Will Harrison

This woman would be a fantastic mother.

She would have that effortless ability to lift a kid and set her up on the edge of her hip with just one arm, while with the other she held a phone and made a deal or stirred a pot of soup or picked up the cat from the front steps, rescuing it from the rain.

His own wife had not wanted to have children, which was something he had known when they married.

It was their arrangement.

He just hadn't planned on his own feelings changing ten years later.

The woman continued to write.

She bit her lower lip.

He imagined her and her wife moving around their apartment at night, visiting the child once after bedtime, but then, after that, having the firm resolve to answer only from the hall, teaching their daughter to believe in her own strength and to let go of the day the way you just can't when you are five years old and every fear has a shape.

Well, they've set it for next Thursday.

Can you make that work?

We can do the pickup, I guess.

To him, the woman standing in the middle of her store now seemed to be more of the flowers than apart from them, as if they, the flowers, had brought her with them to look after their feeding and cleaning while they got on with the taxing business of being beautiful.

As she pulled together her papers, moving things around on the counter almost like a shy person, her tattoo flexed on her arm.

It was like the bees were actually breathing, helping her along and caring for this sea of flowers.

His wife was not a maker or a caretaker.

She existed beautifully in the world of ideas.

It was not that she couldn't feel things.

She was very emotional, in fact, but she could be looking at you and talking to you, and your hair might catch fire from the dinner candles, and she would be thinking about why that might have happened, and what are the cultural norms relative to baldness and

wigs and burn victims instead of thinking, oh shit, what the hell, here's a wet napkin and are you okay?

This woman, who he believed was preparing now to welcome home her lover and their newly adopted child, a daughter, he imagined, gave him the sense of standing with an actual human representation of Mother Earth.