The Flower Arrangement (19 page)

“Oh!” She claps her hand over her mouth. “I think I'm going to blub!”

“That's okay.” The delivery woman smiles. “That's allowed. It's pretty much expected.”

She pulls out a tissue and hands it over. Jenny dabs her eyes. “Not when you're wearing a full set of stick-on lashes. I was expecting flowers, I just wasn't expecting”—she takes the carnations the woman holds out to her—“
these
.”

She stands in the hall after the door has closed and counts the carnations. There are exactly twelve of them, like there were that first night. She opens the little cream envelope, hoping that it won't say something glib that will ruin this perfect gesture. But James has kept it simple.
Sorry!
the card says.
XoXo, J.

*   *   *

“I lost my wedding ring,” Lara told Ciara when she got back to the shop.

“I gave mine to that homeless woman who sits beside the bank machine on Baggot Street,” Ciara said bitterly. “Poor cow. I hope she has better luck with it than I did.”

They went upstairs to check the wedding flowers. Ciara had almost finished the centerpieces. Lara would come in early next morning to do the bouquet.

The creamy millefeuille roses had arrived from Holland yesterday and been left in the warm kitchen, where they were opening like tulle ballerina skirts. The pale pink peonies were in the coolest corner of the shop downstairs so they wouldn't go over. The wildflower man would be in at 6 a.m. to deliver the cornflowers and foxgloves. Every flower in the bouquet had a special meaning for the bride. She had known exactly what she wanted, Lara remembered, and had turned up at the shop with her own color swatches and mood boards and Pinterest links.

Ciara went back to work while Lara went downstairs and put the kettle on. As she waited for it to boil, she slipped her hand into her bag and took out the envelope. It was dog-eared and damp from where it had fallen on the road. The American postmark was blurred. Her name—her maiden name—in Michael's small, neat handwriting was smudged. Lara Kiely. She was so used to seeing Lara Grey that it looked strange to her. That's who I am now, she thought. That's who I've always been.

She was about to open the envelope, when the phone in the shop began to ring. “Are you trying to ruin my life?” a voice said when she picked up.

“Sorry?”

“This is James Delaney. I rang first thing this morning. I ordered two hundred euros' worth of red roses.”

“Yes,” Lara said, placing his voice. “I just delivered them.”

“Really? Then why did my fiancée just text me a picture of a scabby bunch of carnations?”

“I don't know—” Lara began. Then she stopped, because suddenly she did know. The cards had fallen off the bouquets. She must have clipped them back on to the wrong ones then delivered the flowers to the wrong addresses. “I'm so sorry.”

“Screw sorry! I've just stepped out of a meeting to call you. I'm going back in again now and the fifty red roses I ordered and paid for had better be delivered by the time I get out.”

Lara swallowed. “I don't have fifty roses left. I could deliver them tomorrow or I could refund your money right away.”

“I want a full refund anyway,” he said. “And I don't care where you get the roses, but they'd better be in my fiancée's grateful hands exactly one hour from now. Is that clear?”

*   *   *

When she heard what the man had said to Lara, Ciara wanted to call him back and tell him where to shove his roses. She wanted to take
the envelope out of Lara's bag and tear it into a hundred pieces. She wanted to ring Lara's therapist and tell him to get his finger out because even now, half the time, Lara seemed to be drowning not waving, clinging to the wreckage of her past life when she should be swimming to save herself.

There were a lot of things she wanted to do, but in the end she settled for making a pot of mint tea, sticking on Lyric FM and trying to talk Lara into calling around to the woman who had been given the roses by mistake to get them back. But of course Lara wouldn't hear of doing that, so Ciara got on her bike and did a mercy dash to three local florists to beg, steal and borrow every Black Magic rose they had in stock.

*   *   *

When Jenny opened the door again, all she could see were roses. Dozens and dozens of them crowded together in a massive bouquet that appeared to have grown legs. Then a head leaned around the side of the cellophane. It was the same delivery woman who had brought the carnations.

“Oh, hello!” Jenny smiled at her. They'd only met for a minute earlier, but it had turned out to be a very important minute, the one before she had decided to retrieve her engagement ring from the bottom of the bin bag. “Are you lost?”

“No. I've made a terrible mistake. I got two deliveries confused. The carnations I brought here earlier were for someone else. This is the bouquet your fiancé actually ordered.” She held out the roses.

