The Flower Arrangement (12 page)

She saw the dog first. He was cowering on the concrete division in the middle of the Blackrock bypass. He was still a puppy, his paws way too big for his body. He was so thin that every rib showed through his black and tan fur. His bony back legs were covered in sores. My mother had taught us to be wary of all dogs, especially strange ones. But when I grabbed hold of the frayed rope someone had tied around his neck, he lifted his head and his long mouse-tail began to whip
against my legs. He wasn't strange at all. He was just a friend I hadn't met yet.

I held my hand up like a lollipop lady and hauled Mia and the dog across two lanes of traffic.

“You said we were going
shopping
!” Mia whined.

“Sssh! Pat the dog!” I pulled the belt off my coat so I could use it as a leash.

My mother came home in our uncle Desmond's car just before it got dark. Desmond carried her suitcase into the house, avoiding our eyes, and she followed him, looking smaller than herself.

Mia ran straight into her arms and I got up slowly and stood still while she hugged me. Her hot, wet tears plopped onto my scalp like Chinese water torture.

I felt her stiffen when she saw the puppy curled up on the bed of towels I'd made for him under the stairs.

“What's that?”

“It's Pat,” Mia said. “Pat the dog. Katy wants to keep him.”

“I
am
keeping him,” I corrected her.

“Really?” Mum's voice hardened. “Who says?”

“What's the harm?” Uncle Desmond said, jingling his keys, eager to be on his way. “If he makes the girls happy.”

My mother and I locked eyes for a long moment. I stared her down until I saw the shame swim up into her eyes. And I didn't look away again until I saw the flash of surrender.

*   *   *

Every time I think I am adjusting to being on my own, something happens. Something that reminds me how much I relied on Ben.

A fuse blows, and when I go outside to the fuse box in my nightdress, the door slams closed and I have to force the bathroom window to get back in. I wake up at five in the morning thinking how easy it would be for a burglar to force that window. I pull on a dress and a
huge black spider runs over my shoulder. I drink too much wine and fall asleep in the bath and wake up when the water is cold. I drop a heavy saucepan on my foot and I don't even say “ouch.” There doesn't seem to be much point “ouching” when there's nobody listening.

Something strange happens. Mia, who has never even been in like, falls in love with a performance artist called Ronan. I know that it's serious when she tells me, with a straight face, that his current “piece” involves dressing in a tree costume and standing around in Mount Merrion Woods.

Mia invites my mother and me over for dinner to meet him. I can't remember the last time any man except Ben set foot in Mia's flat.

Ronan is tall and shy, and when I see the way he and Mia look at one another, I feel dizzy and light-headed with longing for Ben. I feel jealous.

“I liked him,” my mother says as she is driving me home. “Do you think he liked me?”

“I'm sure he did,” I say. But what I'm thinking is, it shouldn't matter whether he likes you or not. What matters is that he likes Mia.

We pull up outside my flat and my mother looks up at the dark window and sighs. “Don't you just dread going back to an empty house?”

Something else strange happens. Flowers start appearing on my desk. It begins with a bunch of bright red gerbera in a coffee mug. A few days later, there's a frothy pink peony in a water glass. Then a leggy blue agapanthus in a jam jar.

There's no note from Ben, but the flowers are a good sign, and the following Sunday there's another one. He leaves a piece of paper folded into an origami bird on my pillow. I sit on the bed and unfold it.

I've been thinking about your ultimatum
, it says.
Meet me for lunch tomorrow. The new tapas place on Baggot Street.

I arrive too early. The restaurant has oxblood-red walls and blown-up black-and-white prints of bulls and matadors. The red leather booths are full of businessmen in twos and threes, eating
patatas bravas
and ordering cerveza with a lisp.

There's a bowl of green olives on the table. Each one has a tiny red tongue of red pepper peeking out of it. I can't stand olives—the vinegary smell of them makes me queasy—but I'm so nervous that I eat them all. The waitress brings another bowl.

I smell Ben's aftershave a moment before I feel his hand on my shoulder. He slides into the seat opposite me. He is clean-shaven and clear-eyed and he looks nervous. He hands the dish of olives to the waitress, who has reappeared with menus.

