Page 26 of The Incredible Kindness of Paper
It was a facet of New York she hadn’t experienced before, and she was beginning to feel a little more like maybe shedidbelong here. Maybe people did want to connect but they didn’t know how to free themselves from thefortresses of solitude they’d built around themselves. The pups gave them an excuse to peek over the ramparts, even if just a little.
Heck, maybe dogs ought to be part of all major human interactions. Chloe grinned at the thought of global leaders at the G20 Summit or international treaty negotiations, surrounded by happy, slobbery, furry friends. Imagine what could be accomplished if diplomats could remember that, at the end of the day, they weren’t opponents, but rather, all in this together.
As Chloe unclipped the dogs from their leashes, Thelma pulled out a blue tin of Danish butter cookies. Chloe smiled at the familiar round tin; her nana had about a dozen of them at home, used as storage for everything from needles and thread to office supplies to makeup counter samples.
“Now, come sit with me for a minute,” Thelma said, pouring two cups of coffee and nodding to a purple vinyl kitchenette chair. “Tell me what’s going on in your life. How are the paper roses going?”
“Really well,” Chloe said, sitting and opening the blue tin and reaching inside for a cookie.
“Oh, not that, dear!” Thelma said. “Those are dog biscuits I just baked. Rufus! Barney, Freddy, Rocky, Mary Puppins, and Priscilla, come get your treats!”
The dogs came running into the kitchen to eat straight from Thelma’s hands, and she cackled with glee. Chloe couldn’t remember the Thelma of the past ever saying more than a handful of stern words, but now she laughed all the time. And no one called her the Threadbare Countess anymore. It was wonderful.
After the dogs had demolished the biscuits and left nothing but crumbs, Chloe updated Thelma on her origami project. Although the crew at the Central Park location was growing—a young, aspiring pharmacist named Ricky had shown up today—Chloe still preferred not to hand out her paper roses there. She wanted to spread them out farther around the city, to reach people who couldn’t come to the park or who didn’t even know the flowers existed.
But something interesting was happening. Her volunteers would pass on stories they heard about the paper roses—conversations they overheard or people coming to the tables in Central Park to tell them—and there was always one consistent detail: the origami flowers marked with theheart-shaped rosebuds (the ones Chloe made), always seemed to find their way to the exact right person who needed it.
The paper roses that everyone else made were terrific, too, but they didn’t have the same accuracy.
There was no explanation for it.
“Perhaps it’s the extra love you put into them,” Thelma said.
Chloe shook her head. “Maybe. It’s weird, though, right?”
Thelma shrugged. “Weird, but nice.”
Chloe laughed. “Yeah.”
Did it matter, how it happened? Whether it was the exact message someone needed to hear or simply a moment of uplift or joy, the paper roses were bringing people together.
A connection.
A spark of sameness.
A pause to remember we were all human.
And that, Chloe thought, was what really mattered.
Chloe
That evening, the crumpled rose that Oliver had defaced was sitting on Chloe’s kitchen table. But she didn’t see it right away, because the table was covered with a hundred other yellow roses. Which was precisely what Becca was lecturing about.
“The table is foreating, not storage,” she was saying. “And look, you know I fucking adore you, but you can’t take up thewholetable. Fifty percent of that space is, like, technically mine. I always sit on the north side, and you sit on the south side, so all your stuff really ought to be on that side of the dividing line.”
Chloe scrunched her nose. “What dividing line?”
Becca sighed and shook her head, like she was disappointed in Chloe’s life education up until this point. “The invisible one that’s obviously there! Everyone who’s ever had a roommate knows these things. Didn’t you learn that in college? Order is respect and keeps things running smoothly. That’s why we alternate weeks getting mail from the Hell Room. Why we have designated shelves in the pantry and in the fridge. And that’s why we have a rotating schedule for who gets to use the bathroom first in the mornings, not that it matters now that you don’t have a job and don’t have to be ready by a specific time.”
“That was kind of a low blow,” Chloe said. She knew Becca didn’t have a filter and hadn’t meant for the comment to land so harshly, but right now, Chloe was not feeling very inclined to move her origami to the “south side” of the kitchen table.
Becca just sighed again. “Anyway, clear some space for me, please? Oh, and by the way, this was in our mailbox.” She tossed an opened envelope on top of some of the paper flowers.
“Hey!” Chloe snatched the envelope. It had smashed some of her origami.
But Becca was leaning against the counter, arms folded as she waited for Chloe to open the envelope.
The plastic window showed it was addressed to both of them. From their landlord. Chloe’s stomach curdled as she unfolded the letter inside.
