I was eighteen and wearing a yellow dress the night Danny Wirth asked me to dance. That’s why he called me Dandelion — only he spelled it Dandylion, every time, and I never once corrected him. He gave me a ring in October of 1968, on the bench by the river downtown. It was a chip of a diamond that turned my finger green by Christmas. Nine days later, he shipped out on a bus to the Army, and I never saw him again for fifty-eight years.<\/p>\n
Everybody else in Reno called me Sukey, since I was a girl. My real name’s Susan. But to Danny I was a weed in a yellow dress, and I loved it. He wrote me thirty-one letters from training and then from overseas. I kept every one in a Whitman’s candy box — under my bed, then my closet, then my cedar chest. His capital D always leaned over like it was tired.<\/p>\n
In the spring of 1969 the letters stopped. In June, a letter came from his mother instead. She’d gone down to Texas to be near him, she wrote. He’d been burned bad over there and sent to a hospital in San Antonio. He didn’t make it. They’d buried him back home in her family’s plot in Ohio. “Don’t come,” she wrote. “There’s nothing left to see. Remember him how he was.”<\/p>\n
I was nineteen. I didn’t have bus fare to Ohio. I didn’t even have the sense to ask which town. I just lay down on my bed in my mother’s house and didn’t get up for a week.<\/p>\n
Two years later I married Ted Haldane. Ted was a good man — I want to say that plain. He sold insurance, and then I sold it with him for thirty years. We had two kids and four grandkids and a house off the freeway with a lemon tree that never made a lemon. I felt guilty every day of it, a little. For marrying so fast. For being happy. For keeping a candy box of another man’s letters in my cedar chest the whole time.<\/p>\n
Ted died three years ago this month. I keep a pencil behind my ear out of habit, from forty years of filling out policies. I’ve got Ted’s pension and a casserole in the freezer for emergencies. It’s a small life. No big deal.<\/p>\n
Then last Saturday, the doorbell rang.<\/p>\n
A teenage boy from a florist downtown stood there, holding a mason jar of wildflowers. Black-eyed Susans, some little blue ones, and right in the middle, a dandelion. “Ma’am? These are for Susan.” There was a little white card tucked in the ribbon. I knew that capital D before I knew anything else. Still my Dandylion. Spelled wrong. The way he always spelled it.<\/p>\n
I had to sit down on my own front step. My first thought was, somebody’s playing a mean trick on an old woman. My second thought was, nobody alive knows that name but me. I called the florist and dialed wrong twice. The girl there was real sweet about it. “An older gentleman came in Thursday and paid cash,” she said. “He filled the card out himself. He had a hard time holding the pen.” “Did he leave a name?” “Just D. Wirth. And a phone number, a 530 number.” That’s up in California.<\/p>\n
I called it. A woman answered. I said, “My name is Susan Haldane, and I’m looking for—” She hung up on me. My grandson found the address on his phone in about two minutes. Susanville, California. Two hours north. I told my daughter that night. She looked at me like I’d lost my marbles. “Mom, you’re seventy-seven. You’re going to drive two hours to chase a ghost?” “He’s not a ghost if he can buy flowers.” “Somebody’s scamming you. Please don’t make a fool of yourself.”<\/p>\n
I didn’t sleep. I took his letters out of the Whitman’s box and read every one at the kitchen table.<\/p>\n
I drove up the next morning anyway. I stopped at the Raley’s on the way out of town for gas and sat there in the parking lot a long time. Maybe my daughter was right, and I was just a lonely old fool chasing a dead boy across two states. I put the car in drive.<\/p>\n
The address was a little green house on a quiet street, with a ramp up to the porch. There was a pair of men’s work boots by the door, old ones, polished. I knocked. A woman about fifty opened it, gray at the temples, still in scrubs from a night shift. She looked at me, and I could see she knew exactly who I was. “You’re her,” she said. “The Dandelion. I’m his daughter.”<\/p>\n
“Is he here? Is Danny here?” Her eyes filled up. She held the door with both hands. “He wanted you to have the flowers. He never meant for you to come.” “He doesn’t want you to see him like this,” she said. “Please go.” She started to shut the door. And from inside that house, a man’s voice said, “Selena. Wait.” I’d know it anywhere. Older, rougher, but I’d know it. She stopped. The door swung wide, slow.<\/p>\n
Danny was alive. He had never died in that hospital in San Antonio. The truth, it turned out, was crueler than grief: his mother had lied. She had intercepted his letters to me — and burned the one in which he begged me to come to him. She told him I had stopped writing, that I had moved on, that there was nothing waiting for him back home. She buried him in Ohio on paper so he would stay buried in her life for real.<\/p>\n
He came home broken and stayed hidden for years. Eventually he built a quiet life, married a kind woman named Elaine, and raised Selena, the daughter now standing in the doorway in her scrubs. Elaine passed a few years back. The guilt of what his mother did had eaten at him ever since — until, at seventy-eight, he walked into a florist with shaking hands and asked for wildflowers and a dandelion.<\/p>\n
Now I drive up on Sundays. We sit on his porch, and Selena brings out lemon cake, and we don’t talk much about the fifty-eight years. There isn’t enough Sunday in the world for that. He still spells it Dandylion. I still never correct him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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