flowers, and while she was doing it I counted the seven freckles on her nose. I’d been counting her freckles for years. Usually I did it when I was loaded, to reassure myself that things in the world outside my head were still the same.

“Thanks for the roses,” she said. “And thanks for driving Trace this morning.”

“Aren’t you going to open the card?” I said, pointing. It was tucked between the stems, announcing itself whitely.

“How did I miss that?” she said. She plucked it out. She used her palm to hide the blue heart and the ink on the card.

I watched her read, thinking, Please don’t bullshit me, please .

She looked up when she was done. Her eyes were blue-gray and revealed nothing. “Oh,” she said. “They’re from my dad.” The top of her robe had come open, showing a triangle of smooth, pale skin. With one hand she guided it closed again.

Ringo started to whine. That dog understood things. I got up and brought him a chew toy, a length of thick rope with a knot tied in the middle. He gummed it and looked satisfied.

As I was sitting back down, Mo took hold of my wrist and steered me into the loveseat next to her, smiling like nothing was wrong, like a girl wasn’t dead, like Trace wasn’t maybe blind by now, like she and I weren’t sitting together on a couch where she’d probably screwed a guy named Archer.

“So,” she said, “are you going to tell me why your fingers are black?”

“I have been implicated in many things today,” I said. “Today I feel cursed.”

“You should try turpentine.”

“You’re changing the subject.”

“No, I’m not. Not if the subject is all this paint on you, which it is.”

“The subject,” I said, “is Archer.”

Mo was quiet.