The Flower Arrangement (2 page)

Mondays were her biggest delivery days. She'd arrive to find huge boxes, fresh off the Dutch transporters that had rolled into Dublin port the night before. She always held her breath as she slit the tape and pulled back the corrugated-cardboard flaps. Ordering online was all about ticking boxes. Species. Color. Size. Number. Grade of quality. Degree of openness. But there was something miraculous about seeing the flowers she'd imagined brought to life. Roses from Colombia. Chrysanthemums from Ecuador. Orchids from Thailand. Anemones and agapanthus from Spain. Stargazers and parrot tulips from the vast Dutch flower fields.

The shop was usually quiet on Mondays, so she and Ciara could take time to condition everything properly. Stripping leaves, removing thorns, rehydrating the flowers, separating any blooms she'd ordered for weddings or events from the stock for the shop, and filling the tiny cold room.

Tuesdays were catch-up days. Between the phone and walk-in orders, they'd give the shop a proper clean—dusting shelves, polishing vases, replenishing cards and ribbons, tissue paper, cellophane, wire and sterilizing fluid.

Midweek there would be a steady flow of customers and some early orders for the weekend. If stock looked as though it was going to run out, there was still time to put in an order.

Fridays were frantic. Men rushing in to buy flowers for their wives and girlfriends. Women looking for last-minute plants to take to dinner parties. Single girls who were going to spend the night in treating themselves to a bouquet on the way home.

Saturday was Lara's favorite day. The shop was busy with strollers and browsers, families out for a walk, loved-up couples in town for brunch, local people who emerged on the weekends to take the streets back for themselves. A Saturday could be even more hectic than a
Friday, but it felt more chilled out because everyone had time to stop and, literally, smell the flowers.

Just after nine, the door opened and her first customer came in: a man in his twenties in jeans and a very crumpled shirt carrying two cups of takeaway coffee and a plastic bag full of croissants. He winced when the wind chimes tinkled, and Lara turned the radio down in case his hangover was as bad as it looked. “Good morning.”

“Very good night!” He grinned sheepishly. “Not sure about the morning yet.”

He rambled around the shop for a while, muttering to himself, apologizing to a bucket of stargazers when he bumped into it. Lara asked if he wanted any help, and five minutes later he left with a glorious bunch of white narcissi tucked under his free arm.

A stressed-out woman in her thirties wearing pajama bottoms under her coat and Velcro rollers in her hair double-parked her Mini on the street right outside and rushed in looking for twelve gifts for a hen party.

“Perfect! Sorted! Done!” She swooped on the line of jam jar arrangements that Lara had just finished. And Lara, who had seen the traffic cop go past a minute earlier, didn't have the heart to tell her that the twelve miniature bouquets were meant for the charity dinner.

The shop was busy for the next two hours; then there was a lull. At about twelve, a man in his forties in a light green linen jacket, with thinning hair carefully spiked up to hide a bald patch, ducked in to avoid a sudden shower of hailstones. He cursed under his breath as he shook little nuggets of ice off his shoulders. He looked around at the fairy lights and lanterns and finally at Lara, who was working under a circle of soft light cast from the chandelier.

“It's kind of dark in here.” He sounded disapproving.

“It is.” Lara gave him a quick smile. Choosing flowers, deciding what to write on a card, these were personal things. A little mood lighting didn't hurt.

Hailstones were flinging themselves against the window like
handfuls of gravel. “Bloody typical.” The man rolled his eyes. “I'm going on a blind date. Better hope she's actually blind if I have to walk to Duke Street in that!”

“Why don't you wait it out?” Lara smiled. “It won't last long.” She went back to work on a new set of mini bouquets for the charity dinner. She had panicked when she found she didn't have enough jam jars, then decided she could use a dozen mismatched china cups she had picked up in a charity shop at some stage. They were turning out better than she had hoped.

She heard, rather than saw, the man's mood change as he wandered around the shop. He began to whistle, out of tune, to the aria playing on the radio.

The reason people loved to give and receive flowers, Lara thought for the hundredth time—the truth, the root that ran deep beneath the bouquets for birthdays and anniversaries and births and even deaths—was that human beings were changed by flowers. Even when they were not aware of it, some part of them basked in their beauty. They slowed down. They took deeper breaths. Their faces softened.