“My girl—” he begins, then catches himself. “My
friend
hates these.”

The waitress eyes the little pile of olive stones by my glass but she takes the bowl away.

“You cut your hair,” Ben says sadly, when she's gone.

“I did.”

“You look like Anne Hathaway.”

“Not Joan of Arc?”

“You're trying to look like a martyr?”

“No.” Meeting his eyes feels weird so I pretend to study the menu. “How's the library?”

He shrugs. “Quiet.”

We talk in clumsy fits and starts about work and Mia and Ronan and Pat and my father's anniversary mass. We talk about the trip we took to Spain last summer. The smell of orange blossom in the streets of Seville. The convent bakery we found in Vejer de la Frontera. The stray beach dogs we fed every day in Conil.

We don't talk about us until we have finished our coffee and Ben has paid the bill. Then he drains his wineglass and looks me straight in the eye for the first time since he sat down. “I've been seeing someone.”

His words hit me in the stomach like a tire iron. The undergrowthy taste of the olives comes back up into my mouth.

“I mean I've been seeing a counselor,” Ben corrects himself. “Well, I've seen him once for a kind of assessment thing, but I've got another appointment.”

He rubs his temples with his fingers. “Look, I know things haven't
been great. I can see that now. I'm sorry. I think I've been anesthetizing myself for the last few years, you know?”

Anesthetizing himself against what? I think. Me? Us? The unfinished screenplay?

“I've cut it out,” he continues. “The dope. Completely this time. I'm writing again. I feel good, Katy.”

He reaches across the table and takes my hand. It twitches, unused to his touch. “I want us to have it all.” He squeezes my fingers. “Marriage, kids. The whole nine yards.”

I want the whole nine yards too. It's what I've always wanted. But I have to know that he's doing this for
him
as well as me.

“Look,” I say, “I don't want you to rush into this. I need you to be sure.”

Ben takes his hand away and folds his arms. “I am sure! I want to come home.”

“We said we'd live apart for three months. There's only two weeks to go. That gives you time to see your counselor again.”

He rolls his eyes. Then he leans forward and plants his elbows on the table. “Two weeks. Then I can come back? No ifs or buts. For good? Yes?”

“Yes,” I say. “And, Ben, thank you for the flowers.”

He nods curtly. “You're welcome.”

*   *   *

The next morning, there's a freckled saffron-colored lily in a clay pot beside my in-tray. I water it every day and it releases a sweet fragrance that makes my tiny office smell like a church. I say a little prayer that Ben means what he said.

On Friday, Ruth pops her head around the door as I'm shutting my computer down. “The florist for Monday's shoot has stomach flu so I've booked a new place called Blossom & Grow.” She hands me a pink card with an ivy leaf logo. “Can you pop over on Sunday afternoon to make sure they're on top of everything?”

I turn the card over to read the address. There's a line on the back that says:
Every flower is a little bit of summer
.

*   *   *

I spend most of the weekend cleaning the flat, polishing the dining table Ben and I made from a carved Balinese temple door we found in a junk shop. Dusting the IKEA chandeliers we spent days assembling. Ironing the bed linens that have been piling up in the washing basket. I tug the cover on over the goose-feather duvet and tell myself and Pat that in a week and one day, Ben will be back.

At about four, I put on shorts and a T-shirt and walk into town. I was worried that I might walk past Blossom & Grow, but it stands out like a flower between the gray and red buildings on Camden Street. The tall, narrow front is painted pale pink and there's a mural of ivy trailing up the wall. There's a “Closed” sign on the door, but when I knock, the owner comes and lets me in.

The shop is cool and dark. There are lanterns and candles flickering among the pails of flowers. The owner, whose name is Lara, is exactly the kind of woman you'd expect to find running a florist's. Tall and slight and graceful, with a yoga body and black hair with glints of silver shot through it. She looks like a woman from a W. B. Yeats poem, beautiful and sad.

I follow her into a storeroom at the back of the shop and catch my breath when I see the bouquets she has made for the shoot. I've seen a lot of wedding flowers, but nothing like these.

