Goodbye to the Flowers by Carolynn Mireault

Afternoon at Miss Allyger’s store, light comes through the crosses on the dossals, runs onto the folk-art trinkets and postcards of the mountains, which Lavina restocks from a woven bin. It is her seventeenth birthday, and there’s yellow cake on the cutting table in foil between bolts of jewel green and chapped violet. On the urethane sheeting, an industrial tape dispenser is placed compulsively on the first diagonal measuring line. A wall hanging embroidered with a simple horse is tacked by one of its corners. Miss Allyger is in and out, choosing rolls of poor-selling madras and paisley for the sale cart. She leaves the door open, but the bells keep softly going.

She has such a way about her that is between old and young, a sort of damage that has reduced her to unrelenting patience. Unmarried at forty-six, she still wears the black, Gotte to herself. Lavina observes her sometimes with pity, or great understanding, leaned over the battery-powered register as if learning to use it for the first time with each sale.

Joseph has been off in Pittsburgh the last two weeks but gets back today, is picking Lavina up in an hour and a half, and she’s consumed with dreaming up the talk they’ll have after all she’s heard around town and from the Hostetler twins. The day will be good or ruined, depending on what he says and how. If he owns up, admits. The thing about the girl, especially, who had a peculiar fascination, asked a favor—for his entire foot inside her—and he obliged, Lavina knows.

Something is wrong, Miss Allyger can tell, but it is not her way to ask exactly what.

A teenaged English girl comes in with her mother. They are six feet tall and in spaghetti strap dresses with straw crossbodies making channels between their breasts. Miss Allyger says something to the mother about if she needs any help. The teenaged girl goes toward the two queen beds in the back—there to exhibit the shoofly quilts Miss Allyger does in the guild—and looks at them like a memory as if, in the borders, is a boy, or her father, smiling from a berg she can’t scale.

Lavina stares at her dress, flouncing down to a cotton ruffle. The shoulders have freckles scorched pock around the blades. Her thin silver sandals don’t have a heel but still make sound on the wood. Blue toenail polish chips off. She’s Lavina’s age or a year younger. Her cheeks have fat in taut, pink bladders. Round caramel glasses are pushed into her hair. From the beds, she makes her way to the wall of pillows where, bored, she studies the stitching of an orange star, then that of flesh-puce peonies. The frowzy ears of a Cocker Spaniel and its nursing pup.

She goes to the basket of tree ornaments, marked down since it is June. Some are snow-covered pinecones. Some, swollen bells of red felt. She picks up an angel with a string loop coming out of its faceless head, and without grace or measure, tucks it into her purse. Her first day being seventeen, Lavina doesn’t move an inch, waiting to see if the girl will turn and meet her eyes, but she walks back near the beds as if now she’s reclaimed something that was once hers.

Before he left, Joseph told her he already couldn’t wait to be back, that nothing would change now would it and not to look at him like that, not to worry one bit, that there was nothing evil inside him, no ill intention, that no eye would bat, no hand would fumble, and just to count down to her birthday when they would be together in his buggy. He said, on return, he would pick her up from Miss Allyger’s and go to her house for dinner before even going home. He promised out loud or with his eyes.

The girl’s mother gives Miss Allyger a check, but Lavina can’t tell what for. There is nothing to bag up, though it appears to have to do with the girl, losing her mind by the queen quilts.

“See you Friday, then,” the woman says to Miss A. Then, “Zo!” to her daughter, and motions toward the lot. Their station wagon still has the driver’s side open.

Following behind, the girl pauses at the register and takes peanut bark from the dish. It is in front of Miss Allyger, who does not mind. Some girls come in and take whatever they want. Lavina has seen it before, time and time again.

When they are gone, Lavina takes a broom from behind the desk to sweep the entrance, where breeze has pulled in loose straw and dirt so bald it never settles. Miss Allyger is reorganizing fabric swatches three feet away. Lavina’s sweeping is aimless. Distracted, she takes the broom the wrong way a few times, dragging straw and dirt in rather than out.

“Did you know them?” Lavina asks.

“No, dear.”

“Oh. What did she buy?”

Miss Allyger is thoughtful for a moment. She is never in a rush.

Finally, it’s, “Would you please do the candles? Make sure all their labels are facing us?”

Passing the rack of chafe-looking aprons printed with stripes, roses, and pies, Lavina goes to the candles, hand-poured by the Millers down the road, whose resources are limited after losing Mr. Miller last year to a battle with an eighteen-wheeler. The labels all face forward, but she messes with them anyway, if only to hear the noise of glass on the maple. Attached to the candle shelf, a paper cone flower is made out of sheet music. Lavina turns to check the clock over the register, but no time has passed. Miss Allyger brings her a goat figurine. She holds it for a moment, looking down at its scurs, then hands it back.

“I don’t want it.”

Carolynn Mireault is a recipient of the St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award in Literature and the Florence Engel Randall Fiction Award. She holds an MFA from Boston University. Her work has appeared in CRAFT, Cutleaf, Orca, and Pithead Chapel among other venues. Find her work at carolynnmireault.com.

25 July 2025