“It's stopped.” The man was standing by the counter now. Lara looked up and saw that the sun had come out. The light catching in the drops that clung to the window cast tiny darts of rainbows that danced around them.

“Spring is the sun shining on the rain and the rain falling on the sunshine,” she quoted.

“Seamus Heaney,” the man sighed. “One of our greatest poets. Hard to believe he's gone. Nobody could say it the way he did.”

“True,” Lara agreed tactfully, although the quote was by Frances Hodgson Burnett, the author of her favorite childhood book,
The Secret Garden
.

The man was staring out the window. “I thought I was ready to go out there.” Lara had a feeling he wasn't talking about the weather. “My girlfriend left me after Christmas,” he said glumly. “Everyone says I should make an effort to meet someone else, but I haven't been on a
date since 1998. I'm not even sure what you're supposed to talk about.” He frowned at the vase of free flowers Lara had left on the counter. “Isn't that bad for business? Giving flowers away?”

“It's better than throwing them away,” Lara said. “Help yourself.”

“No, I don't want to look like I'm trying too hard.”

“How about a buttonhole?” she said. “It'd be something to talk about.”

“Oh, go on then!” he sighed. “Maybe it'll distract her from the fact that I'm not George Clooney.”

Lara picked out a white rosebud. She snipped it below the head, then picked out a stem of
Alchemilla mollis
that was the same color as his jacket. She twisted it deftly around the bud, secured it with an inch of wire, slipped in a pin and handed it to him. He fixed it onto his lapel.

“What do you think?” she asked him.

He looked down at the flower and then up at her with the beginning of a smile. “I think I've been very rude and that you've been very kind.” He pointed at the flower. “What do
you
think?”

“I think you should forget it's a date,” Lara said, “and just enjoy a nice lunch.”

*   *   *

As she swept the floor for what must have been the tenth time that morning, Lara wondered if she'd see him again. Customers were like flowers: they had their seasons too. Some only appeared once, but there were regulars who came in every other week. Alfredo from Havana, who bought his wife, Dominga, exotic plants that reminded her of home—succulents and orchids and kumquat trees. Dermot, a perpetually love-struck pensioner who hobbled over from Donnybrook on his Zimmer frame for a single red rose every time a new female guest arrived at his retirement home. Ciaran, who was waving at her through the window right now. He had been coming in to Blossom & Grow with his daughter pretty much every Saturday since the shop had opened.

Lara had met Zoe when she was only five days old—a tiny bundle
strapped to her dad's chest in a sling, her face tightly furled, like a rosebud. Zoe had loved flowers when she was still too young to see more than blurs of color. She would drum her tiny heels in her stroller until her dad took her out and held her up—a flying baby above the buckets of roses and irises and lilies. Once she was old enough to know not to eat it, Lara had given her her own flower to take home every week. A purple iris or a yellow parrot tulip or a bird-of-paradise cut short and wrapped in cellophane and tissue and tied with a ribbon.

Lara had watched Zoe grow up, week by week, year by year. Seen her take some of her first tottering steps. Now Zoe was the same age as Blossom & Grow. A skinny, long-legged five-year-old in stripy red and black tights and a navy duffle coat. She still had something of a rosebud about her. A saffron-tipped, creamy-centered Leonidas, Lara thought, with her milky skin and her coppery corkscrew curls escaping from under her bunny-ears hat. Seeing her warmed Lara's heart the way the sunshine had warmed the back of her head first thing that morning.

“Well, look who it is!” she said, leaning on her sweeping brush. “I told the flowers you'd be dropping in this morning.”

“We're late”—Zoe hopped from foot to foot in her scuffed black patent shoes—“because we had to take a long time feeding the ducks. We have to do everything extra slowly this morning because Mummy needs a long lion.”

“Mummy needs a whole pride of lie-ins.” Her dad yawned and rubbed the coppery stubble on his jaw. “She was up with Bugs Bunny here at the crack of dawn. Can you make us up a fifteen-euro bouquet, please, Lara?”

