The Flower Shop and the Prairie Drug Lord
Tristan’s Story — Part 2: Cherchez la femme
Shoot me.
Just kill me now.
Rye porter followed by red wine followed by three IPAs and secrets. Never a great idea.
The good news: It was Saturday, the blinds were drawn, and my futon set me just a few inches off the spinning floor.
The shed with the scales and guns. Had I hallucinated them?
Barely a foot from my face, my phone vibrated. Marshaling all my strength, I flipped it over.
Great seeing you last night — it’s been too long! How are you holding up?
Too wrung out to even wrap my head around the act of typing, I summoned every ounce of will to find and send Melissa an animated gif, Hello Kitty puking into a toilet. I didn’t read her retort — Niko is wondering how Hello Kitty can throw up when she doesn’t have a mouth, please enlighten us — until a good four hours later.
Noon. Clanging radiators, stripes of sunlight across the bookshelves, cold bathroom tile beneath my feet. Today, I will not work, I decided. I will not even think about work, about this Shelly lady, about my overdue rent, about my shit-can excuse for an automobile. I would spend my day at the coffeehouse, in a radical act of self care (as my Minneapolis peeps would call it) with the company of copious caffeinated beverages and a thick musty book.
From my milk crate bookshelf I selected William S. Burroughs. “Naked Lunch,” the an obvious choice for a debauched and dehydrated mind. Randolph gave me shit about this author as well. “Why do you read books about white folks? Why don’t you read books about our people?” Because I already know our people, I explained.
My phone buzzed again. In came five emails in swift succession, the articles Niko had mentioned the night before. All concerned North Dakota.
I arrived the next day at Shelly’s Flower Shop refreshed, rested and ready. And informed.
I wondered how she’d be, this Shelly — Melissa’s estranged sister-in-law, mother of two children, erstwhile farm mistress. Former wife of prairie drug lord Brandon.
Shelly’s Flower Shop was located right between a nail salon and a smoothie shop, with a Jimmy John’s two storefronts away. Jingle bells clanged as I walked through the door. The store was small but bright, with shelves on the wall displaying representative arrangements and two plastic chairs and a small round table ready for consultations.
Right on time, the woman from Melissa’s photo album walked out to greet me. Trim, cheerful, with feathered dark hair and a firm handshake. Would I like a coffee? A donut? She had just picked up a batch on the way in — cinnamon, honey-glazed and chocolate.
“I read about your work in Minnesota Woman magazine. Thanks for taking on a small client like me.”
I’m one bounced check away from living in my car, I immediately wanted to tell this friendly woman.
“I really liked your portfolio,” Shelly continued. “Even the less glamorous businesses, like the pawn shop and the plumber, you really gave them style.”
“Thank you,” I replied. Style. Making people happy. That’s why I was in this business, I told her. Because it sure as hell wasn’t for the money, I added to myself.
“Let’s dig into the system and see what’s wrong.”
For the next three hours, I coded and she worked. As the phones rang and delivery people and customers walked through the door, she hustled through the store in her stacked boots and rhinestone-studded jeans that said Sturgis or West River more than Minnesota suburb. Cheerful. Competent. Prairie drug lord Brandon was a fool for letting this woman go.
For lunch, Shelly picked up sandwiches as Jimmy John’s. “My treat,” she insisted. And she told me about her circumstances — the polite, sanitized preamble Minnesotans always lead with and the story she didn’t realize I already knew.
Born in New Mexico but grew up in the area. Married her high school sweetheart. Helped him with his family’s farm and two kids — “good kids, a boy and a girl” — who were now off to college. And now finalizing a divorce.
“This shop is the first thing I’ve done for myself in 20 years,” she told me. And then a customer walked in before she could explain more.
My first day of work exceeded her expectations. “Thank you very much, Tristan. It’s been a pleasure working with you so far. I can only hope my own kids turn out as well as you.”
I kept those words in mind that evening as I met with my landlord, begging one last time for forgiveness before he kicked me out into the street.
“Tristan, this is becoming a habit with you. You need to start catching up.”
He gave me a deadline. An impossible one.
What else can a man do?
The next day, I filled up my tank and drove back to South Dakota, where business was less competitive, to hustle. The string cheese company. The ad agency. The hunting outfit. “Just in the area so I thought I’d stop by. Anything I can help you with?” At night, I crashed at Benedict’s. He was in Milbank now working at a pawn/skateboard shop and sharing a big ramshackle house with five other guys.
