A man was getting tropicals for a presentation bouquet and I walked him through the process of what looks good when we got to the protea. Now, protea are a weird-looking tropical flower, so they catch people’s attention really easy.
“Protea! I love protea,” he says. “Where do your protea come from?”
“Ecuador,” I said. Our flowers, generally, come from Ecuador and Peru.
“I thought they came from South Africa.”
Then why... did you ask? “Our greenhouses are in Ecuador. They grow them there commercially.”
“That seems improbable, since they grow in big bushes.”
“Commercial greenhouses are tall enough to accommodate bushes and trees.”
Moving on.
“What are these?” He points to the green berries I’d chosen for him.
“Hypericum berries.”
“Hyperi-what?”
“Most people know it as St John’s Wort.”
“St John’s Wort has yellow flowers, I thought.”
Why are you here, sir? Are you here to flex your floral knowledge at someone who spends all day around them or... what?
So something that people might not realize is a big part of the floral business is funerals, and since our shop is well acquainted with the funeral homes in the area we usually try to get a booth at the Funeral Director’s Association convention.
I have wanted to go to the OFDA convention ever since I heard about it last year, via this Very Amusing Story.
Grandpa went alone this year, but since the convention is across the parking lot from our shop, we all took turns hiking across the lot to see if she needed anything.
I took the new girl with me and we trekked across the lot to where there were about four dozen hearses lined up, walked straight in without so much as a second glance, and started looking for Grandpa.
Now, Grandpa has always said that this is where she comes to get new pens and refill the candy dish and I thought that it would be just like any other industry show where every stall has a couple pens and maybe a letter opener and some mini reeses.
Oh.
I was wrong.
If you’re there as a funeral director, you’re encouraged to go to the seminars- which go over emerging trends in the funeral industry, you wear a suit and tie. If you’re training to be a funeral director, you’re required to go around to every vendor to get credits, you wear a lime green backpack.
If you’re a florist, as Muggle and Blue discovered, you wear a green apron and everyone assumes you’re hotel staff and will ask you for drinks.
Rin and I chose to cosplay as interns to avoid getting asked when the bar opens over and over again.
A number of the swag bags were lime green, just by chance.
We went in, found Grandpa, and realized she didn’t need anything. Which left us unattended, in disguise, and with empty bags.
...in a hotel full of swag.
Rin tentatively starts eyeing some of the stress reliever balls on the tables, wondering if it’s okay for her to take them without asking.
I, on the other hand, begin shoveling things into my bag indiscriminately. I am Swag Goblin from Swagopolis. All Aboard to Swagtown, making stops at Doric Metal Vaults for a chip clip and The Amish Handmade Casket Builder just because I like his beard! CHOO CHOO!
Everyone is asking us where we’re interning at when we graduate and I just mention whatever funeral home I made a casket spray for last and some vague motions of not being sure what area of study I want to go into just yet. It’s a really big business, you know- there’s a lot to choose from. Facial reconstruction sounds good.
And then there were some where I just said ‘I’m a florist’ while shoving a fistful of candy into my mouth.
The majority of vendors were pretty prepared for people to just grab stuff and go, and in fact were down to endorse the free shit at the vendors next to and across from them.
“You want pens? That guy’s got pens. I hear Community Tissue Services has cups if you need cups.”
Rin follows suit and starts taking things that are handed to us.
After an hour, our bags are overflowing with things.
Behold: the haul-
An itemized list:
Way, way way more candy than is actually pictured here, including full-sized candy bars.
A small coffee cake
A packet of coffee grounds
A chip clip with chips attached.
A tiny bottle of Tabasco sauce
Handy-dandy notebooks
Mints in a pill bottle, care of Western Insurance Group
Like five bottles of hand sanitizer
A butt-ton of pens, including one that lights up when you put the cap on the back of it:
Glasses cloth
A little plastic bit intended to go over the camera on your computer to keep the CIA from spying on you.
Letter openers. Many letter openers.
This overdesigned plasticware set that fits into itself
Tire pressure gauge (???)
