The florist called in the spring to thank me for continuing to use them, and I hadn’t ordered anything since my husband’s funeral. We’re outside Poplar Bluff, and that funeral was in 2023. I ordered the casket spray and two standing pieces, paid nine hundred dollars, and never ordered another thing. The girl said there had been another order in November — a graveside piece, delivered to the same cemetery, paid for by phone. I asked who ordered it, and she gave me a woman’s name I’d never heard before.
Then she told me it wasn’t a one-time order. It had been placed every November for three years, always on the same date, and the card attached to it said exactly the same thing every time. I asked what the date was. It wasn’t his birthday, our anniversary, or the day he died. I looked it up after I hung up, and it was the day his first wife died in 1979 — the marriage I only learned about at the funeral home after finding an old obituary with his name in it.
I called the florist back and asked if they still had the card from the most recent order. They did. The girl read it to me slowly, then asked if I wanted her to stop the recurring order. I said yes, and then I asked her to read the name of the person who’d been placing it. She went quiet and said the woman had never given a last name, but she’d always asked the same question before hanging up: whether my husband was still buried there. Then she said there was something else in the florist’s notes — a request from the woman that had been added after the first order, and it said, “If his wife ever asks, tell her I kept my promise.”