Did they have to crank up Game of War at 3 a.m.? Did they have to smoke weed near the bag with my dress clothes? Probably not, but a free boarder has no room to complain.
I drove back to Minnesota for my paying work. Back at Shelly’s Flower Shop, it was a beautiful fall day. Everyone was outside biking, pushing strollers, doing yard work. No one wanted to be shackled to a counter, including us.
And that’s when she started confiding in me.
“I need to get out and meet people, Tristan.”
Go for it, I replied, in a tone I hoped to be encouraging.
“But how? I haven’t dated since I was 16. I’m always in this shop. All day, all night. Not that I resent it. I know it’s my choice- ”
The Internet, I told her. Duh.
“Is that what you do?”
“Yeah,” I walked on over to show her my phone and my apps. “Here’s how it works. And just to warn you,” I said, logging in and flipping through a few screens. “I like guys.”
Shelly didn’t bat an eye. “That’s fine. I do, too.”
I helped her set up her profile. A swipe here, a swipe there and every so often a twinkle in the eye and a smile. Wasting no time. This woman was something else.
What a family. I never would have expected it from Melissa when I first met her. I would have pegged Melissa as coming from respectable MPR-worshiping, St. Olaf-attending suburban stock instead. So later that afternoon, I stopped by her studio. She was in, hunched over a mask and wearing a new pair of trendy glasses. “How’s work?” she asked.
Not bad, I told her. I rattled off the latest developments with the Sioux Falls ad agency, the string cheese magnate in the middle of the state and another potential South Dakota client, Ham World. Because every Midwestern mall is required by law to have a Ham World outlet.
And in the middle of it all, I slipped in a quick sentence about Shelly’s Flower Shop. That got her to look up from her mask.
“You took the job?”
I nodded.
“Shit, you didn’t listen to Niko, did you?”
She sighed, tapped the tip of her Sharpie against the edge of her chin in thought. Tristan, Tristan, Tristan, I could hear her cluck to herself. “Well,” she conceded. “Not a lot that can be done about it now. How is she doing?”
Good, I said because it was the truth. My new client Shelly was rocking a fresh divorce and the travails of a new business with pluck, aplomb and, quite frankly, a rugged sexiness a woman half her age would envy.
Maybe I shouldn’t have used the phrase “rugged sexiness” to describe Melissa’s former sister-in-law. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything, or taken the job with the flower shop in the first place.
Because Melissa said nothing for a very long time. “I’m glad to hear that,” she eventually conceded. “Shelly’s a good person. It’s not her fault.”
“How did the kids take it?”
I always ask about the kids when people bring up divorce — politely, of course. Because no one had ever asked me or Bertram or Benedict or any of the others how we had felt about our situation. Of course, our free-spirited parents — Dad and his many girlfriends, then their many boyfriends, that was — hadn’t technically been married. And they were all long dead by now. But we would have appreciated some polite concern.
“Oh, they knew,” Shelly sighed. “One Friday night, we all just stared at each other in that big beige living room in the new house that never really worked with our farm furniture. The kids, of course, resented the timing because they wanted to go out with their friends. ‘Your father and I need to tell you something, and I think you already have a good idea what it is,’ I told them.
“Our girl, of course, was the first one to guess. ‘You’re getting a divorce.’ She said it with about as much emotion as I’d say ‘I’m going to go out to the garden’ or ‘I’m going to take some turkey out of the freezer for dinner.’ And within five minutes, we all were back to our separate rooms in the house watching TV or playing around on the Internet or whatever. That night, I checked in on each of them before bed. ‘We’ll figure something out for the holidays,’ I told them. Well, both of them already had plans. How about that?”
How about that indeed. “How’s your life treating you, Tristan? Everything good with your family?” she asked me. “Not to pry or anything.”
I told her how Bertram was asking for money, yet again. He was behind on his rent. And how Benedict’s landlord for the skateboarding shop was hassling them for burning incense. Who the hell burns incense any more?
“I burned incense,” Shelly replied. “Brandon’s mother liked it. Something about the scents and her Parkinson’s or dementia. She found it really comforting.”
“That was right before we sold the farm and the divorce. They had retired to Florida, but after she got sick, Brandon brought her back to Minnesota because that’s where she had spent 40 years of her life. Of course she didn’t realize she was there most of the time.”
Shelly explained as shoved a fistful of stems into a vase. It was the kind of glass vase that looks expensive when it arrives on your doorstep but ordinary when you see dozens of it in a supply cabinet.