Jenny stared at them. James hadn't sent her carnations to show her that he was still the guy who had chased her down the street. That guy didn't exist anymore.

“Tell him I don't want it!” she said.

“Please,” the delivery woman said. “This is all my fault, not his.”

“But something is his fault.” Jenny looked into the woman's eyes—they were brown, almond-shaped, honest. “Nobody sends that many roses unless they've done something really bad, do they?”

The florist opened her mouth as if she was going to contradict her, then closed it again and shook her head slowly. “No,” she said.

*   *   *

“Ciara,” Lara said when her assistant picked up the phone, “would you mind locking the shop up today? It's been a pretty emotional day. I'm too worn out to come back.”

“No problem. Oh,” Ciara said, “a guy just came in. Glasses, kind of frazzled-looking? He said you delivered forty-eight roses to his wife by mistake.”

“Was he upset?”

“He was walking on air. He said thank you about a million times. Apparently you might just have saved his marriage.”

“I think I've just broken up someone else's,” Lara sighed. “I can't seem to do anything right today.”

“That other guy sounds like a right bollox!” Ciara said, after Lara had told her what had happened. “And that girl dodged a bullet. You might have gotten the address wrong but the flowers got it right. They always do. Now you go straight home”—she took a beat—“and read the bloody letter. Get it over with and move on.”

*   *   *

When Lara got home, she took the letter out of her bag before she even took her coat off. She stood at the kitchen window, looking out at her dad's overgrown garden. It was where she had seen Michael for the very first time. Her father had hired him to landscape the garden and to clear a line of pines that were casting long shadows over his wildflower borders.

Lara had stood in this exact spot and watched them plan it out. Her dad, in his mid-fifties then, still dark and striking, striding back and forth in his crisp three-piece suit, talking nonstop, while Michael, tall and silent, in browns and greens that made him seem part of the earth and the leaves, followed a few steps behind.

She tore the envelope open, pulled the letter out and began to read.

Dear Lara,

I hope this letter finds you well, as happy as you can be with everything that has happened. And I hope that it won't come as a shock to you that, if you have no objection, I would like to file for a divorce.

I want to marry Glen—as you've probably guessed. But I want you to be free, Lara, to find someone else, to have all the love and happiness you deserve.

Lara remembered the day Michael had proposed, in a Victorian glasshouse in Kew Gardens in London. It was November outside but the air was tropical beneath the lush canopy of palm trees.

Lara had thought that marriage would be like that glasshouse. A place that let in the light and kept the cold out, where trust and love could be planted and flourish protected from the outside world.

She looked back down at the letter.

I think about you often and always with love and regret for the pain I caused you. And I think about something I said to you after Ryan died, something that I realize now must have sounded cold and hurtful.

When I said that Ryan had died for a reason, the reason was that I was being punished for lying, for hiding the truth about myself. I deserved it, but you, Lara, you had done nothing wrong, yet you were being punished too.

Of all the things I am sorry for, I am sorriest for that.

Love,

Michael

There were tears of sadness in Lara's eyes as she folded the letter, but there were tears of forgiveness too. She propped it up on the windowsill and looked out.

Her dad would be brokenhearted if he could see what had become of his garden. There were two smashed panes in the greenhouse. The trellis for the honeysuckle had buckled. The flower beds were choked with weeds and fallen leaves. The grass was a foot high, flattened by the wheels of the bins that Lara dragged in and out whenever she remembered.

She imagined how it would look if her dad was still alive. The green velvet of the lawn trimmed, the flower beds covered in a blanket of wood chippings. The roses pruned. The water feature he'd been planning before he died, sitting on the circle of white gravel. The garden had been, for him, what the flower shop was for her. “There is no hurt that a garden spade won't heal,” he used to say.

His gloves were still on the hook by the back door. When she slipped her hands into them, she had the strongest sense that she was touching his hands. As if this was something they were going to do together. She unlocked the back door and stepped outside.

*   *   *

It was dark by the time she was finished, but the lawn was cut and the greenhouse was sparkling and she had dumped six wheelbarrows of rotting leaves onto the compost heap. And she knew now where her dad would have put the water feature.

Not on the gravel at all, but beneath the winter-flowering cherry he had had planted the year her mother died. It came into flower in December, just in time for her anniversary. Tiny, fragile pink blossoms that smelled of summer.

