Stealing Glads

If Andy Flynn could have had any life, he’d have been a gardener. Once upon a time, he had thought maybe he could landscape people’s fancy lawns, or design displays at one of those estates where tourists came to walk the grounds and admire sunbursts of lilies and rainbows of iris and hibiscus. Now, with age forty fading away in his rearview mirror, he knew the goblins in his head had cost him too many jobs, and he wasn’t going to get another start. So instead he dreamed about a house out in the country somewhere—not a big house, because nobody would want to share it with him—but with a yard where he could dig, and feel the soft earth between his fingers, and set plants into the soil according to the design he would make for himself.

In real life, Andy had a shoebox apartment in Philly. The closest he got to gardening was planting parsley and cilantro and basil seeds in a narrow window box, so they could try to grow in the thin sunlight he got through his only window, which faced south. It wasn’t much of a life, but something had to pay for the apartment, and something had to pay for the pills that at least let Andy get out of bed in the morning. Meanwhile, his goblins made him lash out in panic when any supervisor tried to give him pointers, or else they kept him up all night so he got to work late in the morning and slogged around all day like a stoner. So when a buddy of a buddy pulled some strings and got him a job driving Ruggiero Florist’s delivery truck, Andy knew he’d better hold onto this job with both hands.

The work meant that Andy had to drive from Philly to Wilmington every week to pick up supplies from a warehouse. His rational brain knew the truck wouldn’t tip over, because people didn’t design delivery vans so that if they went around a corner, or ran into a light cross-breeze, they would flop over on their sides like felled trees. When Andy got behind the wheel, though, his rational brain checked out for the duration. The blacktop on the highway stretched out in front of him like a conveyor belt, ready to whisk him off to God-knew-where, and the traffic streamed around him, and huge eighteen-wheelers crawled up on the delivery truck’s back bumper, and all of Andy’s goblins came out to tap dance in his head.

They were tapdancing with a vengeance one night in April, when Andy had been working his job for about three months. It had taken him that long to get up the courage to ask his boss, Charles Ruggiero, if it would be okay to do the Wilmington run late on Tuesday nights: really late, like eleven o’clock. Andy had a key to the warehouse, of course, and he could load up the van himself, he said, and no, he didn’t care that it would cost him more time and hassle to do it alone. Andy would have said anything Ruggiero wanted to hear, as long as he could get permission without having to explain that maybe, with fewer cars on the road, he could avoid some of the head-spinning panic spikes that shut down his breathing for terrifying seconds at a time. Those spikes probably meant he shouldn’t be driving at all.

Ruggiero said that as long as Andy didn’t expect to get paid OT for working off-hours, and as long as the supplies ended up in the shop by nine AM every Wednesday, Andy could make the run at three in the morning for all he cared. So on the first Tuesday night in April, Andy tried his luck at late-night restocking.

It was better, but not by much. Andy got down to Wilmington all right, let himself in, and stocked the van with vases and flowers and EverBloom powder, but on the way back, the panic set in. By the time he made it to the I-95 toll plaza just south of Philly, he felt like a lifeboat cut loose in a storm, sloshing around on the water, miles away from any shore. His tapdancing goblins showed him a live-action sequence of the van flipping over on the highway with him pinned in the cab, tangled up in his seatbelt, waiting for the tankful of gas under him to ignite and blast him clear up to the moon. In real life, the flat highway pavement rocked like waves in his headlights and he could practically smell the fire.

Even so, he made it up to the tollbooth window, pried his hands loose from the steering wheel, and fished his wallet out of his shirt pocket. Then, as the toll taker reached for the couple of dollar bills he held out, the panic spike took him.

He couldn’t do anything but shut his eyes and get his head down as far as he could. One of these times, his goblins told him, his skull might plain crack open from all the pressure inside. He waited, feeling like he was drowning in hot molasses.

Then, from a long way away, he heard a voice. “Mister. Hey, mister. Are you okay?”

Andy raised his head, fighting against the slackness in his muscles. The tollbooth worker had actually opened the booth door—he had never seen that done before—and stepped out to get closer to the van. She was younger than Andy, maybe thirtyish, with smooth skin the color of fresh-turned soil. She had small quick hands inside her blue latex gloves, and dark eyes that rested on his face.

Andy made himself sit up straight. At least nobody was waiting behind him, laying on the horn to tell him to quit being an asshole and find his gas pedal. He held the bills out again, willing his hand not to shake. “Yeah,” he said. His voice felt scratchy and thick. “I’m fine. Thanks.”

