The rain came in off the Columbia sideways, the way it always did in June when everyone in Astoria had finally stopped expecting it, and by ten that morning the district had sent out the text everybody dreaded: commencement moved indoors, gymnasium, doors at one, ceremony at two, four tickets per graduate, no exceptions. By noon the parking lot behind the high school was a gray lake with pickups standing in it like moored boats.
Renee Lindqvist got there at twelve-fifteen, because she was the kind of person who got places at twelve-fifteen when the doors opened at one.
She had the bouquet on the passenger seat beside her, belted in like a child: white ranunculus, eucalyptus, a few stems of lisianthus the color of the inside of a shell, all of it wrapped in brown kraft paper and tied with the narrow gold ribbon she'd ordered from a supplier in Portland three weeks ago, before she'd even known the school colors were going to be printed on the programs. She owned a flower shop on Commercial Street, a narrow green storefront between a bookstore and a smoked-salmon shop, and she had made, at a rough guess, four thousand bouquets in her life. She had never been so nervous about one.
A custodian let her in a side door because he knew her. Everybody in Astoria knew Renee, or at least knew her shop, or knew that she was Tom Lindqvist's second wife, which in a town of ten thousand was a kind of address. The gym smelled of floor wax and wet coats. Folding chairs ran in long rows across the basketball court, and up front, just below the stage, a single row had been roped off with maroon ribbon for the families of the valedictorian and the salutatorian and the student body president. Little white cards were taped to the backs of the chairs.
She found theirs on the left. Six chairs. Six cards, typed in the same plain font the school used for everything from lunch menus to suspension letters.
THOMAS LINDQVIST.
INGRID LINDQVIST.
PETER LINDQVIST.
RENEE LINDQVIST.
She stood there a moment with the bouquet in the crook of her arm and looked at her own name and felt the small, familiar, stupid hurt, the one she had been feeling in one form or another for eight years and had never once said out loud. Just her name. No word after it. It was a seating card; of course there was no word after it. She knew that.