My mother has told me a hundred times about the boy who sold his blood to buy her flowers. “He had a motorcycle,” she says. “He had no money, but he wanted to take me on a date so he went out and sold pints of his blood so he could do it.”

Pints.

“He was woozy at dinner,” she says. “He couldn’t eat at all. He seemed like he was going to faint. But he’d bought me flowers. Lilies. Isn’t that romantic?”

This story bothers me. It intrudes upon my father, and that’s part of it, but it’s also the way my mother wields those flowers as some false barometer of love.

As if her generation were worthy of blood and mine only backstage corn syrup.

My mother has asked me on every Valentine’s Day since I was fourteen, “Did he buy you flowers?”

“I told him not to,” I say.

“Why would you do that?” she says. “What kind of standards are you setting?”

“I don’t want that kind of relationship,” I say. “I don’t want flowers.”

I want to say: Stop pretending that the point is the lilies and not the blood.