A Single Daffodil

Grandpa Gene had been listening to Frank Sinatra all morning.

I was lying on the floor of his sunroom, resting my chin again my propped up hand as I flipped through the pages of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. When I had time to kill, I would spend time reading Grandpa Gene’s favorite books. He had an old rustic-looking bookshelf located right outside the sunroom, filled with all his favorites. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age classics, essays by William Faulkner, novels by John Steinbeck, the humorist words of Mark Twain. They were all there. All friends, sitting on the bookshelf. Every book had just as much of an aged quality about them as the bookshelf did. They were beaten up, frayed, spines split, pages pulled out, tears, tugs, and rips. I think that’s what why I was intrigued in the first place. The books have been places, they’ve travelled, almost as if they’ve journeyed the stories they declaim.

I had started The Old Man and the Sea at the beginning of the summer. I found my last dog-eared page, stretched out on the floor of the sunroom, and tried to get back into the story as Grandpa Gene painted at his easel. Sometimes I found Hemingway’s style of writing very difficult to follow, mostly because he writes simple stories, but you can tell every word counts. Every word is full of thought, every word is pure, simple and straight to the point. I think that’s why I catch myself getting stuck on the same sentence or paragraph for long periods of time. Stories can never be straight forward, or simple. Everything in this world is complex and chaotic, so it trips me up quite often when Hemingway gets all uncomplicated on me.

I was stuck on the same second paragraph of the fourth chapter as I idly twisted a loose curl that fell out from the messy bun that sat lop-sided on my head. I realized as my ankles swayed back and forth behind me, that I wasn’t stuck on the same paragraph because Hemingway was trying to bamboozle me with his easy words. It was because Frank Sinatra was playing. All morning.

And when Grandpa Gene plays Frank Sinatra for longer than an hour, it means he’s missing Grandma Bridgette more than ever.

I think Frank Sinatra was my grandma’s favorite musician, or she had some kind of association with the late singer, because when my Grandpa listened to ol’ Blue Eyes sing the sweet melodies about love, he smiled less and frowned more.

I couldn’t focus on Hemingway because thinking about Grandpa Gene missing the love of his life, led my thoughts into a whole other destructive subject matter that I’ve been trying to avoid for the past couple of days now: the beginning of the end between me and Harry.

After a few more struggling moments of moving onto the third paragraph, I decided to give up and rolled over onto my side so I could look up at Grandpa Gene. His expression was pensive as he focused on blending different shades of blue into the corner of his new canvas. He was painting a warship at sea today. I wondered if it was the same ship he served on when he was in the navy.

“Hey, Grandpa?” I said after watching him paint for a while. “Can I ask you something?”

“Are you going to ask me why Hemingway cared so much about fishing and drinking?” He answered my question with another question. “Because I have yet to figure that out myself.”

“No, nothing about Hemingway.” I found myself chuckling as I pulled myself up into sitting position. I crossed my legs and leaned back onto my palms. “I actually have a question about long-distance relationships.”

Grandpa Gene frowned, his brows creasing as he dropped his paintbrush into the cup of water. He didn’t say anything verbally, but a fleeting moment of him looking tormented told me a lot about how he felt.

I took this as my queue to continue. “Well, you and Grandma. You were separated from each other a whole year because you were deployed back to the States, right? And you would write letters to each other and stay in touch the whole time you were apart.”

“Right.” Grandpa Gene confirmed.

“Well, I guess my question is...” I tilted my head and chewed on my lip while I thought about what I wanted to ask. “My question is, how did you cope without her? How did you manage?”

Grandpa Gene let out a steady exhale before responding. “In actuality, Vita, I didn’t manage without her. I was miserable. Downright desolate. It’s a feeling I will always struggle to describe. I knew when I left her in France, that I couldn’t live without her. Letters weren’t enough for me. I wanted to hold her hand, hear her voice, see her eyes light up. My future belonged to her.”

I let his words settle with me for a couple of moments. I pulled my knees up to my chest and tightly wound my arms around them. “So, you knew you were going to marry her.”

“Without question.” Grandpa Gene answered not a second later. “That’s why waiting a year for her was worth it. That’s how our long-distance relationship worked. We had an end goal waiting for us. We had the same dream. We wanted a life together; we wanted to start a family together. It was just a matter of being patient and holding onto our dream until we could make it true.”

“Right.” I hummed, my eyes focusing on the wall behind Grandpa Gene as I dipped into my latest woes about where my own relationship was heading.

Long distance relationships were as foreign to me as the Arabic language. If you asked me, dating was an all-inclusive enigma. I’ve seen friends and acquaintances try to do the whole long distance thing, and I’ve never actually seen it succeed. Like Jayden, for example. He tried dating a girl that lived just outside Miami a couple of years ago, and it was going really well until Jayden had to leave Florida for competitions. Jayden was pretty lousy at staying in touch while he was out of state, so that relationship went down the drain pretty quick. I just couldn’t see how Harry and I would be able to last. He was from England, I was from America. I had to finish school, he had to tour around the world. His schedule was demanding, strict, in the public eye and I was just a college student, trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life.

“What are you thinking about, Vita?” Grandpa Gene’s gravelly voice interrupted my thoughts. “You’ve been quiet.”

“Everything and nothing, Grandpa.” I sighed, jumping up to my feet and stretching my arms. “Would you like more coffee?”

He politely declined and went back to his canvas. As I walked into the kitchen and poured myself a second cup of joe, I couldn’t stop thinking about Harry. About me. About us, together. Our relationship was being timed, and it had a countdown. There was a limit, and we were reaching it. We were a ticking time bomb. It was the beginning to the end of us. I could feel it.

It was a terrible feeling.



