Frank Dollar sat by the open window, feeling the warm breeze coming in. He was puzzled by a flowery scent he couldn’t identify. He looked around the room, but did not see anything new or different. He had lived here, in this house for . . . a long time, most of his adult life. He had lost track now of how many years it was. He knew where things were, he knew how everything smelled. But he did not recognize what he smelled now, though it seemed flowery.
He would ask the woman in the kitchen, the one who came to cook for him.
“Hello?” He felt embarrassed at not remembering her name. She appeared from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a red-and-white checked dish towel. She smiled at him.
“Yes, Mr. Dollar?”
Frank saw now she was wearing a tag with her name on it, a white plastic thing with blue lettering.
“Olivia.”
“What can I do for you, sir?”
“Do you smell something strange?”
She tilted her head upward, sniffed. “I don’t think so. I’ve got a casserole in the oven for you, is that it?”
“No. No. It’s kind of flowery, I think. Not a casserole.”
Olivia stepped closer to where he sat, sniffed again. Bent over and looked out the window.
“Oh my, that’s lovely. A nice bunch of blooms out there. It’s your beautiful flowers. You’re so lucky to be in your own home where you can sit and smell those flowers.”
Frank turned to look out where she had pointed. There were pink and red flowers just under the window, and he now made the connection between the flowers and the flowery smell.
“That must be it.” He turned and looked at her name tag again. “Olivia. What are those called? The flowers.”
“Roses.”
The word jolted him, like a shock of static electricity when he touched a light switch. The woman had smelled of roses. Not this woman, Olivia, who smelled of casseroles. The woman he had loved. Margie. Margie smelled of roses.
Now memory swept over him, filled his head like breathing in the rosy fragrance. Margie, his first and only love, had smelled of roses the first time he met her. High school, the beginning of his senior year, civics class. He had sat in the back corner, she had been almost late, had come in just as the bell rang, taken the last seat, which was just in front of him. Roses. He could not remember anything of what had been taught in that class, but he remembered Margie smelling like roses, Margie looking so beautiful with her auburn hair, her green eyes, her perfect shape.
Frank had asked her, later, how she always smelled like roses. She had told him the name of the perfume. The perfume she always wore, then and for the next fifty-odd years. She had worn it the night of their first date (a movie and ice cream after), the days he left for boot camp and later for the South Pacific, and the day, after the war, when he proposed to her. Roses had permeated their bed, their passionate nights, and their hard times, when the fragrance sometimes meant making up after a painful argument.
He stared out the window, remembering when they had bought this house, Frank and Margie. She had been four months pregnant, just showing. It had been early winter, but they imagined the house in springtime. They would plant flowers, in beds and borders and window boxes. It was not a large house, but it would be enough, a cottage where they would raise children and love each other always. When spring came, they painted the house yellow and white, and had planted flowers just in time to welcome the baby. The first baby. He had driven Margie and the baby boy home from the hospital, and the car had smelled like roses and fresh baby. Smelled like love and the future, blooming out of rich dark soil.
It had been Margie who had tended the rose bushes, for Frank did not have the knack for it, nor the patience. Margie somehow knew what to do for the roses, to keep them blooming without becoming overgrown and woody. Frank dealt with the marigolds and day-lilies, the daisies, the simple flowers that responded favorably to his crude care. But Margie made the roses thrive, just as she made the children thrive, with that combination of toughness and tenderness, each at the right time and in the right amount.
Frank was weeping now, still staring out the window and smelling the roses, crying without knowing why. It was just one more thing his body did to him now, betraying him. Why did his head spin when he stood up, or his knees creak and pop when he walked? His skin now was thin and translucent, his veins showing beneath brown spots on his hands, his trembling hands that were too weak to open a jar. It was all a damned nuisance, and no Margie to sympathize or to laugh about it with him. Where was she now, where had she gone?
“Olivia? Hello?”
“Mm hmm?” Wiping her hands, smelling of casserole.
“What about Margie, where is she?”
Olivia had heard this question before. She had not known Margie, but knew of her, could feel her presence in the house. “Oh, Margie’s gone to Victory.”
“Victory, why?”
He pictured the old school and the little spot of town that had been Victory, Oklahoma. The school where he and Margie had met now nothing more than a foundation and a few scattered stone blocks, the old store on the corner a sagging ruin of sun-bleached boards. No houses left. Up the road a mile the cemetery, the only thing left that was much as it had been. The cemetery gate with a metal arch over it, the word “VICTORY” in wrought iron. The rows of stones, stunted cedar trees, borders of flowers around the few graves where living relatives still bothered to tend them. Stones marking childhood friends lost early to farm accidents or, later, to the war. Relatives and distant relatives, some strangers he had never known. One stone with large pink and red flowers on either side, the fragrance dissipating in the hot, dry wind.
Olivia put her hand on his shoulder. “I guess she just needed to go. Don’t worry, she’s fine.”
“Well I wish she hadn’t gone.” He cleared his throat, scratched his forehead. “Or at least waited for me to go with her.”
He looked up at her, read the name tag.
“Olivia.”
“Yes, sir?”
“I can smell flowers out there. They smell pretty nice.”
“They do, don’t they?”
“Olivia. What are those flowers called?”
She patted his shoulder.
“Roses.”
Buttermilk Flat 