In the Waiting Room at Newark Penn Station

The woman sitting across from me had her mother's hands.

I didn't notice right away. The waiting room at Newark Penn was doing what it always does on a Tuesday afternoon: swallowing sound, chewing it into a low, fluorescent hum. A man in a grease-stained jacket argued with the vending machine. Two teenagers shared a pair of earbuds and laughed at something on a phone. The arrivals board flickered, went dark, flickered again.

She was maybe sixty. Gray coat, sensible shoes, a plastic shopping bag looped around her wrist. The bag said CVS. She sat with her purse on her lap and stared at the departures board like it owed her money, and when she reached up to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, I saw them.

Her mother's hands. She had to have had her mother's hands, because they were hands that had done this exact thing ten thousand times before beside six other faces in a row of plastic chairs, and you don't get hands that deliberate on your own.

It's my job to notice. I've been doing this for eleven years.

I work at a florist's kiosk in the concourse, the one that sells roses in cellophane sleeves and those little cards you can scribble a message on in the time it takes your train to arrive. I mostly get apologies, sometimes proposals, once a month a birthday nobody planned for. But the real business happens on the weeks when, out on the platforms, the conductors blow their two-finger whistles and the wind off the tracks smells like diesel and snow, and I just stand there and count the people who pass my window without buying anything.

That Tuesday, the woman in the gray coat got up and walked to the window. She stood with her shoes exactly on the yellow warning line, the painted one that practically yells at you to step back, and she didn't step back. She raised one hand, not to wave, just raised it, like she was checking for rain.

I sold two bouquets between then and when she came inside from the platform and sat back down.

The thing about grief is that it doesn't clock out. You watch people carry it through the concourse every day: men in good suits with a stiffness in their shoulders, college kids who sleep on the benches with their backpacks held to their chests, women like this one, who sit with their purses clasped in their laps and wait for a train they're not sure they want to board. You learn the look. It's not sad. Sad is quick, sad has an errand. This is the other thing: the long, slow leak of missing someone, the kind that doesn't care what time the train leaves.

I was closing up the kiosk when she approached. It was 4:47. I remember because the register had just printed its end-of-day and I was doing the thing where you count the till twice to avoid talking to anyone.

"You sell flowers," she said. It wasn't a question.

"All day," I said.

"My daughter's name was Ruth." She said it the way you'd say a street address: like the information was still current. "She loved tulips. The yellow ones. Not the fancy parrot kind. Just yellow."

I didn't say anything. There's a moment in my line of work where you either ask the next question or you don't, and I've learned that passing the moments count more.

She opened her purse. It was the old kind, with a brass clasp that made a sound like a key turning. Inside, along with the folded tissue and the compact and the six loose cough drops, was a photograph in a plastic sleeve. She held it out.

Two faces. Older woman, younger woman. Somebody's kitchen, the bad lighting of a late Sunday afternoon, a cake with white frosting on the table between them. The younger one was laughing, head tipped back, and the older one had her arm around her shoulder. Ruth, I figured. The one with the laugh.

"She would have turned forty next Tuesday," the woman said. "I always bought her tulips. Every year. Since she was nineteen. The first time was in a hospital room—" She stopped. She closed the purse. The brass clasp snapped shut, and the sound was exactly like a train door closing on an empty car.

I thought about the first time I bought my own mother flowers. I was thirty-one. It was for her birthday, and I'd forgotten, and I ran down to the corner deli and paid seven dollars for wilted daisies. She kept them on the kitchen table for three weeks. They dropped petals into the sugar bowl and she still wouldn't throw them out. I didn't know that then. I know it now.

"I'm not going anywhere," the woman said. "I don't have a train to catch. I just needed to sit somewhere warm."

I asked her if she wanted coffee. She said no. Then she said yes. Then she said she wanted the yellow tulips to still exist, even if Ruth isn't here.

I looked at the kiosk. I'd already locked the cabinet where we keep the pre-arranged bouquets, the roses in their little green flasks. But the buckets with the loose stems get covered with plastic sheeting and left by the back wall because nobody wants to haul them down to the storage room. Yellow tulips. I had eleven of them. They weren't even that fresh, the edges already going soft, like the petals had started to forget their shape.

I unlocked the cabinet.

That's the part I keep going back to. Not what she said, not the photograph, not the hands. The moment when I stopped counting the till and walked back to the buckets and peeled off the plastic sheeting and took out the eleven yellow tulips. It took maybe four minutes. The whole thing, from her asking me about flowers to her walking away, took maybe eighteen minutes.

I wrapped the stems in wet paper and then in brown paper and then again because it was cold. I didn't charge her. I won't say why. There's a whole set of reasons, and none of them fit on the little cards I sell for three dollars.

She told me Ruth was nineteen when she first had to go to the hospital. She told me about the first tulips, the yellow ones under the fluorescent light, and how Ruth said they looked like tiny suns. She told me about last March, the phone call, the sixth floor, the nurse whose name she can't remember but whose kindness she'll never forget. She told me that she still reaches for Ruth's number on her phone sometimes, and her thumb just hovers there, like it's waiting for permission.

Then she took the tulips and she didn't cry. She lifted them to her face. She breathed in, and she said, "They don't smell anymore. They stopped smelling years ago."

She thanked me. She called me "dear." She walked toward the exit with the bouquet in her arms like a child, like something that needed to be held carefully through a crowd, and just before the doors slid shut she turned, not to wave, just turned, and I saw her cheek move with something between a word and a smile.

I finished closing the register. I pulled the plastic sheeting back over the empty buckets. The tulips were gone, all eleven, and the trash can by the back door had only wet paper and the smell of old flowers.

When my shift ended, I walked through the station with my coat over my arm. I bought a coffee even though I don't drink coffee after four, and I sat in that same waiting room, in the same kind of plastic chair, and I called my mother.

She didn't answer. It went to voicemail.

I left her a message about the weather, of all things, the way you do when there's nothing to say except everything. Then I hung up, and I sat with the phone in my lap for another four minutes, watching the departures board do its flicker. Somewhere outside, the wind off the tracks smelled like diesel and snow. I ordered eleven yellow tulips from a florist in Trenton, the one near where my mother lives, paid ninety-six dollars with the delivery fee, too much, and clicked confirm.

She'll get them Friday. Three weeks early, before her birthday, for no reason at all. And when she calls to ask why, because she always asks why, I'll tell her I saw a woman at the station. That part won't make sense. That's okay.

Some kinds of missing don't need a reason to become an errand. They just need an afternoon like this one: a gray coat, a departures board, eleven yellow tulips that didn't smell like anything but were still, somehow, the exact right thing to buy.