Maybe Lara would put in the water feature herself. A slab of Wicklow granite. Her dad would like that. He had proposed to her mother by the river in the place they had named her after. Driven her to Laragh for a walk by the waterfall, with a ring in his pocket and the trunk of his car filled with flowers.

She was standing at the sink, scrubbing the earth from under her nails, when she heard her dad say her name. He didn't sound ghostly at all. He sounded alive and quite impatient. “Are you going to leave those flowers in the trunk all night or what?”

She suddenly remembered them, the forty-eight red roses she had forgotten to bring in. They'd never survive a night without water.

She dried her hands and went out to get them. Back in the house, she found scissors and cut the twine that held the stems together. The roses seemed to sigh with relief when they were released. She put a plastic bucket into the sink, and as it filled with water, she looked at the envelope propped against the window.

Leo was always saying that no matter how bad things were, she had choices. She had a choice now. She could go on asking herself why roses had thorns or she could be thankful that thorns had roses.

She turned off the tap and went upstairs. The spare room was still full of unpacked boxes she'd brought with her after she split up from Michael. She searched until she found the one she was looking for. Inside, wrapped in newspapers, were all of her mother's vases. She carried them downstairs and washed them carefully one by one. The green glass amphora, the heavy Waterford crystal, the red and white Lalique.

Then she filled every vase with roses and every room in the house with beautiful flowers.

The snow was back. It had started falling at four o'clock, and by the time Phil pulled the bike into the loading bay outside Blossom & Grow, Camden Street looked like a peaceful scene from a Christmas card. Inside the shop, though, Lara and Ciara were furiously busy making festive wreaths. He had only dropped in, as he did every few days, to check on his sister, but as soon as he stepped inside, he found himself helping out. Washing a bag of ivy, then cutting short sprigs from stems of boxwood and cypress that had been soaking all day. He stood between the two women at the counter and watched them twist the greenery expertly onto wire frames, handing them sprigs of rosemary and cinnamon sticks when they needed them.

It was late when they were finally finished, and Ciara left, anxious to get home before the blizzard that Met Eireann was cheerfully predicting. Lara put the kettle on and time seemed to stand still as the two of them sat at the counter drinking their tea, watching the cars glide past like baby deer on ice. A few guys in hoodies had stationed themselves at the corner with a stack of rubber mats and were throwing them down in the slush to help drivers get traction, refusing the offers of money that were thrust at them through open windows. People got grumpier when it rained, Phil thought, but there was something about snow that brought out the best in everyone.

Lara used the pretext of the icy road conditions to have a go at him
about giving up being a courier, or at least getting off the bike and starting a courier business of his own with the money their dad had left him. He'd heard the lecture many times before but he pretended to be taking it in.

“You're not listening to me, are you?” Lara said.

He shrugged. “I'm listening to what you're saying between the words.”

“Which is?”

“The usual. I'm twenty-nine. You want me to put my toys away. Get my shit together. And”—he drained his cup—“you love me.”

“I do,” she admitted, “but I'll be the only one who loves you in ten years when you're heading for forty and losing your hair and stuck in a job that means you have to dress like a teenage hell-raiser.” She took their cups out to the kitchen, and when she came back into the shop she was wearing a long, elegant black coat with a shawl collar and a pair of green Wellingtons that looked several sizes too big.

“If only I had your fashion sense.” He grinned, winding the cashmere scarf Katy had given him around his face.

“The boots are Michael's.” Lara looked down at them.

“Maybe it will do you good to walk a mile in them,” Phil said. “He's moved on; maybe you will too.”

“I can hear what you're saying between the lines too . . .” She shook her head. “But I'm not going to meet someone else, Phil. That's not going to happen.”

He got it. It would be hard for her to trust someone again after the way her marriage had ended. But the idea of his lovely sister on her own for the rest of her life? He was supposed to be looking after her; he couldn't let that happen.

“Give it time before you say that,” he said. “Give it a year.”

“You're starting to sound like Leo!”

“There are thirty-one million seconds in a year,” he said. “A lot can happen in thirty-one million seconds.”

“Maybe,” she said. She went around snuffing out the small candles in the lanterns, switching off the fairy lights, until the shop was in darkness.

Maybe he'd buy her a session with a psychic, he thought. She believed in that kind of thing. If someone with a crystal ball told her she'd meet someone, it would give her something to live for apart from her customers and her flowers.

