YELLOW ROSES

 

	I thought I wanted to marry Irene.      Fortunately, she was not in love with me, and so I didn’t.      Instead, while I was in the Air Force and stationed in Texas, I served as her back-up beau for the nights when her official boyfriend was otherwise occupied. Irene said that she loved him, but never seemed certain that he loved her back. She certainly did not love me, and she protested all of my verbal efforts to show honorable intent. However, when it came to physical intent, she was quite amenable. Admittedly, that was probably why I swallowed my pride, and accepted what should have been a humiliating situation.      She was very lovely, Irene was.      Once a month, on the anniversary of the date that we met, I would give Irene a single yellow rose.       “Don’t ever give me a bunch of flowers all at once,” she had insisted. “Men always buy a dozen roses for their girlfriends. So the flowers all die at once. Just give me a single yellow rose.  Once a month.”      One night, while out on an “anniversary date”, we took a long drive, and in a somewhat isolated area I spotted a flower shop right next door to a gas station.      “I need to get some gas,” I told Irene, and pulled up at the pump.      “Fill ‘er up,” I told the attendant, and then said to Irene, “I’ll be right back.”      When I got back to the car, I tried to hand a yellow rose to Irene through the open car window. She had just finished drinking the Coke she’d gotten from the vending machine, and still had the bottle in her hand.      “Oooh. Wait, wait,” she said. She hurried out of the car and scooted into the service attendant’s office. When she came back, the Coke bottle was filled with water, and she took the rose and put it in the bottle.      I smiled wistfully, knowing that she cared more about her rose than she did about me.      “It probably would have survived till you got home,” I teased.      “It will for sure now,” she said.      When we got back to her house, she put the rose in a small vase and pressed the Coke bottle into my hand.      “What am I suppose to do with this?’’      “Take it back to the gas station?’’     “I don’t think they’ll miss it.”      “I’m very tired tonight. Do you mind?”       She gave me a quick dismissive kiss, and navigated me out to the street.      That night I gave up the dream that Irene would ever be mine, and I never saw or called her again.      A few weeks later, I got orders to ship out to Germany.      The empty Coke bottle was still in my car.       On the day before I would leave San Antonio, I took the bottle to the florist who had been providing the monthly roses.      “I’m leaving San Antonio for good tomorrow,” I explained to the pleasant elderly lady who had always smiled and winked when she'd given me the roses of yesterdays.      “Please put a yellow rose in this Coke Bottle and send it off today."      She nodded and handed me an embossed card to be signed and enclosed with the last rose I would ever give Irene.      I wrote on the card only "Your Proxy Lover".