It was what he asked for every week, and Lara had already set the flowers to one side. Three deep-pink anemones with sooty centers, a single full-petaled ballet-slipper-pink Antique rose, half a dozen bluebells, a pale pink hyacinth, a spray of freckly green hellebores.

She made a circle with her thumb and forefinger and began slotting the flowers into it, spiraling the stems so they wouldn't break when she tied them. She watched Zoe out of the corner of her eye. The little girl
stopped to gaze up at a bright pink orchid, squatted down to sniff the narcissi and stood on her toes to touch the inside-out trumpet of a calla lily with her red-mittened fingertips.

“Careful there, butterfingers!” her dad warned her.

“It's okay.” Lara smiled. “She knows not to squeeze them too hard.” She tied the bouquet with a pale green ribbon the same shade as the hellebores.

Ciaran whistled. “Wow! That is something else. You're a genius, do you know that? It doesn't seem fair that you make that amazing arrangement and I take the credit for it.”

Customers were always telling Lara that she had a gift, that nobody arranged flowers the way she did. Three years of graphic design college and seven years poring over a Pantone color chart had probably helped. The course she'd taken at the London School of Floristry had taught her the basics of conditioning and arranging. But the truth was that Lara was as amazed as anyone at how instinctive it felt, how easily it all came to her. She rarely had to think about what she was doing. Her eyes and her hands took over, weaving the flowers together, layering color and texture to create something beautiful and unique every time.

Zoe came over to examine the bouquet. “How did you know to pick those exact flowers?”

Lara bent down and tucked a curl back under the knitted brim of the little girl's hat. Zoe smelled of outdoors and chocolate cereal. There were bread crumbs clinging to the front of her coat. Up close, her eyes were the pale green of myrtle leaves.

“You want to know a secret?” Lara whispered. Zoe nodded. “I don't pick the flowers, they pick me! Now”—she stood up and held out the vase of free flowers—“let's see which one picks you.”

The small red mitten hovered over the vase and then settled on a bright pink gerbera. Lara folded a sheet of pale pink tissue into a fluffy froth and tied it with a snippet of pink ribbon.

“What's the magic word?” Ciaran asked when she had handed the flower over.

Zoe thought for a moment, then waved the flower like a wand. “Abracadabra!” she said imperiously.

After they'd gone, Lara stood at the counter for a long time, twisting a stray length of ribbon around one finger while her mind probed nervously at the ache in her heart the way a tongue explores a broken tooth. Seeing Zoe every week was always a blessing, but sometimes it was a cruel reminder too. Five years, she thought, staring down at the ribbon but not really seeing it. Seeing, instead, the life she and Michael could have had if things had turned out differently.

The sadness didn't mug her the way it had in the beginning. Then it had knocked her down every day, worked her over and left her limp and shaking. Now it could leave her alone for a week, then suddenly slide up behind her, pull and prod at her, looking for a way to drag her down.

She forced herself to pick up the phone and make some calls, then check her emails. She swept the floor again. She moved some of the flower buckets around and organized the counter and replaced the till roll. Then, when there was nothing else to do, she dug out the squeegee mop and marched herself outside to clean the already clean window.

One of the girls from the betting shop next door stopped to say hello. A chef from Pizza Heaven who was having a quick smoke by the Dumpster bins in the lane gave her a wave. Ketut, the solemn Balinese man who owned the furniture store two doors down, emerged and asked in his elaborately polite way for Lara's advice about his window display. She spent a few minutes pointing and nodding and shaking her head while he rearranged the gilded Buddhas and the intricate shadow puppets and the brightly painted wooden gods and goddesses who had found their way from Indonesia to keep watch carefully over this tiny corner of Dublin.

As she went back to Blossom & Grow, she glanced over at the Camden Deli across the street and saw the owner behind the gleaming plate-glass window. Glen was fortyish, with a closely shaved head and a mid-Atlantic accent. He had gone to the States on a J-1 visa when he was twenty and come home a year ago when he'd inherited the café
from his mother. He had transformed the place from a greasy spoon to a glossy black-and-white-tiled New York–style deli. Brought in real American bagels and French pastries and Italian espresso and a coffee machine as big and complicated as Lara's brother's motorbike.