Five
The 300-balloon arch is twenty-five feet long, a candy-colored display of peach, gold and Tiffany blue curving over the brunch spread. Plates of French toast, eggs benedict and shakshuka crowd a cream table cloth. Candles drip. Guests pick at their food. The wait staff alternates between refilling coffee cups and passing out mimosas and bloody marys. Lena is not drinking because she is pregnant, but she encourages her friends to have fun. It’s her baby shower. She orders another bottle of champagne and relishes in the attention her round belly brings her. She’d never been popular in school, and she likes the taste of it.
In the middle of the table, a white ceramic vase holds a single pink flower. Lena recognizes it. The carnation is the cheapest flower, she thinks, but it is not the least beautiful. She’d often confused certain rose varieties with carnations when she helped Ana at the shop. The flowers were that similar. But the rainbow carnations that Ana dyed were ugly. Ana had been tacky. Ana liked doing the floral arrangements for Sweet Sixteens. Ana had lacked class. She lacked manners, too.
The baby twitches inside Lena’s womb like a fish flicking its tail, and Lena returns her attention to the party. She is reminded so often of the flower shop that she resents Ana for hiring her in the first place. The memories are an unwanted distraction. How many baby showers will be thrown in her honor? She must soak up the experience. Scheduled sex hadn’t been pleasant.
Lena’s mother sits across the table from Lena shining with pride. Her eyes have been misty all morning. The first grandchild of her only daughter! Packages wrapped in every shade of yellow topple over one another on the gift counter. The food is rich and plentiful, and the space is light-filled. Still, an image of Ana flits through Lena’s mind. Small, brown-skinned and stony-faced.
Last week, when Lena had dropped by the shop one afternoon to make sure Ana understood the lawyer’s letter, Ana wouldn’t even look at Lena.
“You probably feel confused,” Lena had said, taking a step toward her. “And I’m genuinely sorry it has to be this way.”
Ana had stepped back behind the counter, and Lena suddenly felt aware of her body, of the room. She was large, looming, and the smell of plant life was thick. Had her visit to the shop been a violation? Lena had been the shop assistant for close to a year. How could Ana, a working mother of two, not see that firing Lena for being pregnant had been unethical? And then rebuke the olive branch Lena offered by stopping by? Couldn’t they have both expressed regret for the way things had turned out? Island cultures were supposed to value community. Lena might have dropped the whole thing, had Ana had more grace.
At least Lena had learned something through the flower shop ordeal. Recently, she’d added a floral consultation to the end of a client meeting. It was her first paid project as an interior designer in years. “Carnations are underrated,” she’d said to the friend of her mother, who needed a quote for a living room refresh. It was a simple statement—“Carnations are underrated”—but it worked. It helped Lena communicate that she was of the people. Not uppity, like so many of her peers.
Lena has an $80,000 Steinway baby grand on the first floor of her house. “It’s a rental,” she assures friends, talking about the piano. “I keep meaning to play, but then I’m so busy with work.” Her Brooklyn brownstone, on the other hand, is not a rental. “It has good bones,” Lena told her father over mezcal margaritas during a long weekend in San Miguel the previous year. “The neighborhood is up-and-coming.” The cosmetic surgery practice had brought Lena’s father surprising wealth. Mr. Hartman had already put Lena through art school, and if Lena was going to be an interior designer, she needed interiors to design. So the house was hers. “An early wedding present,” he had said, footing the half-a-million dollar down payment.
Lena picks up her phone to check Zillow. After a year, Brooklyn has lost its shine. Lately she’s been thinking about her brownstone as an investment property. A little design project. Something to flip and make extra money from. There’s no parking in Bedstuy, and the nearest garage is six blocks away. It’s loud, too. Every afternoon, Lena hears kids from the nearby high school shouting as class lets out. Plus, with the baby coming, maybe it’s time to leave the city. Lena is not twenty-five anymore.