“So then I was all like, ‘Sir. You have to calm down. I was just asking for your passport’. He was getting all worked up about me asking to see his passport. His passport, Vita. Can you believe it?”

Ronnie was sitting next to me in the back room of Jane’s Flower Shop, babbling on about her job at the airport as we both ate our Chipotle rice bowls. Flower orders always slowed down in the early afternoon and since business was extra slow today, Maggie agreed to letting Ronnie and I take our lunch break together. In the distance, I could hear Maggie on the phone in the front, following up on orders for seasonal flowers. It was about that time we started ordering Russian Sage and Red Spider Lilies for the Fall.

“It’s like, how dunce can you be about traveling?” Ronnie continued, taking another bite of her guacamole-smothered rice. “He was accusing me of stealing his personal information for the government. Like, what? Bro. I’m just trying to get you on a flight to New Zealand. By the way, what the hell is in New Zealand? Whales? Did you ever see that movie, ‘The Whale Rider’? That movie scared the shit out of me. It was set in New Zealand, I think.”

I pushed the leftovers of my Chipotle with my fork and shook my head. I tried to focus on Ronnie and her over-zealous tales from her other job at the airport. Typically, I enjoyed her stories a lot. She had crazy ones. They were always funny because she was a great story teller. But I just couldn’t focus on her stories today. I was tired because I wasn’t sleeping. I wasn’t sleeping because I was anxious. I was anxious because Harry.

“Now what’s this frown all about?” Ronnie asked, crumpling up her napkin and throwing it on the table. “Don’t tell me you and Harry had your first fight already. The honeymoon period is suppose to last another month at least.”

Another month at least. I don’t even think we had another month together.

“No, we didn’t have a fight.” I said. “But we probably will have one.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Ronnie.” I took in a deep breathe. “I think I have to break up with him.”

Her eyes widened and her brows rose so high, they disappeared under her messy red hair. “What the hell are you talking about?”

I didn’t know what the hell I was about. Thinking about breaking up with him was only thinking. It was a brief moment of insanity inside my brain. It appeared and then it disappeared. I was able to pretend like it didn’t exist. That was just me going crazy. But saying the words out loud made it different. It was harsh, real, noisy. The difference between thinking it and saying it out loud was I wasn’t the only one who experienced the words anymore. Someone else heard me say it. Ronnie heard me. The words were permanently dangling in the flower scented air of the back room of Jane’s Flower Shop.

“He’s leaving at the end of summer.” I tried to support my statement. “Wouldn’t that make this just a summer fling? A summer romance?”

“Come on, Vita. This isn’t Grease. This is real life.” Ronnie replied. “Long distance relationships are a thing.”

“But they don’t work. They never work!” I dropped the fork on my plate and folded my hands in my lap. I could feel myself getting nervous. “They’re a disaster. And Harry... he’s in a band, you know? A well-known band. Fuck, not just a well-known band. He’s in the band. The boy band of the century. He’s international. How many women will he get to see daily when he’s on tour? Hundreds. Thousands.”

“Oh man, Vita.” Ronnie gave me a pained expression. It was clear she felt bad for me. “You can’t think like that. You’re letting his career intimidate you and it shouldn’t. He really fought for you this summer. From what I’ve heard and read about him, that’s a big deal. I don’t think he’s ready to let you go when recording wraps up and he goes home. I think he’s in it for the long run.”

“You don’t know that.” While Ronnie made a valid argument, I couldn’t stop thinking about how miserable I would be when Harry did leave for good. “I don’t think I could do a long-distance relationship. That’s the thing. It’s going to be fine at first, we’ll manage, but then we’ll start missing each other’s calls, the time difference will get confusing, I’ll get paranoid about losing him to someone else, and I’ll worry myself sick. It’ll get toxic, and we’ll resent each other when we break up after trying the long-distance thing. Why not end it on a good note? Turn it into a friendship instead?”

“You’re not even willing to try, Vita?” Ronnie pushed her red bangs out of her eyes and crossed her arms across her chest. She looked at me with amazement like she couldn’t believe I was acting this way. “You’re not going to give your relationship the benefit of the doubt? You and Harry’s connection might be a lot stronger than you think.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” I sighed, letting my shoulders drop with exhaustion. “Maybe Harry isn’t even thinking about the whole long distance thing at all. Maybe he’s ready to quit too.”

Before Ronnie could even fight me on the whole quitting comment, because I could tell by how bright her eyes were that she was ready to seriously prevail in some words of wisdom, Maggie walked into the back with a vase sprouting loud bursts of yellow, white and purple flowers.

“Here you go.” She sang happily, placing the vase in front of me. I stared at the flower combination. The dominant flower range of the bouquet were yellow daffodils, blended wonderfully into the rich purple freesias and delicate lilies of the valley. It was beautiful and smelled like a sweet meadow hidden behind a mountain.

Confused, I sat back in my seat and looked up at Maggie with a raised eyebrow. “I didn’t do these? I finished all my orders this morning.”

“I know you didn’t do these because I did these.” Maggie replied, already walking back to the front of the store. “But the young man on the phone this morning told me you would know what to do with them.”

Ronnie and I shared a look before I quickly stood up and snatched the tiny envelope out of the bouquet. I didn’t even need to read the note to know who they were from, but I ripped the envelope open anyways.



“Oh yeah, Vita,” I didn’t realize Ronnie was reading the card over my shoulder. She stood up and grabbled our empty plates. “He’s definitely ready to quit you.”

She walked over to the trashcan and dumped our meal before disappearing to the front of the store. I slowly sat back down, reading the card over again. And again. And again, again, again. I looked up at the daffodils and felt my brows scrunch up and my eyelids wilt.

I held the note tightly against my chest, right where it ached the most.

Always the daffodils.