She wanted cut flowers, and she did not want to say it; her husband was just supposed to know.
He had never thought much of cut flowers; to his way of thinking, they lasted a few days, and died, generating waste. He preferred live plants, and would take her to nurseries where she pointed at something and he bought whatever it was. But, really, she wanted cut flowers, maybe once a week, to put in a glass vase on a table in the kitchen or on the coffee table, like they did in classy homes.
She found someone to buy her flowers, a regular customer at her workplace. The flowers looked nice on her desk and she hadn't have to tell anyone what she wanted. Soon they were dating, very discreetly at lunchtime and on weekends when she told her husband she was going shopping for women's things. There were several years of this, and then she discovered he had a wife. He told her that it was o.k., his own wife was fine with an open marriage, but she knew that it was not right to be the other woman unless you ended up married, like her mother had done.
She broke it off. She was sad, really sad, and her husband noticed. He took her to a nursery where they spent a lot of money on plants that he still has today, and still enjoys. Eventually she divorced him and she never had to tell him about the cut flowers.
She died alone. At her funeral there were lots of cut flowers, huge sprays in her favorite colors, which goes to show the lengths it takes to get what you want if you aren't willing to say anything about it.
#microbio