She sees a listing for a gorgeous 1929 Tudor home on a half-acre in Larchmont, just forty-five minutes north of the city. The house, which is close to a private elementary school, sits on a small hill, and the lawn is a brilliant green thanks to an underground sprinkler system. A high-end renovation features French doors, hardwood flooring and a restored fireplace. Lena takes a screenshot of the listing and sends it to her father. Chances are he’ll know an agent showing the property. She wonders if the piano rental company that she uses delivers to Westchester. Maybe with the extra time and space, she’ll finally start lessons.
“Hey!” Lena’s sister-in-law claps her hands together on the other side of the table. “I have some advice for our mother-to-be.”
“Don’t get a Carribean nanny,” interrupts a friend from art school. “I know how it sounds. But trust me.”
Lena’s younger brother, Alen, gives Lena a sharp look, and Lena feels embarrassed.
The sister-in-law frowns, then rolls her eyes. “Two words,” she says. “Night nurse. I wouldn’t have survived without one.”
Lena’s mother wants to know what a night nurse is.
“God’s gift to working mothers. They stay overnight to feed and change the baby so you can sleep.”
“Sounds expensive.”
“Send me her contact information,” Lena says. Such synchronicity, she thinks. She can put her settlement money toward a night nurse. It’s perfect, but she keeps it to herself. Lena hasn’t told any of her friends about the lawsuit. She barely told her fiance. None of them would have understood.
Even her lawyer, a trained steward of ethics, had used the word “sue” while discussing the case over the phone. “You want to sue?” she’d said, incredulously. Lena didn’t like her choice of words and had paused, collected herself, and worked to clarify.
“It’s symbolic, of course. It’s not about money. It’s the principle.”
The lawyer coughed, then excused herself. “Of course. I’ll start drafting a demand letter.” Lena had felt self-conscious then, too. Still, it was more than obvious that Lena was the wronged party.
Lena was somewhat familiar with the legal process. Her senior year of college, she’d hired someone to write a paper for her, and the adjunct professor had caught on. My tutor and I worked on the paper together, Lena explained to the department head, and then the chancellor. She had hired a tutor. The professor was unaware that Lena’s father had made significant donations to the college since Lena’s enrollment. At his daughter’s urging, Mr. Hartman had accused the adjunct professor of defamation, and her contract with the school lapsed at the end of the semester. For that, Lena had felt bad. She had been cheating. Enough time had passed that she could admit the truth. It had been excessive for her school to threaten expulsion over the misstep, yes, but the teacher needn’t have suffered. But Lena had been young at the time, self-centered. Now she was embarrassed about the way it had gone down. The privilege she’d wielded. This time was different, though. In her heart, Lena knew that she was standing up for women and mothers everywhere. But she didn’t want to have to explain, so she told people she quit. Everyone had said, “Makes sense.”
There was right, and there was wrong. Pregnancy discrimination was wrong.
Four
The FedEx envelope is addressed to Ms. Ana Gomez, and it arrives at the flower shop a month after Lena’s last day, the day she’d stormed out red-faced. Ana’s new employee, a hard-working high school senior, signs for the envelope, then hands it to Ana as he leaves to run deliveries. Later, Ana, her husband David, and their girls will sit together and have dinner. For now, Rosa and Lily watch cartoons and giggle in the back room while Ana luxuriates in the peace their new iPad grants her. Working on a flower arrangement for the next morning, Ana holds baby blue eucalyptus against a bin of orange roses to gauge the color palette.
Ana is designing a wedding bouquet that is inspired by a “New York sunset”–the bride’s words, not hers–but she likes the concept. Engrossed, she puts the FedEx envelope next to the cash register. The client is on a budget, but Ana is determined that nobody will suspect it based on the flower arrangements. Lavender carnations, pink lilies and a few creamsicle-colored roses, all nestled among silver-gray Lamb’s Ear. The arrangement is carnation-heavy, but they work to spotlight the more expensive flowers, which are like the glowing edges of a cloud that fails to obscure the sun. She starts to plan how she will stage the bouquet for social media. The shop’s following is growing; she just hit the 2,000 mark. People seem to like the photos of her children the most.
When Ana tears open the letter, it is the end of the day and she is tired. The letter is long and serious with formal headings. She skims its contents and her eyes land on “loyal employee,” “wrongfully,” “undue hardship,” and “discrimination.” There is a number, $10,000, buried in the last paragraph. Concerned, Ana returns to the first page and examines the sender. It’s an unfamiliar address. Then she reads the opening paragraph and sees Lena’s name.