A cell-phone holder, screen cleaner, and a carabiner from a company that cleans up the mess after messy deaths, murders, and suicides.
A poker chip
Band-aid dispenser from a custom air-mat place
First-aid kit (like a really nice one with gauze and shit)
Ohio Embalming Association Rules and Guideline Handbook
A shoe-cleaning kit
As far as I can tell- what appears to be a rape whistle
A whole-ass journal with tabs and like 100 pages
A box of matches with this logo:
(Beam me up, Scotty. They also had lip balm.)
An old-looking calculator from a company that ships bodies overseas
A hearse-shaped stress ball
A hearse-shaped bumper sticker
A reinforced red solo cup, which the insurance provider suggested was definitely not for beer wink wink.
I took all this home with me and the roommates asked me:
“Lee? What did you bring back from the dead people?”
And my answer was...
SWAG.
I AM THE GOD OF SWAG.
FEAR ME AND MY TINY BOTTLE OF TOBASCO SAUCE THAT THE LADY AT THE TABLE SAID WAS THE PERFECT PROPORTION FOR BLOODY MARYS. I DON’T DRINK BLOODY MARYS SO I’LL JUST TAKE HER WORD FOR IT!
So anyways, if you want to get into the funeral business or just want to pretend that you’re in the business to impress your distant family, I have like... fifty pens to get you started. Just not the one that lights up because that bitch is MINE.
A pair of women signed up for the class but had it as one transaction. They wanted to split it so they could pay separately. When we do that, it basically just splits payment into installments and because our system is kind of old it won’t calculate change until the thing has been paid in full. Usually this isn’t a problem because most people pay with a credit card.
But this time they both paid in cash.
The first lady hands me a $20 bill.
“Hold on,” I said. “Let me get my calculator.”
I grab the calculator off the desk and explain that I’ll have to calculate change at the end.
The second woman hands me another $20 bill. I start typing that into the calculator to figure out change when she says:
“Oh, let me make that easy on you.”
So she starts digging through her purse to find exact change and hands it to me.
“Okay,” I said, ringing it in.
“Hold on,” said the first one, digging through her purse again- after I’d already rung both her and her friend up. “So you don’t have to get your calculator.
I already had a calculator. I’d already calculated what they needed. I was already typing it in. I was about to press ‘enter’- when she hands me another $10 bill.
“Wait, I’m confused.”
“She gave you $20, so I’m giving you a $10 to make it even.”
“No, I gave her $16.12 exact.”
“So this $10 will make it even,” says the first lady.
“I’m confused again. You already paid $20. I owe you change.”
It’s our policy to protect the privacy of our senders. If a sender sends something anonymously and the recipient wants to know who sent the flowers, we can’t tell them. It’s our policy.
We did a funeral for a man named Roberts and the widow came in to order his casket spray personally.
“Yellow roses,” she says. “He always said it wasn’t about what he wanted, it was about what made me smile. Yellow roses.” And we made them a gorgeous yellow rose ensemble.
A week goes by and we hear nothing, forgot all about it. I wish we could say that we put love and care into every spray we do, but we do about 30 of them a week... we tend to forget all about them.
But one day we get a distraught phone call from Mrs Roberts.
“Someone sent me flowers and I demand to know who did it.”
“We... can’t reveal the name of the sender, I’m sorry.”
“No, I need to know! Is this some kind of prank?”
“I’m sorry, it’s just... it’s our policy. Is everything alright with them?”
“They’re fine, it’s just... no one sends me yellow roses other than my husband and his funeral was yesterday.”
Spooky organ music.
So we look up the order and sure enough, the sender was Mr Roberts. He placed an order for a vase of yellow roses for their anniversary three days before he died and the order still went through.
We broke our silence to tell her what happened and she started crying on the phone. “Are you okay, ma’am?”
“I can’t believe that out of all the years... this was the year he remembered!”
So Friday was quite possibly one of the worst days I’d had in awhile. Barring maybe that entire week with the Lemon Church, but that was just like... one single person.
