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Naomi had at least given me a glimmer of hope, though.
Wasthere any hope that Brady might change his mind at the last minute? I really didn’t know him well enough to say for sure what he was or wasn’t likely to do when it came right down to it.
“Maybe you’re right,” I said. “I wanna hope you’re right, that something amazing and wonderful might happen in the next month to change his mind. I just can’t really see what it might be.”
“I don’t know what will happen, either,” she confessed. “If I did, I’d be making a lot more money as a fortune teller than a flower delivery girl. But I try to have faith that people will usually do the right thing, at least until they prove me wrong.”
“I want him to do the right thing,” I said. “I really, really want that. I mean, maybe it helped that I pointed out to him what a disaster it would be to try and sell the place before the Anderson-Beachman wedding… but right now I feel like that just bought a little more time. I guess it was a good sign that he was at least willing to listen, though.”
Thinking back on the conversation, I did have to admit that Brady had seemed a little different, had at leastlookedinterested in the things I had said.
“That sounds like a good start,” Naomi said. “You can’t force him to do anything, but you can at least steer him in the right direction and hope for the best. It’s all either of us can do, really.”
It all sounded so simple when my friend laid it out like that, butwasit really that easy?
“So,” I furrowed my brow as I tried to follow Naomi’s logic. “You’re basically saying that we both need to keep doing what we’ve been doing, and just hope that he changes his mind sometime in the next month?”
“Look, it’s like this—you love this place and so do I, right?” She shot me a look but didn’t wait for a reply. “So now we’ve got a month to show Brady how great it can be to work here. We’ve got a month to make him fall in love with this job the same way we did.”
“How, though? How do I tell him not to worry about that big, fat check those corporate guys will give him? How do I make it seem like a worthwhile trade-off for him to stay here and fill his dad’s shoes, when that seems like the last thing he wants to do?”
Naomi laughed. “God, do you ever see the glass as more than half-empty? Where’s the happy-go-lucky Joanne I used to know? Of course, we don’t say it likethat… that doesn’t even makemewanna stay here. But honestly? Even though your delivery is a little off, the content is pretty accurate.”
I sat for a minute as I thought about Naomi’s words.
It stung to hear my friend confirm that I was becoming a pessimist, especially since that wasn’t the way Iwantedto be. But it was hard to see the glass as anythingbuthalf-empty in that scenario, no matter which way I looked at it.
“It’s like this,” Naomi continued. “You and I don’t love working here because of the money, right? We love the work, sure, but it’s more about the people, the community, theconnectionwe get from working here. You’d at least agree with that, right?”
“Yeah, definitely. We could probably make more money just about anywhere else, really. I just like to know that I’ve made a difference in someone’s life, even if it’s something tiny, like the fact that some flowers I’ve arranged made them smile for a few minutes.”
“Exactly,” she grinned. “That’swhat I’m talking about. And that’s what we have to show Brady. Now, thanks to you, we have an extra month to do it.”
I cocked my head to the side.
Naomi was definitely onto something. After all, it wasn’t as if her or I could go to work for some other flower shop and automatically love it the same way. No, Patty’s Petals was unique. It was a special place, and if the two of us had fallen in love with it so easily, who was to say that Brady couldn’t, too?
It was certainly more plausible than me trying to buy the shop, and I’d giventhata shot.
“You know,” I said, a wide grin spreading across my face. “I think you might be right.”
Naomi shrugged. “I usually am. But I think it’s the best chance we’ve got for keeping this place as it is, without selling its soul to some stupid corporation.”
If we could show Brady how nice—how muchfun—it could be to work at the flower shop, we might have a chance. It was still a slim chance, to be fair, but I believed that I got a lot more out of my job than just money because of my love of the work and the people.
We just had to get Brady to see it, too.
“Agreed.” I took a deep breath and stood up, feeling as though a heavy weight had been at least partially lifted from my shoulders. “So, I guess we know what we need to do.”
“We need to be happy.”
“We need to be perfect.”
I gave a wry smile. “We need to make him fall in love.”
Chapter Twenty-Three - Brady
From the workbench in the back corner of the shop, I watched—half-amused and half-amazed—as Joanne guided the elderly lady around from corner to corner, from arrangement to beautiful arrangement. The pitiful bouquet I had been attempting to put together was momentarily forgotten as the scene unfolded in front of me.
