The Light of Hidden Flowers Read online

  BOOKS BY JENNIFER HANDFORD

  Daughters for a Time

  Acts of Contrition

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2015 by Jennifer Handford

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503950870 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1503950875 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781503947511 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1503947513 (paperback)

  Cover design by Elsie Lyons

  For my grandmother, Anna Pauline Parker

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A Q&A WITH JENNIFER HANDFORD

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PART ONE

  FATHER AND DAUGHTER

  CHAPTER ONE

  I didn’t usually mock my life. Really—my disposition was quite agreeable most of the time. In fact, people regarded me exactly that way: Missy Fletcher, a real sweetheart. The same way people described kindergarten teachers and puppies. And usually, I really did have an “attitude of gratitude,” as my father had always taught me. Count your blessings, daughter, he was fond of saying. We have it so good. But today I felt a gremlin on my shoulder, egging me on.

  A milestone birthday could have that effect.

  Happy birthday, Missy Fletcher. Thirty-five years old and you’ve barely cast a shadow.

  I locked the car and checked my reflection in the window. A disproportionately heavy head of hair for my little face, like a Tina Turner wig on a toddler. I reached into my pocket for a hair band and flattened the puffiness into a ponytail.

  I began the block walk up King Street in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia, toward the financial firm I co-owned with my father. When I reached our building, I peered up the five steps to the copperplate at the left of the front door.

  FLETCHER FINANCIAL, LLC

  FRANK FLETCHER, PAUL SULLIVAN, MELISSA FLETCHER

  Adjacent to our office was the community center, a redbrick building as old as the Continental Congress. It was the first working day of the month, which meant it was a Fletcher Financial seminar day in the center’s main hall. I entered and saw that Dad was already there, moseying around the room and touching each long table as if bestowing on it a benediction. In a short hour from now, he would be up in front delivering a financial planning seminar, but mostly telling stories and entertaining his buddies and clients.

  Let me tell you about the greatest guy in the world . . . my father would say. Let me tell you about a gal who was the smartest in her field. My father was this larger-than-life guy who started every sentence by complimenting someone else.

  When Dad saw me, he brightened like his dimmer switch had been turned high. “There’s my birthday girl! How’s my beautiful girl with a beautiful mind?”

  “Good, great!” I exaggerated a little. “You look handsome.” Dad wore his perfectly tailored Armani suit, gleaming Rolex, and shiny Ferragamos. “I’m going to set up the buffet.”

  “Not so fast,” he said, reaching for my hand. “Spend a few minutes with your old man. Tell me how you are. I mean really. It’s your birthday, a milestone. Are you happy? Are you doing what you want to be doing?” He looked at me like an eager puppy awaiting a treat. “Seems like just yesterday, you were a little baby. I’d sit with you on the floor. I’d hold your little hands and you’d jump—”

  “Up and down, up and down,” I said, finishing Dad’s sentence, one I’d heard so many times before.

  Such was my father’s daily conversation with me, his never-ending quest to tunnel into my soul. Why was I still single at the age of thirty-five? Why was I—his only child—working at his firm as a financial analyst, rather than pursuing another career? Why had I chosen to stay put, settling only a mile from him, in the same town I grew up in, rather than traveling the globe as I’d claimed I wanted to do when I was younger?

  That Dad loved me was a given; that he thought I could live a larger life was a given, too.

  “Dad, seriously,” I said, exhaling noisily, like a child. “I’m great. Right where I want to be. Are you ready for the seminar?”

  Dad peered around the room as if it were already packed with his treasured clients. “You know what my goal for today is? To talk to every person in this room.” He smiled wide, pounded the table with his fist.

  That was always Dad’s goal. To talk to every person in the room. For everything to be “the best.”

  As for me, I could think of nothing worse. The exact opposite of my father, I preferred a quiet room, a cup of tea, and a good book. Let’s communicate by e-mail, my quiet persona whispered. No need for public speaking. No reason for phone calls.

  The clients and prospects filed in. Paul, our third partner, helped me set up the projector. Paul was a lovable Muppet with a heavy helmet of coarse salt-and-pepper hair, caterpillar eyebrows, and a smile that covered half his face. Paul was the best. He’d come to work for Dad before I had even left for college, and now he was ki
nd of like a big brother to me. We laughed as we watched Dad work the room, greeting his old friends, meeting new ones: a touch and a thousand-watt smile. The attendees mixed and mingled, sipped coffee and nibbled on bagels.

  “He never tires of this,” Paul said.