There are soft apricot roses with dusty-blue delphiniums, creamy-white peonies with miniature pink alliums. Waxy green orchids with deep purple irises.

A phone rings in the shop and she excuses herself and goes back outside to answer it. I bend down and pick up a pretty tumble of glossy green ivy and pale purple bells on slender stems.

The flowers have a delicate scent, something elusive between
hyacinth and freesia. I close my eyes and breathe it in, then I get that hair-on-the-back-of-the-neck feeling and I know that somebody is watching me.

I snap my eyes open. Phil, the office courier, is standing in the doorway. It must be nearly eighty degrees outside, but he's wearing his biker leathers and managing, somehow, to look cool.

“Did Ruth book you to pick up these flowers?” I sound ruder than I mean to, but there's no way I'm going to let these delicate arrangements go for a ride on a motorbike.

“Nobody booked me.” He folds his arms across his chest. “Lara asked me to give her a hand. I was supposed to be driving to Hook Head today but she made me an offer I couldn't refuse.”

I want to fold my arms too, but I'm still holding the bouquet so I can't. I realize that I'd presumed that Phil had a crush on me and I feel like an idiot. Lara is in her forties, probably ten years older than Phil, but I can see them together. She's one of those women, like my sister and my mother, who will still be beautiful when she's ninety.

I, on the other hand, was beautiful for about fifteen minutes when I was seventeen, when almost everyone is beautiful. If I make a marathon effort, I can still manage pretty. But not, obviously, when I'm wearing a faded Primark T-shirt and a pair of ratty cutoff shorts.

“So how long have you two been . . .” I juggle the options. “Together?”

“Oh, let's see. I've known Lara for what?” Phil counts the long fingers on his left hand with the index finger of his right. “It must be about thirty years now.”

I stare at him, confused.

“She's my sister,” he says. “The offer I can't refuse is dinner. She's had a tough couple of months and this will give me a chance to hang out with her. Plus, when she bothers to cook, her food is nearly as good as her flowers.” He smiles. “You thought she was my girlfriend?”

“No!” I start to babble, trying to cover up my embarrassment. “I knew right away that you were related.” I didn't, but I should have.
“You look exactly like her.” It's true. He has the same polished conker-colored hair as his sister, the same dark-brown eyes, the same easy grace. “Except,” I say, “that you're a man.”

“I wasn't sure you'd noticed,” he says drily.

And suddenly it's all I do notice. The inverted triangle of his broad chest, the thick broken black line of his eyebrows, the sooty five-o'clock shadow around his mouth.

I can hear Lara in the shop, winding up her call. The sound of her voice makes the silence in the tiny room thicken till I feel I can actually taste it at the back of my throat.

I remember what Mia said about the first time she met Ronan. She said: “You could have cut the air between us with a butter knife.”

I'm still looking at Phil's mouth and neither of us seems to be moving, but the distance between us is contracting. I feel myself tipping toward him, my weight shifting forward till my toes are pressing against the rubber bumpers of my sneakers.

What am I doing?
But I know exactly what I'm doing. I'm going to kiss him.

Then I see a shadow behind his shoulder and I take a step back.

“Lara, I was just wondering,” I say quickly, my voice sounding croaky, “what these little purple bells are.” I hold up the flowers.

Phil moves aside to let her come into the room.

“That's wisteria,” she says. “Isn't it lovely?”

“Really?” I hand Phil the bouquet and he bends down to put the flowers back in their pail. His jacket stretches over his broad shoulders like a second skin. “My mother has wisteria in her garden,” I say, “but it refuses to bloom.”

Lara twists her hair into a rope and anchors it with a pen. “How long has she had it?”

Ben planted it for her a month after we met.

“Seven years,” I say.

Longer than my mother spent with my father, I think. A quarter of my life.

“Well, seven years is make-or-break time,” Lara says. “You could try pruning the roots. Sometimes the shock will trigger bud-set. But if it hasn't bloomed by now, it probably never will. You'd be better off digging it up and starting all over again.”