The succulent has been dead for six weeks.

I know this because Jennifer gave it to me six weeks ago, pronouncing it "literally impossible to kill," and I have apparently found the one exception to that rule. It sits on my counter near the register looking like a small green accusation, its leaves gone from plump to papery to something that resembles beef jerky if beef jerky had given up on life entirely.

I should replace it. I should have replaced it four weeks ago, but replacing it means admitting defeat, and also it means going next door to Petal & Vine, and every time I think about going next door I remember the Valentine's Day incident where I launched twelve-dollar roses across the alley and Jamie had to fish her entire cooler's worth of inventory out of my deep freeze, and then I decide maybe the dead succulent is fine actually.

But today is the day. Today I am a business owner who maintains her establishment's aesthetic, and that aesthetic cannot include deceased plant life.[^1]

I make myself a cortado for courage—Guatemalan, medium roast, the dependable one—and I make Jamie a flat white because I remember that's what I made her the day her cooler died and she sat in my shop for the first time looking like someone who'd finally been allowed to stop swimming. I remember the way she held it with both hands. The way she said "I didn't know coffee could taste like this."

The bell on my door announces my departure. Twelve steps to her door. I've counted. Not in a weird way. In a "I walk past this door multiple times a day and my brain apparently catalogues information whether I ask it to or not" way.

Petal & Vine smells like green things and cold water and something floral I can't name, and it's chaos in here—beautiful chaos, but chaos nonetheless. Buckets everywhere. Petals on the floor. Coolers humming their refrigerated hymns. A roll of ribbon has escaped and is making a slow journey toward the back room like it's planning its getaway.

Jamie doesn't look up when I come in. She's bent over the worktable, hands moving with the kind of focused precision I recognize from my own work—the muscle memory that happens when you've done something so many times your body knows the shape of it.

"One second," she says. "If I stop now I'll lose the—there."

She steps back. I step closer.

It's a funeral arrangement. I know this the way you know grief when you see it—the lilies, the roses, the careful architecture of something meant to say what words can't. It's enormous. Elaborate. The kind of thing that costs more than my weekly coffee order from Riverside.

"That's beautiful," I say, and I mean it.

Jamie wipes her hands on her apron, and I notice for the first time that she looks tired. Not the normal tired of running a small business, but the bone-deep tired of someone carrying something heavy.

"Brooks family," she says. "House fire last week. Grandmother didn't make it. The house is—" She stops. Starts again. "They lost everything. Including the grandmother. In that order, actually, which somehow makes it worse."

I don't know what to say to that, so I hold out the flat white like an offering. Jamie takes it, and something in her face softens.

"You remembered."

"You said it tasted like being allowed to stop swimming."

"I said that out loud?"

"You did."

She takes a sip, closes her eyes for a second. When she opens them, she's looking at the arrangement again.

"They're not paying for this," she says. Matter-of-fact. Like she's telling me the weather. "I mean, they can't. They don't have—there's nothing left. Insurance is still figuring out whether the fire was electrical or—" She waves a hand. "Doesn't matter. Mrs. Brooks's sister is going to pick it up tomorrow. I'm delivering the other two myself because their car was in the garage."

"Other two?"

"Casket spray. And a smaller one for the—" She stops. "There's a lot of flowers at funerals. I forget, sometimes, until someone needs them all."

I'm doing math in my head. The lilies alone. The roses. The hours. Jamie took over this shop eight months ago from an aunt who retired, and I know from our conversations—brief, always brief, two women drowning in adjacent waters—that the margins here are thin. That she's learning as she goes. That some months are better than others and February was not one of the better ones.

"Jamie."

"It's fine." She takes another sip. "I do this sometimes. Not often. But sometimes people need flowers and they can't—" Another wave. "My aunt used to say flowers are the only thing that makes sense when nothing makes sense. I thought that was just something old people said. Turns out she was right."

Something catches in my throat.

I think about the customers I've given free coffee. The ones who came in shaking, the ones who couldn't make eye contact, the ones who just needed somewhere to sit. I think about the margins I've eaten, the beans I've written off, the ways I've decided that sometimes the math matters less than the meaning.

I thought I was the only one doing that math. I thought I was quietly, foolishly generous in a way that would eventually catch up with me.

But here's Jamie, elbow-deep in lilies she can't afford, making something beautiful for people who've lost everything, and she's not making a speech about it. She's not asking for credit. She's just doing it, the way you do things when they're the right thing to do and you're the person standing there able to do them.

"I brought you a coffee," I say, stupidly, because I already gave it to her.

"You did."

"I should—I should go. Let you work."

I turn to leave and my elbow catches a bucket of baby's breath and sends it cascading across the floor in a white explosion of tiny flowers.

"Oh no. Oh no, I'm so—"

"That's the third bucket today." Jamie doesn't even look up from her arrangement. "The universe just wants floor flowers. Leave it."

"I can't just—"

"Rena." She's smiling now, tired but real. "Leave it. Come back tomorrow. Bring more coffee."

I stand there in a sea of baby's breath, holding my empty cortado cup, watching a woman I almost know make something beautiful for people who will never know what it cost her.

The succulent is still dead when I get back.

But I'm thinking about what generosity looks like when nobody's watching. The quiet kind. The kind that shows up in flower arrangements and free coffees and twelve-dollar roses launched across alleys by women who don't know how to help gracefully but help anyway.

I touch my grandmother's necklace. The cross sits warm against my collarbone.

Let not your left hand know what your right hand is doing.

Jamie's left hand knows. Mine does too. But maybe that's okay. Maybe the point isn't the secrecy—maybe the point is the doing. The showing up. The making something beautiful for someone who needs it, even when the math doesn't work.

I look at the dead succulent.

Tomorrow. I'll get a new one tomorrow.

Today, I'm just going to stand here and think about floor flowers and grief arrangements and the woman next door who's been drowning just like me this whole time.

We're going to be okay.

Both of us.

I think.[^2]

[^1]: Jennifer will ask about the succulent. Jennifer always asks about the succulent. I have been telling her it's "thriving" for four weeks. This is a lie that is about to catch up with me.

[^2]: This is not a guarantee. This is a hope. But sometimes hope is the whole thing.