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Show Blue Run/95 miniature yellow roses she'd started to wrap for Danielle Treadway's bridal party Dr. Jenkins held me on his lap. He was white-faced, said, "Watch your head, Dee " Then it took off, so I fell flat on the metal gurney which was the sort of cold the dead have about them. While Dr. Jenkins sewed her, Mama told what had happened. She said the hell with Danville women lying how they'd fallen off chairs or tripped into doors or got tangled up with the well house in the dark of night Why, Yell County women must have been the clumsiest on earth, if all the lies be believed. A full-through laceration. Doc Jenkins said. He could see her skull, touch it with his fingertips, and an infection was just starting. Encephalitis, he called it. "Jesus, Lord Dee?" he'd said "Does the son of a bitch have to kill you?" Together, they ran a flower shop right on main street in Danville, and by the time I was born a long list of customers were showing up for their weekly petunias, what Daddy called every flower he ever saw on this earth, a petunia. They were in the bidness of selling petunias. Daddy write with a flourish on a ticket stub before he made deliveries. Mama'd tape them to the cold-room door: Carolyn Beavers has just ordered two-dozen purple petunias, or Reverend Noblett's sister needs petunias for the alter bouquet Whenever Miss Ruby Titsworth was due a petunia delivery, Mama'd slice her name in pieces with trimming shears. I can remember that, Daddy's blue-inked loops and Stepwell curves-pieces of Ruby all over our floor He cut firewood on the side, split seasoned oak in rickets and cords up against the back wall of Tri-County hunt club-and this made money so Dee let it slide, though I've always believed that the goings-on out in Solgahatchia bottom involved more than chainsaws and draglines. Men swore secrets out there that never saw the light of day, not til this second. I can't be sure of it at all, but I was there once I believe. Surely I was there, though that memory bleeds at the edges |