“On behalf of Lena Hartman,” the letter says. Though Ana is unfamiliar with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, she understands that Lena Hartman is threatening her. As she reads the details of the letter more carefully and shows the letter to David that night, she understands that it was a mistake to fire Lena. No, it was a mistake to hire Lena.
Ana asks friends if anyone has a lawyer to recommend, and someone puts her in touch with the cousin of a colleague’s wife. Frustratingly, the immigration lawyer Ana speaks with is more concerned with David’s green card status entering the equation than anything related to pregnancy discrimination. When the lawyer googles “Hartman,” she lowers her tone and asks Ana if she has the money.
Three
After Ana tapes up a “Help Wanted” sign, Lena Hartman, the lonely housewife, is the last person she expects to hire. She imagines a teenager from the high school on Marcy will come on the weekends. A student athlete maybe, since there are heavy boxes to lift. She and David are prepared to offer $10 an hour, cash, and only fifteen hours each week. But Lena is pushy about wanting the job.
David warms quickly to the idea of a rich, white lady dealing with customers, while Ana wants to stick with the original plan to hire a kid.
“You’re not the one who’s going to have to talk to her,” Ana says.
“But she knows things,” David argues.
Ana sucks her teeth. “What things?”
“Rich people things.”
Ana ignores David all through dinner, focusing on the girls, the radio, anything but him. Later, in bed, she agrees that more people like Lena coming to the shop isn’t a bad thing.
“Let’s just see,” David says.
The work is not hard, Ana thinks. They can give this woman something to do. When she agrees to hire Lena, it is more out of pity than anything else.
On Lena’s days, Ana hands her a list of addresses and a trunk full of flowers. Lena returns hours later, tired but spirited, often with an iced latte and a bagged pastry. Doing deliveries is gratifying, Ana knows. She can see it on Lena’s face, and Lena says so, too. “It is a gift to give,” she remarks. The women agree that even grieving customers light up when armfulls of white lilies or funeral roses arrive.
Ana imagines that Lena’s job is made even more enjoyable because she has a shiny black SUV to drive around in. Unlike David in the rusted out van, Lena never returns looking overwhelmed. She remains unaware of the rising rent, the bookkeeping, the money Ana and David struggle to save. Lena asks multiple times a week what Ana is doing at the computer.
“Money,” Ana says. “I’m doing the money.”
Though it is innocent, curious, Lena’s question annoys Ana. What does she think a business is? Lena reminds Ana of a kid making a game out of work.
“Let’s play Flower Shop!” she’s heard her own children say, equipped with flower clippings and a few nickels. Then, “Let’s play wedding!”
Play education, play doctor, play lawyer, Ana wants to tell them.
Often, Lena arrives late and leaves early. After her deliveries, she chats with customers, recommending first flowers, and then retinol creams and yoga studios and upstate vacation properties. Ana does the math and calculates that every week Lena spends most of her paycheck on pastries and to-go coffees. The rest she spends on flowers. But the customers return, and most of the time they buy what Lena recommends. Lena’s book club comes into the shop, and Lena gives them a tour of the different sections and then brings them to the register to buy hundreds of dollars worth of flowers.
“Let me ring you up,” Lena says. The women pay with credit cards, and Lena adds a 5% service charge without asking. After the group leaves, Lena turns to Ana to explain. “Was that OK? It’s kind of standard. I think it’s a good idea.”
Ana laughs, waves Lena away. “Yes, sure. A great idea.”
On a Thursday, Lena returns from her deliveries earlier than usual. An old man in a waxed jacket and loafers enters the store in front of her. His patterned button-down hangs loose on a lanky frame, and the bright spot on his bald head shines as he looks around. His skin is tanned. “This is my father,” Lena announces, and the man smiles.
