Relative Fiction | ✓

03

My mother's flower shop used to be a dive bar once upon a time, and when she bought it, she kept the name, so the same gold script lettering of The Ordinary was still etched into the front window.

I couldn't remember a time that my mother didn't have The Ordinary, but if I had to guess, it was how she kept busy with my dad being gone all the time. Guys on Coast Guard cutters were away on average 185 days of the year. There were years he'd be home for almost every important holiday, like birthdays and Christmas, but there were years he wasn't. I'd learned to accept my father's transiency a long time ago. Did it impact me negatively? Who the hell knew. I just knew he loved the ocean, and it was why he named me Kai - from the sea.

The little bells on the door handle jingled when I walked into the shop, and I was instantly greeted by a blast of cold air. We were always slow in the mornings, so I didn't expect to see any customers, but my mother was nowhere to be found.

"Mom?" I called as I weaved my way further into the shop, the cement floor still damp with puddles from the morning sprinklers.

"Back here," she called from the back office behind the register. I snaked my way around shelves of orchids and vines of Boston fern that hung from the ceiling. Mom kept the back office neater and tidier than a hospital should be, which meant I didn't dare step foot past the threshold of the door. I'd sneeze and turn the place upside down. She looked up at me from a pile of papers on her oakwood desk, her dark eyes narrowed at me over the rim of her glasses. Her expression softened in an instant, and she returned to the papers.

They say moms have bullshit radar, but it never stopped me from dicking around, mostly because she never let on what she knew...or didn't.

"I'm going to be back here most of the day just going over some month end stuff for the books," she said, shuffling through more files. "You can handle the front for now, right?"

"Yeah, sure," I croaked out, my jaw numb and my words heavy. I needed ice water, and about 100 milligrams of modafinil before I passed out.

On my way back to the front of the shop, I picked up a lone rose from the floor that had fallen off its stem and tucked it behind my ear. Flowers had been part of my life since I was little, and I stopped caring a long time ago how un-masculine it made me. Flowers were also the first thing I truly learned to draw, and I remember sitting in the corner of the shop on a stool when I was 7 or 8 during summer break from school, watching my mom make bouquets and clutching my little sketchbook in my grubby hands. When I graduated from doodling in sketchbooks to oil painting, and playing in the sandbox turned into smoking behind the coffee shop, I still painted flowers. I needed anything that brought color into my gray haze of a life.

At this point, I just hoped the rose would hide the fact that I smelled like death warmed over, but I still drew flowers when I was bored, and I kept a sketchbook tucked away in the bar-turned-register at the back of the shop. I learned not to think too much when I sketched - sometimes I didn't even look at the page, I just let my hand do what it felt like. I had the outlines of a few roses before I realized I was drawing the silhouette of a girl - long hair made of threads of gold, and eyes as big and as bright as the sun.

The bells on the front door jingled, and when I looked up, I was staring right at my own sketch come alive. A pair of round Ray Ban sunglasses sat perched on her head, and those same bright blue eyes stared right back.

"Oh hey, it's the boy who sleeps on beaches." She brushed her hands over a few of the ferns that hung from the ceiling as she walked further into the shop. I stammered and quickly slammed my sketchbook shut, jamming it onto a shelf under the bar.