Harold promised his sister he would meet her at the annual flower show. She had bought both tickets and left his in an envelope on the kitchen table. Harold pocketed the envelope without opening it.
At the gate, the volunteer scanned his ticket and frowned. It was for the model railway exhibition in the hall next door.
“My sister said flowers,” Harold replied.
“The railway ticket has a photograph of a train.”
“She buys unusual cards.”
The volunteer sent him to the railway hall, where a different volunteer explained the tickets could not be exchanged. Harold called his sister. She answered from among the roses and said the flower ticket was still on her table. He had taken the wrong envelope.
“How many envelopes did you leave there?”
“Two. The other one was yours too. I thought you might enjoy the trains next month.”
Harold told her the railway exhibition was today. There was a pause. His sister admitted that her calendar was as unreliable as her envelope system.
He decided to look at the trains while she found a way to get him into the flower show. Inside, tiny carriages passed miniature cottages. A man in a cap operated an elaborate station with signals and a tea stall smaller than a fingernail. Harold asked how long it had taken to build.
“Twenty years,” the man said. “And someone still asks when it’ll be finished.”
Harold understood. He had been rearranging his own garden for longer.
His sister called again. She had found the flower ticket and was walking over to give it to him. By then Harold had become absorbed in a model village where every house had a different front garden. He asked the builder how he made the hedges. They were cut from green kitchen sponges. The trees began as wire and old brushes.
When his sister arrived, she found him taking notes on the back of the railway programme. He accepted the flower ticket and promised he would come in a minute. She waited through three minutes, then ten. He wanted to see the next train pass the garden centre in the model town. He could not remember whether it had a greenhouse.
At last they entered the flower show together. Harold admired the roses, though he kept asking whether the growers had used real moss. His sister said people generally did.
Near the exit, a judge was answering questions about miniature gardens. Harold raised his hand and asked whether kitchen sponge was allowed. The judge looked at him as though he had wandered in from another event. His sister said that, in fact, he had.
On the way home she apologized for mixing up the tickets. Harold shook his head. “Keep doing it. I learned two things today.”
“About flowers?”
“One about flowers. The other is that my lawn would look much better at a scale of one to fifty.”