  “Never,” I agreed. “Ever.”

  My father called the meeting to order and I kicked off the PowerPoint presentation, but I knew how this would go. Dad would look up at my first slide and would have every intention of sticking with the presentation, but . . .

  “Good morning, friends,” Dad began. “The other day I met with a new client. Let’s call him Abe. Abe was a real worrier about the market. Watches it every day. CNBC is on his television set all day, he told me. He clicks on his online account a good twenty times a day.”

  I shook my head and smiled at Paul. We knew exactly where this was going.

  “I told Abe, ‘Abe, I want to know how far your house is from my office. When you leave, I want you to do me a favor. I want you to measure the distance, will you?’”

  The audience hung on his every word.

  “Abe said, sure. Of course he would do it. Then I handed Abe a ruler. ‘What’s this for?’ he wanted to know. ‘To measure the distance from my office to your house,’ I told him. ‘But Frank,’ Abe said, ‘I’m not going to use a ruler, I’m going to set my odometer—and measure it in miles.’”

  Dad paused, looked around the room.

  He went on. “‘If you measure distance in miles, rather than with a ruler,’ I told Abe, ‘Then why are you checking on your investments twenty times a day? It’s the same thing. Today’s price isn’t your price! Tomorrow’s price isn’t your price! When you wake up on your sixty-fifth birthday, check the price. That’s your price!’”

  The audience nodded, wives smiling at their husbands. Paul nudged me. This wasn’t our first time to this show.

  “Folks,” Dad went on. “We don’t pick the flowers to see if they’re growing!”

  More laughter. More approval.

  From the corner of the room I watched as the crowd shook their heads and smiled and laughed because Dad and his thunderous personality had done it again. He spoke loudly, and often, and with conviction, and for these character traits, he was loved and admired.

  Dad moved on. “Folks, you all travel, visit interesting places—vacations, to see the kids, to explore mysterious lands. So you tell me if I’m right. When you get on a plane, you want three things: to take off on time, to have a smooth flight, and to land safely.”

  Dad looked at me because his flying analogies hit a little too close to home, with his daughter who couldn’t board a plane, even when nearly knocked cold.

  Dad talked about hitting these goals, and when he was just about to make his point—to say that having a competent pilot was the same as having a competent financial planner—he paused, leaned against the podium, stared at the crowd. Time decelerated as we waited for Dad to continue. He cleared his throat, and through the speaker system, it sounded like growling. Dad looked at me again, issued a small cough, and wiped at his brow.

  I couldn’t fathom what he was waiting for.

  Had he lost his place? I glanced at Paul, who knitted his eyebrows in worry.

  Dad’s eyes met with mine. Help me.

  I attempted to send Dad a telepathic message, to prompt him back to his story, because for the first time ever, it seemed that he had drawn a blank. He could always find north, but today, Dad was in the dark, and couldn’t seem to find the sun.

  A few people turned from their seats and whispered to their neighbors.

  My heart pounded in my chest, the same anxiety that preceded anytime I was forced to speak in front of a crowd. Saliva pooled in the back of my throat at the same time my lips adhered to my excessively dry teeth. My head itched with perspiration. When I looked again at Dad, his jaw was jutting back and forth, up and down, like he was trying to clear clogged ears.

  My dad was trapped in a burning building and it was up to me to save him.

  Run into it, Missy! my mind blared. Save him! I opened my mouth to speak, to rush headlong into the fiery heat, but nothing came out. The words I heard in my head were crushed by a flaming rafter. I couldn’t help my own father.

  Dad looked at me again. A look he shouldn’t have had to give. A good daughter would have stood ready. A brave daughter would never have hesitated.

  “So having a competent financial planner,” Paul called, “is like having a pilot: takeoff, smooth flight, safe landing.”

  Dad’s shoulders dropped an inch, and his jaw stopped shaking. It was as if he’d been under a spell now broken by the snap of the hypnotist’s fingers. “That’s it, my friend!” Dad said. He pulled out his embroidered hankie and wiped at his brow. “Forgive me, folks! Had a frog in my throat! Thanks for the assist, Paul,” Dad said. “Paul Sullivan, folks, my brilliant partner!”

  The grateful smile Dad sent Paul should have been for me. I should be the one with soot on my cheek, not Paul.

  Again Dad’s eyes flicked my way, and though he returned the smile I sent him, his eyes blazed feral, like a zebra cornered by a pack of lions. He pushed on. “That reminds me of another story . . .”

