I don’t know where Doris gets all her flowers. I guess they’re driven in at night from far away, in trucks like big, wet gardens on wheels. All I know is her shop is the only place in town where you can see those amazing colors—purple, orange, yellow, pink, red—that grow naturally in other places. Sometimes I stop by just to take it all in. It’s a magical place. Like an oasis in the desert. Which is what it is for real, I suppose, no like to it, seeing as how the dust blows in and turns everything khaki here.
Doris is bashful, and she communicates mostly with nods and fluttery hand motions, even in her own shop. But when you see her at church, she sings louder than everybody, and she’s damned aggressive about it, too. She’ll glare at you if she thinks you’re trying to drown her out. Brother Lamar has tried to talk to her about lowering the volume a smidge, but she just makes out to be deaf. She sleeps through sermons, never puts any money in the collection plate when it comes down her pew, and I’ve peeked during prayers and caught her looking around wide-eyed plenty of times. In other words, she’s far from devout. She just sings.
It makes me wonder what her funeral will be like, which can’t be all that far off considering her age. Will Brother Lamar hint at Doris's meager faith as he eulogizes her? Will everybody sing “The Old Rugged Cross” extra loud, happily filling and overflowing the hole where her voice used to be?
One thing’s for certain: there’ll be no horseshoe wreath of white carnations perched next to her coffin, that’s for damn sure.
KEVIN GRAUKE
Kevin has published work in The Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, StoryQuarterly, Fiction, and Quarterly West, and more. He is the author of Shadows of Men and winner of the Steven Turner Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. He is a Contributing Editor at Story and teaches at La Salle University in Philadelphia.