They don’t match, Ana thinks, looking back and forth between father and daughter. Lena has sharp lines on a soft body, a round face with penciled eyebrows and a blunt haircut framing the beginning of a double chin. Her father is thin and well-postured. “Congratulations,” he says, grinning at the bins of roses displayed at the front of the store. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.” His blue eyes sparkle. For a moment, Ana is unsure why he is congratulating her. But as she watches him breathe in the sweet smell of the shop, she catches herself smiling. Who knows what nonsense Lena told him. He seems friendly. He is filled with wonder. “Nice to meet you,” Ana says. He chuckles. “I hope my daughter isn’t giving you any grief.”
“Ha ha,” Lena says, rolling her eyes. She steps closer to Ana, leaving her father to admire the sunflowers. “My dad wants to take me for a coffee.” She smiles, already backing away from the counter. “I’ll bring you something. What kind of muffin do you like?”
Ana looks around the shop. It has been a slow morning, and everything is in its place. “Nothing for me.” she says. “But maybe something for the girls?” Rosa and Lily have been playing quietly in the storeroom since lunchtime, and she doesn’t expect it to last much longer. “Of course,” Lena says.
Lena’s father approaches the register with a bundle of sunflowers. “For Lena’s mother. Happy wife, happy life.” He winks, pays, and they walk out together, Lena leading the way. When she returns twenty-five minutes later, Lena is alone. She sets a box of muffins on the counter and hands Ana a to-go cup. “Milk and sugar,” she says, which is exactly how Ana likes her coffee. Ana makes a mental note to apologize to David later. Maybe he’d been right about Lena. She isn’t that bad. The father is nice. Funny.
After a few uneventful months, Lena announces she is pregnant. She tears up as she delivers the news, and Ana recalls the feeling of being with child. As miraculous as it was mundane, to be making life.
“I can’t lift anything heavier than thirty-five pounds. And I can’t stand for long periods.” Lena touches her belly. “But I can answer the phone.”
Ana and David need Lena to lift heavy boxes, though. They need her to drive across town with ten centerpieces, dropping them at ten different addresses. Ana thinks maybe Lena can watch Rosa and Lily while she manages things up front, but soon Rosa is crying and Lena is saying that she can’t carry the girls around. “How much do they weigh?” Lena asks and points out that she isn’t a babysitter, anyway.
Ana tries to keep in mind being pregnant for the first time. The worry and uncertainty. But the work starts to pile up all the same. Soon Ana and David are staying late again, finishing the day’s tasks. Rosa and Lily are overtired and have meltdowns at bedtime. Exactly what they were trying to avoid when they’d hired Lena. “I worked through two babies,” Ana says to David. “We can’t pay her if she can’t do the job.” David agrees that they need to talk to Lena.
Two
Double-bolting her front entry, Lena Hartman is aware that she and her fiance are two of very few white, non-native New Yorkers on her new block. But gentrification is tricky! And Bed-Stuy is an affordable, up-and-coming neighborhood. A whole building for the cost of a Manhattan apartment. Five bedrooms, four baths. A back patio and a half-finished basement. She is tearing out all the ugly pine cabinetry in the kitchen and replacing it with high-gloss white lacquer touch cabinets. Subway tiles for the backsplash. A marble counter. Oak floors stained gray, and, of course, all new appliances. The bathrooms she plans to do in the style of her favorite boutique hotel. Simple. Understated. Cement and frosted glass. And everything else just needs a fresh coat of paint. The brownstone still has its original molding—that is a blessing—and since she has given up her old doorman, Thomas, in favor of a whole townhouse, she plans to install a security system with a video doorbell.
On Fridays, Lena starts visiting the family-owned flower shop down the block to purchase fresh bouquets for her living room and kitchen. Even in the midst of the renovations, cut flowers make the house a home. Plus, she feels part of the community when she pushes the glass door into the quaint little shop. The displays at the flower shop are not the Martha Stewart quality she was accustomed to in Manhattan, but they eclipse the options in her hometown of Houston, which were more bunched than arranged. The shop’s walls are pink and green, and fairy lights dot the ceiling. Lena lets the owners design whatever bouquet they want. “I trust you,” she says, maintaining eye contact. After months of regular visits, she considers Ana, the wife, and David, the husband, friends. Real friends. Or at least close acquaintances.
