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Cigarettes and Daisies

Victoria Griffin

    “I loved her, you know. She was perfect for me, and she said I was perfect for her. But that never was true.”
    “She loved you, Grandpa.”
    “Yeah, she loved cigarettes, too. See where that got her.” The old man laid the daisies against her headstone. He’d brought her daisies on their second date, fifty-two years ago. When she’d stepped onto the porch, in that pale blue sundress, the sight of those daisies had set her eyes twinkling like lightning bugs. He’d brought her daisies for every anniversary for twelve years before she finally told him she didn’t like daisies at all. She hated them, actually. They made her think of some strange, one-eyed creature. So their next anniversary, he’d bought her a card and candy and a pretty silver necklace, and she’d looked at him and cocked her head to the side and whispered real slow, “What, no daisies?”
    “Grandpa, it’s getting dark.”
    “Just hold on.”
    “Grandpa, you really shouldn’t be—”
    “I said, hold on!”
    The old man groaned as his cane dropped to the ground, and his body bent into a horseshoe. His grandson rushed to his side, but he pushed the young man away, frowning at the glimpse of his tee shirt, stretched over his muscled frame.
    Another groan as the old man’s back straightened and cracked, and he allowed his grandson to hand him his cane.
    “Grandpa, we really should go. Misty needs to get back and rest.”
    The old man’s eyes wandered toward the van, parked not thirty feet away. His grandson’s pregnant wife was sitting in the passenger seat, her chest heaving beneath her drooping eyes, and suddenly it was 1966, and he and his wife were in the living room, listening to Bob Dylan on the radio, when she said it was time.
    She was calm and he was crazy, driving twice the speed limit as she breathed deep and slow beside him. And when they made it to the hospital, and that little baby girl found her way out of her mother, there was no music or celebration. There was only his wife’s simple smile. He wished he could bottle that smile.
    “Grandpa, really, she’s due any day now, and she shouldn’t be—”
    “Go, then! Go! Don’t stand around here waiting for an old man. Go take care of your wife.”
    “I’m not going to leave you, Grandpa. Just come get in the van.”
    The old man turned from his grandson and kneeled, his old limbs shaking as he did. He held his cane across his body like a sacrifice, and bowed his head, listening to young feet shifting the dry grass behind him.
    “Please, get up. It’s ten miles to anything. I can’t leave you here.”
    The old man was silent.
    “Grandpa, please don’t make me do this.”
    The twenty-three-year-old sounded like his was six again, whining for a treat from his grandparents’ fridge. The old man didn’t move.
    “Okay, fine, do what you want. But I’m calling Mom.”
    He drew his cell phone from his pocket like a gun from a holster and started back to the van, his mother’s ringtone already in his ear.
    The old man was still a long time after the van’s engine had died into the fading light. His cane slipped into the grass, and he looked down at his shaking hands, the flesh old and wrinkled, like it might fall from the thin bones of his fingers.
    He felt his hands draw into claws, and he pressed his fingers into the dirt, feeling the cool soil beneath his fingernails. Maybe if he dug forever he could reach her.
    He looked up at the cold, gray tombstone, her name etched into its surface, mocked by the daisies just below, and he cried like the day he lost her.
    She always said she wanted to die free—on the top of a mountain, or the bottom of a canyon, or the middle of a dark blue ocean. She wanted to die somewhere her soul might wander for all eternity, and never have to look at another human being again. She wanted to die with her heart in her hands, her mind free of worry, her spirit just barely bound to her body.
    His beautiful wife had died in a hospital, unable to move, barely able to speak, her body overwrought with disease and her heart, soul, and spirit dark as the sky above the rotting graveyard.
    He had held her hand and felt her flesh go cold. He had watched the light drain from her eyes. He had watched her silver hair droop like a weeping willow.
    He had thrown the daisies on the nightstand across the room.
    When his daughter made it to the graveyard, she found her father slumped over her mother’s grave, the fingers of one hand buried in the soil, broken daisies strewn across the grave beside him.
    They buried him next to her, and his daughter smoked a cigarette.

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