Free Barbara Samuel by A Piece of Heaven

with these kids. She was an outsider. Luna worried about it. There would be girls who would challenge her—tough girls who didn’t haveanything to lose. “Girls,” she said. “I’m talking about girls, not boys.”
    “I’m fifteen, not six.”
    “I know.” She smiled, lifting a shoulder. “And I trust you. You’ll make friends fast.”
    At the main drag, they parted company, Joy going off to school, Luna heading to the Pay and Pack grocery store. On the way in, she nodded to Ernesto and Diane, smoking outside on the park bench management had put in the shade. “Still off?” Ernie asked.
    “So far so good.” Lifting her shirt sleeve to show the patch, she said, “Seventeen days.”
    “Goll, that’s good,” Diane said. She was nineteen and Hispanic and had the longest eyelashes Luna had ever seen. “I’m just too weak, I think.”
    “You’ll do it.” Luna lifted a hand and went in, suddenly very jealous of the fact that they were smoking and she wasn’t. Not fair.
    Luckily, because she’d been gone, there was a lot to do. Another woman, Renee, filled in when Luna took time off, but she generally made a mess of things. Or not a mess, exactly—she just didn’t do things the way Luna liked them done. Tying an apron over her shirt, she got to work cleaning up, checking the displays to see what was offered for sale, what sort of bouquets Renee had made up, and what might be left; checking the water level in the potted ferns and dieffenbachia and English ivy—a real pain in the neck in the dry climate; they always fell prey to spider mites. Luna tried to talk people into buying pothos, instead. Finding them all dry as a bone, that was the first priority. She fitted a narrow green hose to the sink in back and turned on the water, drawing the hose behind her as she made her way around the plants and buckets and coolers, filling them all up.
    It wasn’t exciting work. It wasn’t particularly challenging. It was, in the lingo of AA, a Job. She’d taken it when she’d been sober ninety-three days, and at the time, it seemed like God himself had ordained it. It was peaceful. The flowers, the coolness of the water, the smell of the plants and earth and carnations and roses. She loved putting her hands in dirt, and not having to dress up for work. She adored making bouquets from the big tubs of flowers that were delivered twice a week from a greenhouse in Albuquerque. Within a year, she’d taken over the department from the desultory administration of the former manager, and profits went up 23 percent the first six months.
    So she stayed. The salary was decent and there were medical benefits, a little profit sharing, a retirement plan. Enough for her needs. She never had to take it home and worry about it, as she had so often with her clients. And there were fringe benefits to working in a grocery store—people she worked with and people who came into the store. It was possible to help someone every single day, and no matter how grumpy she felt when she came in, the flowers never failed to cheer her.
    Lately, her mother had started to ask if Luna was planning to stay in the store forever, or if she might be thinking about going back to counseling. If it were anyone else, Luna would have said it was simple snobbishness talking, the idea that one sort of work was more valuable than another, that a florist was less valuable to the world than a psychologist, but it would never even occur to Kitty to rank jobs like that.
    Luna had had no answer for Kitty that day. She still didn’t. Every so often, she considered the idea of returning to counseling, and then just as quickly rejected it. The flower business was just fine.
    But this morning, she discovered that not even a shipmentof narcotically scented freesias could distract her from the difficulty of not smoking. It was rough. She’d never smoked on the job, per se, only in the break room in the old days, and then outside—which actually gave her a little