Sure, there’s a minor communication barrier, but Lena studied abroad in Spain her junior year. She can tell it delights Ana and David when she speaks to them in Spanish. “Como estan las niñas?” she says, asking about little Rosa and Lily, who are probably in the back watching TV. The family speaks Portuguese at home, but Spanish shares a wall. She tells her brother, Alen, about the time she spends at the shop with Ana, David and their two young girls. Alen jokes, says Lena is a try-hard, but Lena feels good about the money she spends there, her little investment in the community. When she sees a sign in the storefront window, “We Are Hiring,” it occurs to Lena that she could apply. Why not, she thinks, do more? It would be unconventional, sure. But it was interesting. Experiential. And she desperately needs something to do.
At first, Ana Gomez laughs. “You want to work here?” she says, raising her eyebrows. Lena feels impatient as she watches Ana bend to lift a box onto her workstation. She takes scissors to the top of it and starts stacking its contents onto a nearby shelf. “I’ve always wanted to learn about the business,” Lena replies. She watches Ana strain to lift a second box onto the table. It contains small plastic bags filled with tiny, polished pebbles. “It’s not a job for you,” Ana says.
For this, Lena resents Ana. What does Ana know of Lena, of her capabilities and potential for contribution? What does Ana know of anything? Ana’s hiring efforts amount to a paper Help Wanted sign taped to a dirty window. Lena feels judged. But just a fingernail’s scratch beneath her indignation, she knows that she’s never had a job, not really. The summer after her senior year, her mother’s best friend presented her with an internship at an architecture firm. She wasn’t an architect, so her tasks had been limited. Research, file management, social media. But after three months she felt certain she could take what she’d learned, combine it with her fine arts education, and launch a home renovation business. She just needed her father’s credit card to pay for the business website.
On the day of its launch, Lena threw a party to celebrate the inauguration of her #girlboss life. Her classmates spoke loudly as they passive-aggressively critiqued late-stage capitalism. Her then-boyfriend rolled his eyes, but even he did not come to her defense. Now, several years later, her secret shame is that the most effort she ever put into her business had been the website and launch party. Good ideas came easily to her, but momentum wasn’t her strong suit. And so, this job at the flower shop was a chance to prove herself.
At home, on the phone, Lena whines to her father about Ana and David. “I could bring them a lot of new clients. They have no online presence.” She pours a glass of red wine and drops an ice cube into it. “Honestly,” she takes a sip. “I could make a difference.”
“Mmm,” her father agrees. “You know what they say about idle hands.”
The next day, Lena returns to Ana with the promise that she will send all of her friends to the flower shop. “And then you’ll get referrals from those people,” she says. Ana stops rummaging around in the supply closet and nods. She’s listening. Lena can tell she is considering it now. After all, Ana is a businesswoman.
Late morning on the third day, chimes jingle as Lena pushes into the flower shop. She breathes in the familiar scent of rose, lilac and greenery. Ana and David are in the back talking. Lena rarely sees them in the shop at the same time and takes it as a good sign. Lena smiles wide. Ana glances at her husband, then nods. She turns to Lena. “OK,” she says. “We can try.”
Lena squeals and rushes over to hug Ana. “You won’t regret this,” she says.
And so, on Thursday, Friday and Saturday afternoons, Lena does deliveries and helps Ana close up. She rearranges arrangements and sweeps the floor. She learns how to run the register. She feels accomplished and is proud of the slim envelope of twenties Ana hands her at the end of the week. The job is clearly good for her. She rarely goes for a second glass of wine in the evenings anymore, and she falls asleep quickly at bedtime. When Rosa or Lily want to be held, Lena lifts them up and hugs them as if they were her own.
One
Ana Gomez fries eggs for dinner in her family’s one-bedroom apartment fourteen blocks from their store. She lays out bread and butter. Her children like American cheese, so she puts it out, too. Tomorrow she will prepare vegetables and meat. It’s not that they can’t afford it. It’s just that it’s past nine o’clock, and Rosa and Lily need to get to bed. It’s summer, and they are with Ana all day, every day, driving her crazy. They want snacks. A puzzle piece has fallen out of reach. One of them has pinched the other.