She took his money but didn’t move back into the booth. “You sure?” she said. “That was a bad one you just had.”

Andy swallowed. “How do you know what I had?”

She put her head on one side, sizing him up. “Panic attack,” she said. “I guess I know what they look like. I get them enough.”

When she said it, Andy looked at her hand holding his money and something jolted in his chest: something that had nothing to do with his goblins. He could see the blue latex glove trembling just a little, like a leaf in a breeze. His own hands did that all the time.

The girl went on, “Now, I don’t want to hear about no accident north of here because I let some guy drive away from my booth when he didn’t feel good. You sure you don’t need to rest a while or something?”

Down to the soles of his scuffed shoes, Andy wanted to stay there in the toll plaza, where it was safe. He couldn’t say so. “I’m okay,” he said again. “I’m only going to Philly.”

The girl stepped back into the booth but didn’t shut the door. “Yeah? Is that home, for you?”

She wanted to know if he would get home safe. Andy nodded. “I live on Race Street.”

“No kidding?” The girl smiled for the first time. “Me too.” She added, “By the way, my name’s Madelyn.”

Andy managed to smile back. “Nice to meet you, Madelyn. I’m Andy.”

“Will I see you around, Mister Andy?”

Andy didn’t know why it should matter to her, but he said, “Yeah, if you work Tuesday nights. I’ll be through here most weeks.”

She nodded. “I’ll be here. Same time next week?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” she said. “Good night, now.”

“Good night.”

Andy’s foot shook as he carefully pressed the gas pedal and drove away from the booth, but the highway stayed straight and flat in his headlights. He gripped the wheel tight and aimed for home, one slow second at a time.

~

Over the next handful of weeks, Andy learned a few more things about Madelyn. For one thing, she loved flowers, down to the big pink rose decals on the Ruggiero van. “That’s the only thing I don’t like about this job,” she told him, two weeks after they first met. “There’s nothing pretty around.” It turned out, too, that she only lived a handful of blocks away from his own apartment building, and she lived alone, just like he did. The fourth time he came through her booth, when they took another thin slice out of time to talk, she said, “I like working at night. It’s quiet and dark, and I have my place here.” She tapped her gloved hand against the wall of the booth. Again, he saw her fingers trembling, the way he knew she couldn’t stop even when she felt okay. “Everything’s good,” she said.

He understood. That had to be why, without taking so much as a quarter of a second to think through the words so he wouldn’t choke on his tongue when he said them, he heard his own voice asking her to have dinner with him sometime.

Three nights later, on Friday, they sat together in a booth at Mama Carlotta’s Pizza ‘n’ Subs. Even the pills that Andy took religiously every morning couldn’t take much of the edge off when he looked at Madelyn. Tonight she had on a melon-colored dress with a flared skirt; it made her look like a tiger lily, Andy thought, or one of the tall-stemmed gladiolas that he had to wrap up so carefully for transport. Her fingers were delicate but strong, the nails carefully shaped and gleaming with clear polish. Her smile lit up their dim booth, in the quietest and emptiest back corner of the restaurant, more brightly than the actual candle flickering on the table.

She deserved better than a hole-in-the-wall restaurant and a greasy pepperoni-and-mushroom stromboli, but somehow, she didn’t seem to care. By the time their food arrived, Andy found himself chatting with her about doctors and pills, and stretching paychecks like rubber bands, and the way life might have gone if things had been different. Madelyn said that before her own goblins caught up with her, she had wanted to go to college and study horticulture. Andy told her about the house in the country: “It doesn’t have to be much, but I’ll never afford it with the money I make.” Somehow, when he said it to her, the truth didn’t sound so much like the end of the road. She smiled, but her eyes looked sad. “Yeah,” she said, “when your own brain’s out to get you, what are you gonna do?”

Andy gripped each second of the meal as tight as he could. If he lived forever, he thought he would never meet another girl like this one. Life was hard, the world scared the shit out of him, but for once, for once, he wanted to forget what fear felt like. He wanted to run fast enough to leave his goblins behind.

After dinner, as he and Madelyn headed back to her apartment, they walked right into chaos. On the six-hundred block of Race Street, halfway to Madelyn’s building, somebody was having a party. Cars clogged both sides of the street. In the middle of the block, hip-hop music blasted out of the open windows and through the screen door of a townhouse. Lights from the house’s front porch and downstairs rooms made bands of yellow across the dark front yard. Andy could hear people inside, laughing and yelling over the music.

If he had lived on this block, he would have called the cops already. Never mind that it was only nine o’clock on a fine summer night. He started to speed up, to get past and away as fast as he could, but then something on the lawn caught his eye.

