No rain had ever soaked into the cardboard.

“I put flowers on dirt, Mama, I put flowers on nothing at all,” I said to the silent kitchen.

Fifty-five years of carnations wrapped in cheap grocery store plastic lay rotting in the dumpster behind the chapel, left there for nothing.

The only sound in the house was the dull, steady hum of the refrigerator motor in the pantry corner.

The September bank draft receipt pressed against my hip from inside my uniform pocket, three hundred dollars sent off to Tyler every month for fifty-five years.