Ana’s husband, David, is asleep already because tomorrow at four a.m. he will leave their apartment in Brooklyn and drive their junky Nissan to 28th Street to pick up roses, lilies, orchids, hydrangea, tulips and peonies along with greens and fillers. He’s lucky, Ana thinks, to be in bed while Rosa whines that the ketchup is runny. Ana misses sitting in the passenger seat for early morning rides over the Manhattan Bridge and through a Chinatown so quiet it is unrecognizable. For David’s sake, she prays the van doesn’t overheat again.
Farther north, florists and set designers and restaurateurs double park between 6th and 7th Avenue to load their open trunks with flowers. August is for marigolds and sunflowers, and Ana would love to see the thick bands of orange and yellow in the warehouses. She wants to smell the grassy fragrance, clean and sharp. But she never learned how to drive back home—hadn’t needed to in St. Anthony—and so it is David’s routine to make the trip to the city for the flowers. Before the girls, it was different.
For the past several years, Ana and David have spent every day at the shop, hours past close. Ana, packing and unpacking, caring for cut flowers and taking inventory. David, making deliveries, running errands and doing maintenance. Their children fuss until they fall asleep in the back room. But business is good. These days, people want flowers for no reason. Nobody is getting married. Nobody died. Eight years ago, it was weddings, funerals, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and prom. Now, wealthy women call the shop to set up weekly deliveries. They pass by the store and pick something from the window display. “Flowers just really brighten a room,” they say, too slowly. Ana is patient. She nods. She knows what money looks like. It is understated, in dark colors. It asks for the price when the price is already displayed. It wants ease. It wants to feel validated.
Ana remembers her customers’ names and thanks God for their spending habits as she hands over fresh cut stems wrapped in white paper. She avoids plastic, not because she is particularly “green,” but because she is cultivating an eco-friendly reputation. “Always nice to see you,” Ana tells Charlie, a kind older man who seems especially happy as of late.
Ana invents stories about other regulars, like Kenn, who turns as blush as hydrangea at checkout. Perhaps the bouquets aren’t for his wife, Ana muses, but for a mistress. Or a mister. Or maybe Kenn only comes to the shop to spend a few moments with Ana herself. Does he pine for her as she rings him up? She is a little bit older, but her long hair is glossy and her teeth are white.
And then there’s the new neighbor, Lena Hartman, who lingers whenever she stops by the shop, practicing her broken Spanish. She is in her late twenties, Ana guesses, with dyed chestnut brown hair. It’s the patronage of people like her, loyal customers with expendable income, new to the neighborhood, that spells out success for Ana and her family. Now Ana and David are able to save. Soon they will replace the eighteen-year-old van that David spends half his time repairing. Then they will start a college fund for their daughters. Neither of them would have guessed, when they left St. Anthony, that money would cease to be a problem. It’s time that they don’t have enough of.
Case in point, it is past 9 pm, and Ana is just now getting dinner on the table. Her girls ought to be in bed already, but instead corn chips and television stave their hunger. Lena Hartman kept them all at the shop an hour after close with a request for two custom arrangements. At $79 each, it was worth it. Still, how does Lena not know what time they close? She has quickly become the most regular regular. Fretting over her reflection in the display cases. Constantly checking her phone.
Ana feels a prickle of irritation as she recalls Lena Hartman’s needy, moneyed presence in the shop. Over-caffeinated, making every greeting exuberant. Her smooth, pale skin, dewy and unmoving, and the diamond engagement ring she wears flipped toward her palm. Does she want to show off the stone or not? Lena is proof that all the money in the world can’t buy someone a sense of self.
Ana shrugs. Pours two glasses of milk. She is giving the woman too much thought. Há tudo na vinha do Senhor, she says to herself. It takes all types. She calls her daughters to the table, then decides they can eat on the living room floor just this once. After dinner, she will count the day’s money. She hasn’t told David yet, but soon they will hit the mark. Ten thousand dollars saved toward a car. It makes her smile to think about delivering the good news. The road to success is long, but she walks it with her family, and daily she is surrounded with flowers.