He peered into a bucket on a shelf near the door as they were leaving. Long green spears with tightly closed heads. “Daffodils,” he said through a mouthful of scarf, “in December? I think that's what's technically called ‘a blooming miracle.'”

“It's not the only miracle. You and Katy have been together for three and a half months now. That's a Phil Kiely record, isn't it?”

He pulled his helmet over his head and flipped down the visor. Four months on Saturday, he thought.

She flipped the visor back up again and stared at him. “You're serious about this girl, aren't you?”

“You know me,” he said lightly. “Like Dad used to say, I'm never serious about anything.”

Lara bent down and picked up a handful of daffodil stems. “Here.” She unzipped his leather jacket and tucked the daffodils inside, then zipped it up again. “Maybe the warmth of your heart will open them up by the time you give them to her.”

“Hey!” Phil felt a cold, damp patch against his rib cage where the stems were dripping into his T-shirt.

Lara fished her keys out of her bag and locked up the shop, and they stepped out into a blinding whirl of snowflakes. She gathered her long rope of hair and tucked it under the collar of her long black coat, which was already covered with white flakes, so that it looked like ermine in reverse. “Don't say anything!” she said as she took a fake fur hat out of her pocket and pulled it on. “Someone left it behind in the shop last year. It's the only one I have.”

“From the neck up,” Phil said, “you look like you've stepped out of a Russian novel.”

“Really?” He saw her eyes flick to the boarded-up front of the Camden Deli. “Are you sure you don't mean a bad late-night drama on E4?”

He handed her his heavy leather gauntlets and unlocked the padlock on the chain of the bike.

“Is it wise to take that thing out on these roads?” She turned her gloved hand up and watched a few flakes land on it. “I get a bad feeling sometimes.”

Phil laughed. “Nothing's going to happen to me, trust me. I lead a charmed life.”

“It better not.” She handed back his gauntlets. “Because you are now officially my sole next of kin.” She planted her gloved hands on either side of his helmet and locked eyes with him. “Be careful out there, okay?”

“Okay!” He watched her walk away, her tall, slender figure erased in a few moments by the blur of what was fast becoming a blizzard.

He looked up at the sky, the glimpses he could see of it between the dizzying wheels of snowflakes. The heavy gray clouds were so low now they seemed to be pegged to the rooftops. They had already dumped several tons of snow on the city and, Phil guessed, there was more where that had come from. A flash of goose bumps ran across his shoulder blades, quick as a lizard up a wall, leaving him with a feeling that something bad was going to happen. He thought about locking the bike up again, walking to Katy's. But that would take him the best part of an hour, and he wanted to see her now.

His sister had told him once that after a couple of years in the shop, she had started to see people as flowers. In that case, he thought, brushing the thick fur of snow off the saddle and the handlebars, Katy was a Solanum Glasnevin, like the one Lara had given his dad a few summers ago. One minute it was a small, innocent shoot, a handful of
leaves, a few tiny purple star-shaped blossoms with asterisks of white at the center. The next it had taken over the entire bottom half of the garden, covering the ugly redbrick wall with a heavy tapestry of flowers and sending armies of vigorous shoots up the branches of the rowan tree. His dad had fought a losing battle with it; in the end, he just gave in. It was one dangerous plant, that Solanum, and Katy was one dangerous woman.

The first time he'd seen her, she was bent over her computer at her desk in the bridal magazine where she worked. Her back might as well have had a sign on it that said “Do Not Disturb.” Her shoulders were hunched, her fingers were clacking away on her keyboard. Even her hair, which had been long back then—a wild tangle of dark curls that fell past her shoulders—looked busy.

The ostentatious bouquet of roses on her desk was obviously from a boyfriend. Walk away, Phil had told himself. Just put the envelope down and walk away. But whoever had sent her those roses had gotten it wrong. They were too stiff, too formal for someone with hair like that. And there was something about the shape of her back that made him want to see her face. So he said something about giving the roses Sprite, just to make her turn around.

She was gorgeous. Olive-gold skin, a strong, straight nose, quizzical eyebrows above wide-spaced green eyes that glittered with intelligence and, at that moment, irritation. He had gone out with scores of girls, but there was nothing girlish about her. She was all woman. Damn right he had pursued her. Boyfriend or not. He had to after he'd seen that face. She had taken root in him that day, and now she seemed to be everywhere in his life.