“In cases like hers, the mind lets you go back in time and lets you relive certain aspects from your past. Which is probably really fulfilling for the people experiencing it. Depends on what aspects, I guess.
“In any case, she thought I was her old math teacher the whole time I was bathing her. That’s pretty messed up when you think about it. Brandon handled the medications and feeding, and I insisted on doing all the bathing and more intimate tasks because that’s just not something a son should ever have to do for his mother.”
And Melissa? I asked
“Melissa had just given birth, so we didn’t bother her with these things.”
“How did you learn what to do? Parkinson’s is some serious shit.”
“You go to the internet. You figure it out.”
My conversations with Shelly and these stories about the farm sparked even more curiosity about Melissa. Melissa was a flinty soul, and as much as she tended to overshare certain details about her life, she remained taciturn about many others. Like most of her non-city life.
“So, tell me more about your time as a drug runner in the oil fields.”
I probed this on a hunch during my next visit to her studio. After a brief roll of the eyes — “Niko was only supposed to talk to you about the fucking shed, how embarrassing” — Melissa added some context to all of the articles about North Dakota.
There she was during her first spring in North Dakota, driving her routes, looking forward to summer, loving her life. New business, great boyfriend, flush bank account — what’s not to like? And then a sudden blizzard caught her out mid-delivery, one of those storms where it’s safer just to stay put. So she did, for hours, and waited.
Bored, anxious, annoyed and soon very, very hungry, she remembered, duh, that she was driving a delivery truck full of food so why not take advantage of it? And rummaging through the boxes, she soon discovered that she had been transporting other things as well — oxy, meth, heroin, you name it. Melissa had to go to Google, in fact, to properly identify it all. The pot, of course, she recognized. Even she wasn’t that naïve.
Should she stay? Should she go? Should she tell anyone?
Under Brandon’s dubious tutelage, she kept her mouth shut and drove off in the middle of the night. This on-the-lam plan — “Raymond and those guys were chasing me, they knew something was up” — involved throwing away her phone (“a new iPhone 6?” I exclaimed, horrified) and camping for a month in an abandoned campground in western Minnesota. Hiding out like Jennifer Lawrence in “Winter’s Bone,” was how she described it.
“You skinned and ate a squirrel?” I asked, ready to be impressed.
No, Hormel beans out of a can, she clarified. But her other campground hacks had been noteworthy, like jimmying an electrical connection for the camper and pirating access into some impressively fast internet connections. There she was for a month, huddled in her sleeping bag, scared to death, missing Niko, looking back on her time in North Dakota and coming to the realization that this state was an evil, evil place.
On the drive back to South Dakota, I regarded those white-bread farms along the side of the road in a new light, knowing that my new client Shelly’s old place was among them. The wind turbines interspersed among them spun around and around and around as I raced on by, cranking up whatever music that would drown out my car’s welping engine. Rage Against the Machine. Metallica.
“You’re old school,” Randolph observed as I pulled into his cracked concrete driveway with the stereo blaring. “For a hipster.”
”Why don’t you just move to South Dakota?” he asked me over dinner. “That’s where your business opportunities are. That car is going to die any day, and you’re probably spending a grand a month on gas already.”
He had a point. Randolph usually did. But the city kept on pulling me back. Boys, concerts, culture. Fewer rednecks threatening to beat me up. Plus little commitments like my apartment lease and clients like the flower shop.
“Shelly sounds hot. Can you set me up?”
What could I tell him? Being that I’d been warned away from that side of Melissa’s family, being that Shelly must have known about the illicit activities on the farm — how could she not? — and being that her ex-husband would probably shit to find anyone brown taking his place in bed, the answer would have to be a no.
“I’m not afraid.”
“She has kids in college, Randolph.”
My cousin reflected on this. “So what does ex-husband Scarface do all day, now that he doesn’t have the farm to hang out on?”
“Drives around a lot, she guesses. Goes hunting. Spends a lot of time in South Dakota, oddly enough.”
“It’s the place to be.”
“She doesn’t ask for the specifics. She figures it’s not her business anymore.”
“Does she want him back?”
I pondered that. “She misses him, I think.”
“Stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result,” Randolph sagely advised, polishing the bongs and pipes in the display case until they glistened.
Read part 1, part 3, part 4 and part 5 of Tristan’s story.
See what happened before and the events Tristan’s story sets into motion.
© 2016 People and Places. All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Views of the characters do not necessarily reflect the views of the author.