Friday was terrible just because there was so much. We had 17 casket sprays to do by Saturday, we had a wedding we needed to set up for, two of our designers had asked off, homecoming was that weekend, and to top it off we were just randomly busy for no reason.
Just about everything that we’d sent to our headquarters was bounced back to us because the main store didn’t have the right materials. So on top of all that, we were trying to figure out a way to get all these done with what little we had in the cooler.
I’d come in an hour early to try to get sprays done, but it was becoming a futile effort with as many walk-ins as we had.
And one of them was here for corsages.
She might have shown me over a dozen pinterest photos.
“I don’t want this,” she said, rattling the silk example we have for corsages. “this is crap.”
Thanks.
And that’s when she pulled up the Pinterest. “I want something unique! I want my daughter to stand out! I don’t want her to look like everyone else’s.”
“Okay. So what is it that you’re looking for?”
“This,” she said, showing me a bridal corsage. “I want this flower and I want it like this.”
“Those are ranunculus, and we don’t have them in right now.”
“Well what DO you have in?”
“I can show you what we have in the cooler and you can pick out some things.”
“I’m not going in there!”
So she expects me to bring the flowers out one by one. Cool cool cool.
We have a few small arrangements that have miniature roses and other tiny flowers that work well for corsages and boutonnieres. I brought out one of those in red and pink to see if she liked any of that.
“Sunflowers,” she said, realizing that there was nothing she wanted in those vases.
“Sunflowers? Those tend to look a little bulky on corsages. The only ones we have right now are very large.”
“What didn’t you understand about wanting her to stand out?”
There’s good attention and there’s bad attention. “I thought that her dress was red.”
“She hasn’t bought it yet. It’s supposed to be red or yellow.”
Important to note- Homecoming for her school is tomorrow.
“Which do you think she’s most likely to buy?”
“Red.”
“So maybe we should stick with red?”
“I still want it to stand out.”
“Certainly. But you haven’t specified... how.”
She shoves another set of pinterest photos in my face. “Like these!”
These are five different photos of five different styles. “Which... one of these?”
“Any of them! All of them!”
“These are all bridal corsages,” I told her. “That’s... that’s what you’re looking for?”
“You seem frustrated with me.”
“I’m not frustrated,” I lied. “I’m unsure what it is exactly that you’re asking for.”
“THESE,” she said, indicating four more photos which were all different from the last ones and each other.
“Okay, we can make something like those, but we won’t be able to match them exactly given that we don’t have... most of those flowers in stock. You’re welcome to come back to the cooler with me to see if there’s something you like,” I repeated.
“In there?”
“Yeah- in the cooler.” Where the flowers are.
She made a look that seemed to say ‘if I must’ and followed me into the cooler.
She picked out every comically-sized flower in the cooler and I had to explain to her several times that these will all have the same problem as the sunflowers. Which I swear everyone wants right now because of that damn Post Malone song.
Until finally she spots one of our little vases and her eyes light up. “That,” she said, turning the little vase around so that the queen anne’s lace was facing outward. “I want that.”
This is the exact same configuration of flowers that were in the other tiny vase that I showed her. But I prefer not to bring that to her attention and just let her think that she discovered it all on her own.
I have no idea how I’m going to get full head of queen anne’s lace onto a corsage, but whatever, she’s decided on something that’s not a clearly photoshopped ranunculus.
When I bring the tiny vase out to the register, she makes a face of recognition: she realizes that she chose the same flowers that I’d brought out for her previously, and it has made a blow to her ego.
But whatever- she’s decided. Finally. Now she has to order one for her daughter’s best friend- who needs to stand out as well, but not as much as her daughter does. Which means that we have to go through this entire process... but in pink.
I spent 45 minutes after the store was closed working on these. They were a mass of wire and mistakes, but by Thor’s Hammer I got them done.
And I was off for the next two days, so everything else I know about this I had to hear from Blue.
What did Blue have to say about them?
The lady hated them.
Absolutely hated them.
I didn’t follow any of her instructions, they looked hideous, they looked nothing like the pictures, she wants a new one.