Sometimes, when he was between jobs, hanging around the newsagent on Leeson Street with all the other couriers, waiting for his radio to crackle into life, he tried to think of a single thing he didn't want to do with Katy. Getting stuck in a lift? That sounded kind of sexy now that he thought of it so definitely. A package holiday in some awful concrete, beer-swilling, “Y Viva España” resort? Ah, yeah. A joint bank
account? Pushing it a bit, but nearly worth doing just to see her name printed next to his. Buying a burial plot, like people used to do back in the day? A bit ghoulish, but what the hell. All right, that was getting too soppy.

He bumped the bike down off the pavement into a gutter full of slush and climbed on. He was going to have to prune his feelings for Katy back a bit, he thought, if he didn't want to meet the same fate as his dad's wall. Careful, Phil, he told himself. He edged out gingerly onto the road through clouds of exhaust and flurries of snow, then threaded the bike through the static line of cars, alert for the slightest hint of a wheel about to slide away, glimpsing frustrated faces, white knuckles clutching steering wheels, behind the furious whap-whap of windscreen wipers.

His dad had given him his first bike when he was sixteen. “Philip, I will kill you if you hurt a hair on your body with this!” he'd said, handing over the keys to the secondhand Yamaha 50. But from the moment he'd first sat on the bike, Phil had never, for a moment, been afraid. He had felt as if it was a missing piece of his own body, a two-wheeled bionic limb that made him invincible. The CX500 was his fifth bike in twelve years.

Phil had gone to college, but only to please his father. He had pulled a rickshaw for the long hot summer after he got his arts degree. Blown the money he earned on a month in Thailand. He came back fully intending to do the MA his dad wanted him to do, but the thought of another two years at university was stifling. Instead, he'd walked into a job at Zip Couriers. He still couldn't believe that someone actually paid him to ride a bike. It might not have great career prospects, but it beat years of essays and tutorials or clocking in and out of an IT company, like his two best mates, or giving eight hours a day to a faceless insurance company like his father had before he retired.

“What do you deliver?” people wanted to know, girls usually. Half the time he didn't know and he didn't care. Theater tickets, legal documents, blood samples, photographic prints—stuff. It wasn't about the
contents of the padded envelopes in his courier bag. It was about freedom. Waking up not knowing which part of Dublin his job would take him to that day. Ailesbury Road and Shrewsbury Road, lined with nineteenth-century mansions that housed the embassies. The treacherous cobbled laneways around the Coombe Hospital. The endless sprawls of new apartment complexes that had taken root in the fields at the foot of the Dublin mountains where his Dad used to take him and Lara on Sunday picnics.

Weather never stopped him. He knew all the tricks. In a storm, he'd stick one leg out to the side, relax his muscles, use it like a sail to pull the bike into a straight line. Riding in snow like this was fine if you made ultra-gentle touches on the brakes, clutch, steering and throttle. Stayed slow and smooth and alert.

But this evening his mind was racing ahead of the bike. Crossing the intersection at Baggot Street before he'd reached it, flying down Serpentine Avenue, through the roundabout, taking a right onto Seafort Avenue, pulling over in front of the iron railings outside Katy's house. Climbing the steps to the green door with its panels of stained glass and its brass knocker in the shape of a hand of Fatima that Katy said warded off bad luck. Knocking, though he had his own key. Wanting to be standing on the frozen steps when the door opened so he could feel the warmth from the hallway pour out onto him. So he could see the light on Katy's face when she opened the door. And pull her warm body into him, curve by curve by curve.

He should have known, he
did
know, that bridges freeze before roads. When his front tire hit the patch of ice on Portobello Bridge, the bike jerked sharply to the right, then glided, horribly graceful and weightless, toward the center line of the road.

He hit the clutch. Freewheeling was a risky maneuver. But not as risky as smashing into the huge black 4×4 that was heading for him. His skin beneath his leathers prickled with sweat as he began to skid. He felt the cold patch on his T-shirt where the daffodils had leaked their sap. He heard a woman on the pavement screaming the moment
before the 4×4 swerved and the bike slid to a stop, two inches from its bumper, and he looked up into her eyes and saw, through the falling snow, how close a call it had been. Heard over the pounding of his own heart the shouts of the man who had jumped out of the 4×4.