  And like that, Dad was back on track.

  CHAPTER TWO

  After the seminar, I packed up the laptop and projector and then walked to the office. Inside, I inhaled my earliest memories: mahogany, worn leather and musty files, a hint of my father’s Old Spice, and a touch of White Diamonds perfume courtesy of Jenny, his red-haired, red-fingernailed, red-lipsticked secretary.

  At the sight of me, Jenny sang, “Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday to you!” She pulled a noisemaker from her desk drawer and tooted it ceremoniously while tossing into the air a handful of confetti.

  “Thanks, Jenny,” I said, “but I’m not celebrating, remember?”

  Jenny honked the horn again, but this time at a decibel barely audible. “I know, honey,” she whispered, sliding out of her chair, hugging me tightly and slipping into my hand a wrapped present with bow, anyway. Jewelry or makeup. Jenny always bought me jewelry or makeup, neither of which I had much talent for wearing. “Just in case you want to celebrate later.”

  Jenny was a Christmas tree of a woman, sparkling and gleaming, wrapped decorously in red and gold silk scarves and elevated on shiny hot-tamale pumps, with enough jewelry hanging from her ears and neck and wrists to melt down and arm a small country.

  It wasn’t until I was older that I figured out that Jenny had been angling all along for a different role than merely my father’s dutiful assistant. What she was really hoping to be was his wife, and my mother. And though Dad never hired Jenny for the position she hoped for, the three of us imitated a family pretty well. When I was young, Jenny planned my birthday parties. When I was older, she treated me to shows at the theater, lunch at a fancy restaurant afterward. And she helped Dad shop for suits and ties, expensive wing tips, a gleaming Rolex. Dad and I reciprocated, blanketing Jenny with flowers on her birthday and Tiffany jewelry at Christmas.

  “Thank you,” I said, hugging her back. After all of these years, Jenny was still a wind chime, choked in necklaces and handcuffed in bracelets lining her arms.

  “How was this morning?” she asked.

  “The seminar went well, but . . .” I glanced down the hall to make sure Dad wasn’t listening. “Dad was a little off.”

  “What do you mean, honey?”

  I looked around again and then whispered, “He forgot what he was talking about.”

  “Oh, honey, he’s seventy. What do you expect? We all have senior moments.”

  “Seventy isn’t that old,” I said.

  “Honey, it’s not young. I wouldn’t worry about it. Focus on your birthday. You never know what the day’ll bring!”

  “That’s for sure,” I agreed, immediately th
inking about my mother, who would have never predicted what the day brought her. She was just running an errand to the grocery store when an HVAC truck rammed into her car broadside, killing her instantly. I was four years old.

  I breezed by Dad’s office, the same office he’d occupied thirty years ago. To stand in it, to smell the mahogany of his massive desk, to hear the Frank Sinatra from his CD player (having finally traded in his turntable a few years back), felt no different than when I was five years old. On those Saturday mornings, Dad stacked and sorted, humming along to “Fly Me to the Moon,” while I sat at Jenny’s desk and pounded on her typewriter. Then I’d fish through her drawers, pulling out the stamps and ink pads and covering the back side of my paper with authoritative marks: FIRST CLASS. COPY. URGENT. There was no end to the fun with carbon paper and tracing paper and Post-it notes at my disposal.

  Only now, I wasn’t five, I was thirty-five years old—exactly thirty-five years old—and a partner in my father’s business. A business that now grossed $5 million a year. I leaned into Dad’s office. “Everything okay in here?” I asked, offering him a smile like a cube of sugar.

  “There’s my birthday girl.” He looked fine, his usual, sunny self.

  I put a finger to my lips and issued an exaggerated “Shh—remember, we’re not talking about it this year?” Then I slipped into my own office next door.

  I hung my sweater on the hook, clicked on my computer with its three flat-screen monitors fanned out on my desk like a tri-fold picture frame, then emptied my messenger bag while the screens came to life. Once the computer was powered up, I opened my to-do list via spreadsheet. Color-coordinated columns and rows based on prioritization—Urgent, Important, Later—glowed back at me.

  In the break room, I filled my mug with coffee, added cream and sugar, and a shot of vanilla flavoring. Jenny had brought in a box of doughnuts. I chose a cruller. It was my birthday, after all. I was tall and thin with a hamster-on-a-wheel metabolism. In high school I ran twenty miles a week for the cross-country team and played tennis in the spring. Though now I was far from what someone would describe as athletic, I still maintained the happy ability to burn calories.