Whoever lived in the house had moved some of their furniture outside, probably to make room for all the people they had crammed in. Andy saw a round table, like the kind you’d put a lamp on in your living room. Except, instead of a lamp, it held a vase of flowers.

Gladiolas. Glads, florists called them. That was right: the way their stems stretched up for the sky, and the way their flowers—lavender and yellow, melon-orange and deep rose—flared out like the skirt of a beautiful woman’s dress. Those flowers were glad, all over.

Andy didn’t realize he had stopped on the sidewalk until Madelyn touched his hand. “Hey,” she said. “You coming?”

Her touch tipped a balance in his head. She loved flowers. He could never afford to give her something she deserved.

He glanced up and down the street. No cop car sat in its own slice of shadow. No dog-walkers strolled down the sidewalk. The people in the townhouse were too caught up in their own racket to notice anything. “Go down to the corner,” he told Madelyn. “Wait for me there.”

“What are you doing?”

He didn’t answer, except to shoo her away. If he got caught, she wasn’t going to be mixed up in it. Then, keeping himself in the shadows, he crept onto the strange people’s lawn.

The table sat in the middle of the yard, in a fan of light. Andy ducked down in case anybody came to a window, sucked his breath in tight, and reached out for the vase.

Its weight caught him off-guard. Thick cut glass, filled with water to the brim, it almost toppled him forward as he heaved it off the table. The flower stalks in it stood a good three feet high. Andy gripped the vase tight around the neck, ducked into the shadow again, and lugged the flowers away as fast as he could.

By the time he got to the corner, a handful of yards down the block, sweat stuck his T-shirt to his back and itched under the legs of his jeans. His arms shook and his palms ached where the facets on the vase dug into them. Any second now, he was sure, sirens would start up and cop cars would zoom at him from every direction.

Madelyn was waiting for him. “Andy!” Her eyes were huge in the dark. “What are you doing?”

He shook his head. “Help me. Come on.”

If she didn’t help, he would drop the vase. Already his fingers felt numb. Andy’s goblins shrieked in his head about how pathetic he was. He had no decent job, no money, and now he was stealing somebody else’s fucking flowers, and if he got caught, Madelyn would too…

But then he heard her laughing. “You’re nuts, you know that?” The weight of the vase eased as she caught it by the bottom. “All right, crazy man. Come on.”

They ran the rest of the way to her building, racing to make green lights and walk signals, hanging onto the vase between them like they were Siamese twins. When they got to Madelyn’s building, she fumbled for her keycard and shoved the door open. The tiny elevator, barely big enough for the two of them and the vase, jolted and shuddered its way up to the fifth floor. Safely there, with nobody after them, Madelyn let them into her apartment.

It was just like Andy’s: a studio, shoebox-little, with a tiny galley kitchen. He hung onto the vase again while she pushed off her shoes and turned on the lights.

In another couple of minutes, he figured, he would head home. His goblins reminded him that no woman had wanted him to stick around in a long, long time. If he pushed his luck now, Madelyn would probably never want to see him again.

She came over and took his gift back, wrapping her arms around it as if she were hugging a person. The blooms of the flowers came up higher than the top of her head.

Laughter spilled out of her again. “What,” she asked, “am I gonna do with these?”

“Take them to work.”

Right away, he saw how they would light up her tollbooth. She saw it too, he could tell from her face, but she said, “You know they won’t fit.”

“Then keep them here. They look pretty nice.”

She turned her back on him to put the vase down on the square table in front of her tiny TV. The vase took up almost the whole tabletop. She wasn’t laughing now. Andy figured it was about time for him to tell her good night.

Before he could open his mouth, she turned around. He didn’t believe what she was doing until her hands actually rested on his shoulders. Her clean fresh-air scent hung around him. “Nobody ever gave me flowers like that before,” she said.

He couldn’t let her see how her touch made his skin want to melt. “Nobody ever stole them for you?”

Her smile came back, brighter than any candle. Brighter than any light he knew. “I never knew somebody crazy enough.”

When he put his hands on her waist, carefully, as if she were a bloom he might bruise, she stood on tiptoe to kiss his mouth. He closed his eyes, but not before he saw the stolen flowers behind her, glowing in their vase. And he saw something else: him and Madelyn, side by side in a yard somewhere, laying out plants in the soil.

For this one second, his goblins were quiet. The life he had dreamed about felt close enough to touch. Andy kissed the girl in his arms and willed the peace in him to last for the next slow second, and the next.