So Saturday was a busy day as well- there were about 14 sprays that needed done by Sunday and for reasons no one could really figure out- it was just ridiculous with the walk-ins.
But Blue made her another pair, just like she asked.
And when she came in again:
“Oh god no. These are even worse. Didn’t you listen?”
Ain’t this a Catholic school your kids go to? Didn’t Jesus have something to say about being nice to people? I think it’s in there a couple times. I could be wrong, though.
“Make it again.”
So she makes them again.
And the woman inspects them closely, turning them over and over in her hands. She takes a picture of the pink one and shows it to Blue.
“What. Is. That?”
“A... corsage?”
The woman zooms the photo in to the smallest, smallest corner of a petal of a rose. “THAT.”
“I don’t... I don’t know... what?”
“THEY’RE BROWN!”
“Natural flowers are going to have some browning on them, it’s not-”
“MAKE IT AGAIN!”
She shoved the box back towards Blue and stared, cross-armed, waiting for her to do as she said.
And. Blue. Said.
“No.”
“What?”
“No. You can just... have these. Free of charge. But I’m not making another one for you.”
The woman held the box in her hands, narrowed her eyes, and appeared to have something to say, but Blue was already off doing something else.
Your daughter’s homecoming is less important than a small, private funeral across town. Sit with that and be humbled.
Where do I even start with today? Ah yes. The $1500 funeral.
Well I mean, we can start by saying that two designers called off this morning, leaving me alone with the boss and a new girl who is just so, so very slow. (And yet, somehow, not the slowest designer I’ve ever worked with.) At least until 10, when the closing crew came in.
I had (what amounts to) four funeral sprays in my pile, which is the average number of sprays I can do in a shift without losing consistency. Cali had four, Blue had four... between the three of us we were going to get tomorrow’s sprays done on time, even with only having one person doing hospitals and call-ins.
But then... it was 2:00
And this woman comes in.
Now normally when someone comes in for the first time they wander around the front for a few minutes before looking for a person to ask questions to but this lady all but stormed straight up to Grandpa’s desk.
“Hi, how are you today,” Grandpa asks.
“Shitty,” she says. “My mom just died.”
Never in my 35 years of being a florist, Grandpa would later say. Have I ever had someone respond to ‘how are you’ with ‘shitty, my mom just died.’
“What can I help you with?”
“We’re doing my mom’s funeral and I need to buy your arch.”
“Our... arch? For a funeral?”
She points. “That one,” she says, indicating the arch we use for weddings. “I need to buy it.”
“For... a funeral? How are you going to display it?”
“It’s the gateway.”
Never in my 35 years of being a florist have I ever had someone request an arch for a funeral.
“The... gateway...”
“I want it covered in flowers. Pink, white, cream, peach. Those colors. I want her to look sexy.”
“... you... uhhhh?”
Two more women walk in and the woman gestures them over. They are all... similar.
Sisters.
Grandpa takes them on a walk through the cooler, trying to talk them out of the arch because honestly its such a bizarre request. And they keep referring to it as ‘the gateway’ or ‘the gateway to heaven’ and other such things and Grandpa is honestly starting to get a little freaked out by the fact that they keep using the word ‘sexy’ to refer to their mother’s corpse.
And I’m beginning to understand why so few people want to work with the dead.
It’s not the dead.
It’s their relatives.
“And the arch,” they keep saying. We can hear them through the cooler doors. “We want all sides of it covered. We don’t want them to see any of the structure. And we want the back of it covered with flowers too, like a curtain.”
“Uh... and you want this... tomorrow.”
“Yes, that’s when the funeral is.”
“And... what was your budget again?”
“$1000.”
“We can’t do the full ensemble, the standing cross spray, the peace lilies, and the completely covered archway for that price. And we would not be able to do it by 8am tomorrow.”
“Well how much is it just for the arch like that?”
“Completely covered? It starts at $3000.”
“WHAT!? What if we’re not buying the arch? What if we give it back to you?”
“That... is the rental price. We’re not selling you the arch- we’re selling you the flowers on the arch. That’s the expensive part.”
