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“There is no ribbon in here. Just some old tuna. And an outdated bottle of pimentos,” she said as I made my way to the coffee pot.
“I’ll find you the ribbon,” I vowed as I poured my first mug of the day. Coffee was a bad habit of mine. I’d tried to break it. Once. For an hour.
“Why on earth do you want a circumcision? Didn’t Mona do that for you when you were born?”
I spewed coffee down the front of my only clean work tee. Aunt Midge gave me an odd sort of glower then pattered off to look for salmon ribbon as I dabbed at my stained shirt. I made another mental note to myself to never buy white T-shirts for work. Or anything else. Knowing I had no other T-shirts with the Posy Pusher logo on it, I rushed into the cramped bathroom and found one of my oldSpellborn Warshoodies from the lone locker. The shop phone rang.
“Oh, shit,” I mumbled, grabbed a blue Posy Pusher apron, and raced to the front of the store before Aunt Midge picked up the phone. We did not want another incident like we had with the sanitation workers union last Christmas. Thankfully, she was in the storeroom and unable to hear the phone from that distance. I skidded past the coolers filled with fresh flowers then dove on the bright blue phone beside the cash register.
“Good morning, Posy Pusher. This is Hadley. How can I help you?” I panted. I really did need to start working out after work instead of spending hours online on magical quests and slaying dragons. Oh, and romancing elves. I did have a thing for—
“Hey! I’m so glad you picked up. My name is Prescott Williams and I’m part of the public relations team for the Albany Beavers. We’ve hit a bit of a snafu. Our usual florist, Mercutio’s Floral apparently went out of business recently.”
“Yes they did.” I said politely as I scrabbled to recall what the Albany Beavers were and why I should know the name. It sounded sporty.
“So I discovered. Someone said that they read the owner went to Peru to weave ponchos with a man named Hector or Heleganza or something.”
“Helaganza extravaganza!” I chirped merrily. There was dead silence on the other end. I really needed to watch lessRuPaul’s Drag Race.
“Right. Well, we had a standing order with them for our annual Mother’s Trip brunch and now we’re stuck. Is there any way that you could deliver fifteen table centerpieces, twenty-four wrist corsages, and two dozen rose bud and baby breath bouquets to the Albany Paints Arena tomorrow morning before ten?”
My brain went into free fall. That was amassiveorder. Midge and I would have to work all night. I hated to push the old gal too hard but this was a golden opportunity.
“Sure, we can do that! Do you have a preferred color scheme?”
Prescott Williams “Phew’d” into my ear. “You are a lifesaver! Make them all Beavers colors. I’ll meet you at the delivery entrance at the rear of the arena at ten sharp tomorrow. Thank you!”
He hung up. I blinked at the blue phone in my hand.
“What the hell are beaver colors?” I asked the rack of small cards in front of me.
***
Thank the floral godsfor Google.
I discovered a great deal about the Albany Beavers online. They played hockey so I had been right about them being sporty—ice hockey it seemed. I’d not watched much hockey, or any other sport, to be honest, unless fantasy role-playing board games counted as a sport, which I was pretty sure they didn’t. Bashing trolls gets no respect from the jocks. Neither did being gay, but that was a sad story for another day. Right now, on this Monday, I was up to my elbows in green and gold posies, green and gold being the Albany Beaver team colors. I also spotted some really good-looking men on the team roster page. One, a cutie with shoulder-length brown hair, a thin jaw strap, and dimples, had caught my eye immediately—Bailey Rust his name was. He was twenty and two years old. When I saw his age I hurried to leave the roster page. Making doe eyes at a rookie hockey player twenty years my junior was a waste of time, even if he did have dimples and stunning hazel eyes. He had to be straight. And even if by some random quirk of fate he turned out to be gay or bi, surely he would take one gander at me and run for the hills. Hot young men were not into paunchy middle-aged florists who had pock marks and pretended to be a bard online. It was surely the stuff of dreams, though.
“...that mum like you want to have a baby with it.”
A spool of floral wire bounced off my chest. I jerked back to reality sharply. Midge was staring at me over the top of her bifocals.
“I was studying its shape,” I told her.
“It looks nothing like an ape. I’m tired.”
“And cranky,” I mumbled then slid the mum into centerpiece number six.
“I don’t want your hankie. I’m going to bed.” With that she shimmied off the stool she’d been sitting on. I blew her a kiss, stood, and stretched. It was ten after three in the morning. We’d been besieged with business all day, of course we had, and so had not gotten around to working on the Beaver order until after the shop had closed. Thank goodness I’d been able to call my wholesaler and get more flowers ordered. The coolers were pretty bare at the moment. Those would come early tomorrow—today I mean—but Midge could handle that. She was a whiz with numbers. Studying the project spread out on the large table in our storage room, I sighed and padded off to get some more coffee. I sure hoped this rush job turned into something bright and beautiful for Posy Pusher.
***
After a bit of a strugglegetting the old Dodge van parked behind the shop to start, I was on my way to the hockey arena by nine-thirty. Morning traffic around the capital was always slow. Yawning steadily, I sipped coffee from my travel mug as I crawled from traffic light to traffic light. The heater in my delivery van was iffy. Maybe if this gig with the Beavers panned out I could invest in a new van with a sharp new logo painted on the side.
With a cold nose and a few thousand dollars’ worth of flowers in the back of the van I maneuvered my way to the arena. Funny how I’d seen this building a thousand times but had never been inside it for any kind of sporting event. I had come here for the gaming cons that took place yearly. But there had been no ice on the floor then. Just hundreds of gamers—my people.
I pulled into the parking lot of the huge oval-shaped arena, admiring the sun glinting off the mirrored sides. It took me a few goes to find the delivery entrance, then I had to go through some pretty stringent admissions protocols before I was allowed to pull up and start carrying my creations indoors. I yanked a Posy Pusher hat over my unwashed hair and began toting flowers.
I’d gone with a wintry theme for the event, using small buds with the team colors interspersed with white mums, birch branches, hypericum berries, parrot tulips, snapdragons, juniper, and cedar placed in gold and white glass urns. The wrist corsages mimicked the table settings in color and tone, with the addition of some small pinecones. Midge and I had thought they all looked marvelous, given the short notice. The rose bouquets were standard and had emptied my shop of every single rose.
