Chapter 126 Rose Does It Her Way
Harper's POV,
The wedding coordinator's name was Patricia.
Not Patricia Whitmore. A different Patricia entirely, which I established immediately because the last thing I needed was to spend the flower girl rehearsal doing double takes every time someone said the name.
This Patricia had a clipboard, a headset she didn't need but wore anyway, and the specific energy of someone who had coordinated approximately four hundred weddings and had therefore seen everything and could be surprised by nothing.
She had not, I suspected, seen Rose.
We arrived at the venue on a Saturday morning — I, Maya, Simone, Crew, and Rose, who had been told three times in the car that today was a special practice for Auntie Maya's wedding and that she was going to walk down a long aisle and throw flower petals and it was going to be beautiful.
Rose had listened to all of this with great attention and then asked if there would be snacks.
There were snacks. Maya had made sure of it.
The venue was a converted heritage building in Gastown with exposed brick and enormous windows and a ceremony space that ran the length of the main floor, ending at a small raised platform where Maya and Simone would stand to exchange their vows. The aisle was long — genuinely long, the kind of length that looked elegant in photographs and was currently being regarded by Rose with the expression of someone assessing a significant undertaking.
"It's far," Rose said.
"It's not that far," I said.
"It's far," she said again, with the certainty of someone who had measured it internally and reached a conclusion.
Patricia the coordinator crouched down to Rose's level with the practiced ease of someone who'd done this exact thing many times. "Hi Rose. I'm Patricia. Do you know what flower girls do?"
Rose looked at her. "Flowers."
"That's right. You walk down this beautiful aisle and you throw flower petals on the ground so it looks pretty for Auntie Maya."
Rose looked at the aisle. Then at the basket of petals Patricia was holding out to her. Then back at the aisle.
"Okay," she said, taking the basket with both hands.
Maya, standing at the far end of the aisle, clasped her hands together. "She's going to be perfect. Look at her. She's perfect."
"She hasn't done anything yet," Crew said quietly beside me.
"She's holding the basket correctly."
"Maya."
"That's a good sign."
Simone was already filming on her phone, which meant she'd correctly assessed the probability of something memorable happening and wanted documentation.
Patricia stood and addressed the room. "Okay. So we'll do a practice run. Rose, when you hear the music start, you walk toward Maya, dropping petals as you go. Nice and slow. Can you do that?"
"Yes," Rose said, with complete confidence.
The music started — a soft instrumental piece Maya had agonized over for weeks.
Rose looked at the far end of the aisle where Maya was waiting, arms open, expression luminous.
She took one step forward.
Then she stopped.
She looked at the petals in her basket. And looked at the floor.
Then, with great deliberateness, she reached into the basket and placed a single petal on the floor directly in front of her feet. Looked at it. Placed another one directly beside it. Stepped over them both carefully.
"She's arranging them," Crew said.
"Rose, sweetheart, you can just throw them," I said.
Rose looked at me with the expression she reserved for suggestions she found structurally unsound. Then she placed another petal with the careful precision of someone laying tiles.
"She's doing her own thing," Simone said from behind her phone, in the tone of someone deeply delighted.
Maya's expression had shifted from luminous to something that was trying very hard not to be laughter.
Patricia the coordinator made a note on her clipboard. The note, I imagined, said something like: ‘nonstandard petal distribution method.’
"Rose," I tried again. "Can you walk toward Maya? Maya's waiting."
Rose looked at Maya at the far end of the aisle.
Maya waved.
Rose waved back.
Then Rose sat down.
Not dramatically or in protest. She simply decided that the floor was a reasonable place to be and sat on it cross-legged in the middle of the aisle, her basket of petals in her lap, and looked around at the venue with the serene interest of someone who had arrived at a decision and was comfortable with it.
The music continued playing.
Maya's hand went over her mouth.
Crew's shoulders were shaking.
"Rose." I walked toward her. "We don't sit down in the middle of the aisle."
"Why?" she asked, genuinely curious.
"Because–" I stopped. "Because we're walking toward Maya."
"I waved," Rose said reasonably.
"That's true," Simone said from behind her phone. "She did wave."
"You're not helping," I told Simone.
"I'm documenting," Simone said. "There's a difference."
I crouched down next to Rose. "Okay. Here's the deal. You walk all the way to Maya and throw the petals and you can have the snacks Maya brought."
Rose looked at me.
"What snacks?" she said.
"The good ones."
She assessed the credibility of this claim. Then she stood up, dusted off her dress with great dignity, repositioned her basket, and began walking down the aisle with the determined stride of someone who had a destination and a deadline and snacks waiting at the end of it.
The petals went everywhere; not placed, not arranged, hurled in generous fistfuls in every direction including backward over her shoulder and sideways toward the chairs.
It was nothing like the delicate flower petal scattering that appeared in wedding magazines.
It was absolute chaos.
It was perfect.
Maya caught her at the end of the aisle and swept her up and Rose grabbed Maya's face with both hands the way she did when she wanted someone's full attention and said very seriously: "I did it."
"You did it," Maya said, her voice thick.
"Snacks now?"
"Snacks now," Maya confirmed.
Patricia the coordinator looked at her clipboard for a long moment.
Then she looked at me.
"She'll be fine on the day," she said, with the conviction of someone who had learned that fine came in many different forms and most of them were worth photographing.
…….
We ran the rehearsal three more times.
The second run, Rose threw all the petals in the first ten feet and then walked the remaining distance with an empty basket, looking at it occasionally with mild surprise as if she couldn't account for its emptiness.
The third run, she walked the wrong direction entirely and ended up at the back of the venue examining a floral arrangement with focused interest before anyone could redirect her.
The fourth run was actually beautiful; she walked almost the full length of the aisle, throwing petals with genuine enthusiasm, looking up at Maya at the end with an expression of such open joy that Maya started crying before Rose was even halfway there.
"That's the one," Patricia said, making a note. "We'll aim for that one on the day."
"And if we get the third one?" I asked.
"Then we have an excellent story for the reception speech." She clicked her pen. "Either way, nobody's going to be looking at the petals."
She was right about that.
On the drive home Rose fell asleep in her car seat within four minutes, the snacks half eaten in her hand, the flower girl dress slightly rumpled, a single petal still caught in her hair that I didn't remove because it looked exactly right.
Crew glanced at her in the mirror.
"She's going to do the third one on the day," he said.
"Absolutely," I agreed.
"Maya's going to love it."
"Maya's going to cry through the whole thing regardless."
"Also true."
We drove through Vancouver in the Saturday afternoon light, Rose asleep behind us, the city easy around us, and I thought about a version of myself that had stood on a sidewalk outside Marcello's restaurant watching couples stroll past and feeling like the most alone person in the world.
That woman felt very far away now.
Not gone though— I could still find her if I looked. But far away and getting further.
And that felt exactly right.