“I thought that we were buying it.”
“You’re buying the flowers. This is.. a flower shop.”
“And that starts at $3000? Why so much!?”
“Because you’re asking us to make a solid curtain.”
“Yeah. Of flowers.”
“Yes. Of flowers.” The lead sister did NOT like the implication that her words could be reflected back on her. “We have to make this. With our hands. In less than 24 hours.”
“Well, what would it look like inside my budget?”
“It would be just the front.”
“Just the front,” she repeats, disappointed. “We can stretch our budget to $1500, what does that get us?”
“More flowers on the front.”
“How do we get the sides decorated?”
“By giving up everything else.” Decorating the sides of our arch requires making a web of wire and then weaving bunches of ruscus into it, then either gluing or poking the flowers into the gaps. It takes... hours. Time is money and we’re made of neither.
She holds a minor conference with her sisters and they make many gestures towards the arch, the sprays, the cross, the plants, the arch again, Grandpa.
“We’ll just do the front,” said the head girl.
That’s... what we thought.
Grandpa tallies the whole thing up. The cross, the sprays, the end standards, the lilies, the arch, tax, delivery, and comes to a total of:
“$1505.09.”
The women hold another conference by the door, one of the younger sisters tells the others the price and there is a loud “WHAT?!” which echoes through the store.
The one that came in first marches up to the register, slams her hands down on the counter, and says (I shit you not.)
“I will give you my tits to make that $50 cheaper.”
Never in my 35 years of being a florist, have I ever been offered someone’s tits in exchange for a discount.
And Grandpa, being a woman of large band and cup size herself, literally had no idea what to say to this. We are off-script at this point. We started deviating from the script as soon as she started asking about the arch.
“The price is the price. Take it or leave it.”
“This is more money than we spend at the strip club,” she says, digging through her purse. We have now completely thrown the script out the window. She throws down $1510 in cash money and says:
So on Tuesday this guy came in and said that we did his wedding, he wants vases with the same flowers from his wedding last year. I told him to hold tight for a minute while I looked it up.
It took longer than a minute and I noticed that he was getting antsy. Then I noticed the date on the order and realized that if he was intending these for his anniversary then he was... already a day late.
Blue and white with blue anemones, white dahlias, blue hypericum berries.
“When do you need this by,” I asked.
“I need it as soon as you can make it.”
Yeah... about that. “Unfortunately, we don’t have some of these flowers. Namely, the anemones, the dahlias, and the hypericum. We can make something with similar colors, but we won’t be able to make it exactly like it.To get the flowers you’re looking for, it may be as long as two weeks.”
Usually, this wins people over, but he didn’t like my explanation or my attempt to compromise. He had to have the exact same flowers as his wedding.
I told him it would have to be two weeks. Our buyer needs to order them, they need to get shipped here from Ecuador, get past customs, and make it to our shop and the average ship time for this is two weeks.
“When we had you do our wedding, we worked with the ordering manager to get it to us rushed. You’re saying that you can’t do that?”
... so now I remember this wedding. They ordered it just after the two-week cutoff, but as luck would have it there was another wedding that was using some of the same flowers and we were able to reallocate them to their wedding. It was incredibly lucky of them to get these flowers on short notice.
But he wasn’t taking that answer. “Is there a date you can give us that you need it by? It helps us to be able to work inside of a time frame.”
“I need it as soon as you can make it,” he repeated.
I step away from the computer. “One moment please while I speak with my manager.”
So I meet Grandpa in the cooler to tell her the situation and she says: “Anything before two weeks for anenomes is going to be hard. All our ports are in Miami and customs is messed up from the hurricane.”
Oh right. The hurricane.
Well...
“You.. can’t get them in at all?”
“Not at least until the hurricane is over. I’m sorry, but it is going to be awhile.”
I watched his face pass through a series of emotions, his mouth traveling from one side of his head to the other. “You know, I’ll have to think about it. Keep that list, though.”
“Right.”
