"I bought you flowers."
"Oh?" She looked at him as he sat across from her at their favorite diner for breakfast. It was modeled after the fifties, with black and white checkerboard tile on the floor and pale green on the waitresses. The Crickets went into an instrumental fill over the jukebox.
"Hey, those aren't just any flowers. You know what I had to do for those?"
"What?"
"Had to dig glass out of my hands."
She gaped as the waitress set down two glasses of water.
"That was after I crashed into the wall of the greenhouse." He sipped his water. She could see the small, connected slashing scars on the underside of his hand as he lifted the glass to his lips.
He set the glass back down again exactly in the same place on the gray, faux marble tabletop where the condensation had left a ring of liquid. "My dad loves those flowers and he only threatened me because he couldn't remember who I was. I'd already called him and stuff, he said I could come over. But he's old, you know his Alzheimer's, he doesn't always remember. He thought I'd come to steal them. So while I was there picking out some nice flowers from his greenhouse, the way he'd already said I could, he came up to me all silent and then shouted as loud as he could. I jumped, landed weird, and fell against the wall. But I got the flowers."
"Well, I'm just glad you're okay. The flowers are nice," she said awkwardly.
"They're not as good as the ones in the store," he frowned. "I wanted to get you those. I shopped around for hours–Marshall's, Kaufmann's, all over the place–before I gave up and figured out that you just can't buy nice flowers for ten dollars. Just those plastic violets."
"The kind I wanted to get you were the ones I'd seen in the mall next in the Christmas display Penney's has up now. They're the ones with the giant red leaves, you know, poinsettias? I was thinking about getting you some of those, two or three of them. I found out they were poisonous in some kind of way, though."
"All the flowers I picked out for you had something wrong with them. Before the poinsettias, there were the tulips, which turned out to bloom only in the spring, and before that I wanted to get you some roses–kinda traditional, but they're nice–except that they were all sold out this close to Christmas. Also I only had ten dollars."
"Do you need money? That's not all you have left for the rest of the month, is it?" She frowned again. "I can lend you some if you want."
"Oh, no, no!" he insisted. "I've got plenty for the rest of the month. When I got my check a week ago, the first thing I did was sit down and figure out how much I'd probably need for the rest of the month, bare essentials, and how much I would have left after that to buy you something nice. It's just that what I had left turned out to be only ten."
The waitress, wearing a pale green apron and cap, arrived with their menus. "So I thought we should eat here, and you should get Belgian waffles you like."
She smiled warmly at him. "How about if I just get the scrambled eggs? The Belgian waffles cost nine dollars." She reached across the table and took his scarred hand. "I'd get the point anyway."