Page 67 of The Incredible Kindness of Paper
On the plane, Oliver was so deeply absorbed in his work, it took the woman in the aisle several tries to get his attention. When he finally looked up from his laptop, her face was inches from his.
“What the—!” He jostled the tray table; he caught his computer right before it bounced off.
“Oh, there you are, hiii.” She smelled of patchouli, and possibly pot, and smiled at him as if he were a kaleidoscope of rotating crystals and colors.
“Hi,” Oliver said curtly. “Do you mind? I’m in the middle of something.” He gestured at his laptop.
“I won’t take much of your time,” the woman said, still smiling. “I only needed to give this to you.” She held out her hands, cupped together. Inside was a single yellow paper rose.
Oliver arched a brow. “No, thank you.” He’d had plenty of encounters with the origami in New York; he didn’t need more from a hippie on the plane.
“But this one is for you,” she said, pushing her hands toward him.
“Really. No. Thank. You.”
The woman looked at her palms and frowned. “It’s just… I don’t want to bother you, sir. I can see that you’re busy. This flower, though… I can feel its intention. It wants to be with you.”
Oliver rolled his eyes. “Give me a break.”
She laughed. “No, you don’t understand. I’ve tried to give it away to others, but it wouldn’t leave my hand. Everyone kept picking the other flowers around it. Now it’s the only one I have left, and it brought me to you.” She held out her cupped hands again.
His pulse hiccupped. Because this time, Oliver actually recognized it. It had that same pattern of gold foil stripes, but in a freshly folded yellow rose, its creases sharp and pristine. He wondered if the person on the other side of these flowers was keeping the first and second ones that had filled up with text.
“Where did you get this?” he asked, taking it from the woman.
She simply shrugged and blinked at him, again as if he were a kaleidoscope changing colors right before her eyes. “The universe works in mysterious ways.” Then she started humming and wandering down the aisle, not looking back once as she returned to her seat in a different part of the plane.
Bizarre. But Oliver forgot her in the next moment, because he remembered what he and his mystery correspondent had last written—
I can’t promise that wishes always come true. But I believe they can, and I would be willing to bet my heart on that—because if there is anything worth wishing for, it’s a happily ever after.
That’s a wager I can’t match. My heart is too scarred for happily ever afters. I think a lot of people’s are.
And then he unfolded the newest yellow rose:
Happiness and love can be confusing and terrifying things.
“You’re telling me.” Oliver underlined the sentence with his finger. How strange that, for a man who was such a skeptic, he’d begun to feel a connection to this nameless pen pal.
Oliver chewed on the inside of his cheek, still somewhat uncomfortable with the illogical appearances of these paper roses. And yet, he could definitely use a friend right now, even if it was an anonymous one.
He extracted a pen from his briefcase and wrote back:
Do you think it’s ever possible for scarred hearts to heal?
When his plane landed, he brought the paper rose with him. He stopped at a newsstand in the airport, paid for a plastic bag—nothing else—and gently lay the origami flower inside.
As he exited the terminal and walked toward the taxi stand, various people approached him and the other passengers with offers of more yellow roses. This strange little busker project from New York had somehow spread down the coast and was apparently in full bloom in D.C., too.
But when someone tried to give Oliver another flower, he shook his head and showed them his plastic bag. “I’ve already got one,” he said.
Then he laughed softly to himself that he was actually doing this and dutifully tossed the paper rose into the nearest trash can, hoping it would be protected and get to wherever it needed to go.
Giovanni
There was always a line every morning now at the bakery. Giovanni smiled as he brought a fresh batch of baguettes and pains au chocolat to the front window display, an artfully organized and overflowing cornucopia of buttery indulgence. There were mounds of madeleines, domed platters full of hazelnut and crème fraîche meringues with lemon zest, slices of kouign-amann cake, and miniature galettes with whatever fruit had been ripest at the farmer’s market the previous day.
And that was just the French side. Giovanni also had an Italian display full of the childhood recipes he’d grown up with in his nonna’s small kitchen in New Jersey—rich, crunchy cannoli, flaky sfogliatelle stuffed with ricotta and candied citrus, sweet Roman brioche buns split in half and filled with whipped cream, and more.