And you’d think this is over, but you’ve underestimated how much shit he was in with his husband for forgetting their anniversary after only one year.
He called our main office.
And our main office called us.
We knew who Patty had on the other line when she asked for anenomes. “Do you have them and what colors do you have?”
“The answer is ‘no,’ just like Lee told him yesterday.”
Silence on the other end. “...how do you know who I’m talking to?”
“He came in here yesterday and demanded we remake his wedding flowers. Lee told him it would be two weeks because of the hurricane and he stormed off.”
“I have been on the phone with this guy for an hour and a half. He told me you refused to serve him and has called you everything but your names. He said his company spends over $5500 a year on flowers with you and he’s demanding that we give him these flowers that we don’t have and I haven’t been able to tell him no on anything.”
Grandpa typed in a few numbers. “Funny how that number turns into $600 when I put his account number in. The only thing I can think is to talk to Fiore and see if he can get a rush delivery in... somehow... during a hurricane.”
Fourteen minute later and Fiore makes a promise: next Thursday. He can have them one by next Thursday.
Their anniversary... was on the second. He is going to be ten days late for their anniversary.
And oh... he’s going to be so mad when he comes to pick it up. So mad.
Gonna say it first- you are never going to see nearly as many men in a flower shop as you are on Valentine’s Day. Close runner up is Administrative Assistant Appreciation Day, but given that this is our busiest day of the year and we don’t even hire temps for Admin Day, there really isn’t much of a contest.
On an average day, our shop maybe sees between ten and twenty people walking in, with thirty to fifty deliveries.
On V-Day, the walk-ins start at 7:30am and do not stop until past 7pm, with upwards 500 deliveries and we have to be there for all of it.
But our V-Day week doesn’t start on V-Day.
It starts an entire week before the actual holiday, and why?
Because someone who should have honestly known better booked her $5000 wedding for February 9th.
Now, when I say that she should have known better, I really do mean it. This woman works in the floral industry. She manages and operates a greenhouse. Her wedding was actually at the greenhouse.
For context of what a $5000 wedding looks like, our average wedding account is around $1000. This bride got a discount on all her flowers.
All of hers was greens and tropicals. Anthurium, orchids, succulents, ivy, African Mask. These were all live plants that we had to cut, and some that were being saved whole for a succulent wall.
Setup had five locations. The church, the cottage, a corridor, the greenhouse, and the foyer. The average is two.
Monday, February 4, a man calls and informs us that he has the shipment of flowers.
“How big is the shipment,” Grandpa asks.
“86 boxes.”
“...ah.”
Live plants need to be taken out of their boxes to keep them alive- they need light, they need to breathe, and the wedding is at the end of the week. They began unboxing succulents and miniature orchids at 10:30 and finished with the english ivy and African Mask plants around 3:45.
These take up a grand total of 5 carts. These are large carts- hardly fitting in a doorway and each holding between fifty and one-hundred plants.
And the only place we can keep them... is in the front of the store.
For an entire week- and this is the week leading up to our busiest week of the year, we can neither see nor hear any person coming into our shop.
My desk is positioned in the back of the room, facing the wall. But when I’m working on casket sprays, I pull out a table and have myself facing the door.
I became the sentry of customers. And unfortunately this meant that I had to deal with them. Just about all of them wanted to buy some of the miniature orchids and I briefly considered moving my desk to the front of the store so that I could hide among the carts like some kind of orchid goblin- smacking the hands of people who get too close to the plants before retreating back into the foliage.
The number of people wanting to buy the stock from the wedding only increased when we put a big sign on it reading ‘WEDDING, NOT FOR SALE.’
We began working on them Wednesday. And for the next three days we had people asking ‘how much is this centerpiece?’
Too much.
The answer is ‘too much.’
The Phantom of Phaleanopsis asks for nothing less than your soul.
Friday-
We put the last of the centerpieces together- which includes fifteen very tall mercury glass vases (a shape henceforth known as a ‘pilsner’) where the arrangements are designed in a dish and set on top of the vase.
Because theses vases are so tall, they are set on the floor to be worked on.
This puts them at about waist-height.
You know where this is going.
“Red, can you put this centerpiece away?”
“Sure thing!”
Red stoops down and begins to carry the vase from the bottom, and just as Grandpa begins to say ‘no, the top- they’re not attached,’ his weight is thrown off and the entire thing topples over and a loud and high-pitched crash resonates through the room.
If you know mercury glass, you know that when it breaks- it shatters into a million pieces. If you don’t know mercury glass, imagine the last time you’ve seen a busted lightbulb.
Silence fell over the workshop, and for the first time since we’d opened that day, it was quiet enough to hear the radio.
I-Iiiiii’m Speechless...., sang Dan + Shay on Central Ohio’s Best Country Station 92.3 WCOL
“Red,” says Grandpa. “Please tell me you know where another one of those might be.”
Blue speaks up instead. “There’s still one at the front of the shop,” she says, coming to the rescue. Red is very sorry, apologizes profusely and spends the rest of the day outside a five-foot perimeter of Grandpa’s workspace.
There are at least four more near-misses of the very last pilsner vase being brushed by someone’s leg someone barely grazing the draping ruscus as they walk by. We learn to stay away. Grandpa glares at anyone who comes too near.
She has just finished the last one and allows Coach to squeeze through to get to the computer. We are cleaning up. We are done. Just one more day and the largest wedding we’ve ever done will be wrapped up and we can move on to Valentine’s Day.
As Coach turns to go back to his desk, his knee just barely hits a single frond of asparagus fern and we all watch, in slow-motion, as Grandpa catches the centerpiece in one hand, but fails to steady the pilsner. And into a thousand shiny pieces, it shatters- to the tune of Cole Swindell singing ‘...even though we break up in the end.’
“That... was the last one,” she says. “I gotta stop making these things on the fucking floor.”
That was the last one. There are no more. The only option is to order more pilsners to be delivered at night and hope to every god that they actually bring them.
It is now Saturday and everything looks amazing:
And we are due in at 10:30.
There are no pilsners.
And add insult to injury, the night driver came in under cover of darkness and stole all of our pegboards.
Pegboards are thick, interlocking plastic panels with a grid on them intended to hold pegs of PVC pipe securely. Setting arrangements on them and then surrounding those arrangements with those pegs helps transport them safely.
We can’t move these without pegboards. All of the vases are mercury glass. They will break.
Grandpa, summoning the rage of every short person in her family tree, screamed into the phone until someone finally agreed to send back our damn pegboards and the fucking pilsners.
“Do you not understand that this is a $5000 wedding and that the person getting married is one of our vendors?”
I can only imagine the reason they finally sent someone because the three-headed monster that runs this place felt a swift kick in the wallet.
As soon as a person arrives with our pilsners and pegboards, all four persons required to set up the wedding in four separate vans are out the door, and the bride... is on the phone.
“Um... I’m due to get married in the next hour and none of your people are here.”
“They just left a few moments ago,” I said to Kris Stapelton’s ‘Broken Halos.’ The fact that I can hear the country music is a sign that everyone... everyone... is listening. “They’ll be there in just a few moments.”
“They better be.”
This is the only time I have heard this woman mad.
Hours pass and we have no word on anything. No word is good word. Phone calls are bad. We don’t like them here.
The setup crew returns with good news- everything is fine. Red occupied himself with a standee cut-out of the Pope and took a number of photos with him posing next to him. I’m told this is a Catholic thing. No one could confirm it.
It is 5:00 and we have made it through another day.
Sunday morning. 9am.
The phone rings.
No.
Just... stop.
“Hello, uh... this is the greenhouse. See the problem is that when we were taking your uh... what are these tall vases?”
“Pilsners?”
“Yeah, when we took them down we lined them all up. But one of the movers didn’t know that the flowers weren’t attached so... they all kinda tumbled down domino-style. And we kinda broke... all of them.”
Grandpa did that thing where she kind of laughs and weeps at the same time, to the sound of Brothers Osbourne singing ‘Shoot Me Straight.’
