The Flower Arrangement (28 page)

Now Rita Summers walked along Arran Quay every week to visit the spot where her son had died. Becca had seen her once, from the bus, tying a bouquet of white lilies to the lamppost and she had looked away . . . She hated that place and she hated Rita Summers, but still, she was grateful that Gavin wasn't forgotten. That somebody still brought him flowers.

She wondered if anyone gave Gavin's mother flowers. She looked down at the bouquet in her hand. She remembered the way Rita Summers had looked at her the day she first came to the house. Becca hadn't felt like an amaryllis that day; she had felt like an unsightly weed that somehow managed to intrude into the perfectly manicured garden of Rita Summers's life.

Nobody had a perfect life, not for very long. Not Rita Summers, not the lovely woman from the flower shop. Becca knew now where she'd seen her before. It was at the hospital the night she'd gone into labor with Josh. She'd glimpsed her through a gap in the curtain, the woman in the next cubicle whose baby had died.

Her heart went out to her now, and in the same moment, it went out to Rita Summers. Gavin was eighteen when he died, but he had been Rita Summers's baby once.

And Josh was part of his grandparents' story and they were part of his, no matter what they thought of her. What was it the florist's dad used to say? “It's not other people's job to like you. It's yours.”

She took her son's hand and they turned around and began walking back the way they'd come.

The tiny chapel was like a white shell—hollow inside and arched and echoey. Lara would have tried out the acoustics, thrown out a “We Three Kings” or an “I Will Survive,” if she had been on her own.

He had come in just after she had, and taken a seat on the last bench on the right. She memorized his appearance, just in case something bad happened and she had to describe him to the police. Late twenties. Medium height. Curly red-brown hair. Freckled arms. Jeans and gray T-shirt.

But nothing happened. He just sat there for the next half an hour. She could feel his eyes on her back as she looped swags of hydrangea and larkspur around the ends of the pews, fixing them in place with pale-green silk ribbon the color of river water.

When she had finished the last one, she gathered her things from the red-carpeted step at the altar and hurried down the aisle. Katy's bouquet was relaxing in a pail in the trunk of her car, but she had left the buttonholes till the last minute because camellias were temperamental.

His head was bent as she passed, his hands clasped loosely between his legs. He looked so dejected that she stopped at the door, took a breath and backed up, hoping she wasn't going to regret this. “Are you okay?”

His dark gray eyes were a surprise in his pale face. “I'm dandy. That's just a saying. It's not actually my name . . .”

Lara hesitated, primed to make a run for it if necessary. He didn't look threatening, but you never knew. He had probably just come in here for some peace and quiet. But it wasn't going to be quiet for long. The wedding was due to start in an hour and a half. As if he read her mind, he tilted his head back and whistled a few bars of the Wedding March.

The high, sweet, clear sound bounced around the dome above the altar and echoed back from between the arches.

Their eyes met as the last silver note died away.

“Wow!” he said. “I had the feeling the acoustics in here would be amazing.”

She smiled. “So did I!”

“I'm Ben.”

Lara shifted two rolls of wire under her arm so he could shake her hand. To her surprise, a little flicker of attraction feathered the back of her neck. He might be dangerous after all.

“Lara.” She took her hand back quickly.

He stood up, and as they walked out through the arched doorway into the heat of the day, Lara had a sudden, unexpected flashback to her own wedding day.

The warmth of the sun on her bare arms that day too, as she and Michael came out of the church. The flickering cloud of confetti. The blur of smiling faces. The feeling that all she wanted was to be on her own with Michael. In the limousine, he'd ducked his head and she had picked tiny flecks of green and pink and silver paper out of his fair hair while her mind expanded around the two lovely syllables she had just acquired.
Husband.

But she had been relieved to let it go in the end. Almost grateful when the divorce papers she had been dreading had arrived four weeks ago. She had no use for that word anymore; she could pass it on without a second thought to the girl who was about to marry her brother.

Ben walked beside her as she crossed the wooden footbridge to the parking lot. The taut lines of brightly colored bunting that she had made
on her mother's ancient sewing machine snapped over their heads. The only car outside the gate was her pink van, customized with the Blossom & Grow logo and the line
Every flower is a little bit of summer
.

“This may be a pretty wild guess”—Ben patted the roof of the van—“but are you a florist?”

“Either that or a car thief,” Lara said. Where had that come from? she wondered. Was she
flirting
?

Whatever she was doing, it got a smile. A small one that nearly reached his light brown eyes. Lara dumped her stuff in the back of the van, closed the door and walked around to the driver's side.

He drummed his fingers on the roof. She wondered if he was going to ask her for a lift. She was only going a couple of hundred yards to the B and B where Phil and Katy were staying.

“I suppose you're off to do another wedding.”

“Not today. My little brother's getting married here in . . .” She glanced at his wrist and he held it up so she could read his watch. “God, eighty minutes. I really have to go.”

His pale eyebrows disappeared up under his tangled fringe. “You're kidding me. You're the groom's
sister
?”

She nodded. “I'm Lara.”

He folded his arms and tucked his hands into his armpits. “I'm Ben. I used to go out with the bride.”

*   *   *

Stop! Lara told herself, trying to blow-dry her two-foot-long hair with the asthmatic hotel dryer. Ben was probably still in love with Katy, and even if he wasn't, he was way too young for her. So why did thinking about him make her feel carbonated, as if she was hooked up to an IV of Coke?

*   *   *

Katy, who edited a bridal magazine, was determined not to be a bridezilla. The invitations had been sent by email. There wasn't a whiff
of a hen party. There were no bridesmaids. The reception was going to be a picnic in Glendalough and the cake was three tiers of cheese.

Katy had, she'd told Lara, no intention of looking like “a pavlova in a car crash.” She wore a simple pale green cocktail dress and carried the bouquet of flowers Lara had made. Purple and white fritillaries, dusty-pink foxgloves, wisteria that fell from her hands like pale blue rain.

The ceremony was simple. A humanist minister said a few words, Katy and Phil read their vows, then everyone clapped and cheered and spilled outside into the sunshine.

Katy's sister, Mia, and her boyfriend, Ronan, came around with trays of Manhattans and mojitos in children's party paper cups.

Phil came over and hugged Lara.

“I was pretty sure you'd show in your bike gear,” she laughed, pinching the sleeve on his dark suit.

“Yeah, well, Katy vetoed the leathers. She hates that bike nearly as much as you do.”

She looked up into his face, remembering how small he'd once been. Amazed that her little brother was married, and yet not amazed at all. She had known, this time last year, when he asked her to hold the ladder while he climbed into the beech tree to cut down a spray of wisteria for Katy, that this was where he was heading.

“I wish Dad was here,” Phil said, a flicker of sadness moving like a quick cloud across his dark eyes.

“Maybe he is.” Lara smiled.

“You think he's looking down, don't you?” Phil teased her. “From the great golf course in the sky?”

Lara thought he might be. And she hoped that her mother, who had never set foot on a golf course in her life, was up there looking down too.

*   *   *

She was hanging back at the edge of the small crowd, planning to make a quick getaway if she saw Ben heading for her, when Mia drifted over
looking like a goddess in a gold sheath dress. She filled Lara's Winnie-the-Pooh cup from a pitcher.

“Uh-uh.” She shook her head. “No wall-florists allowed!” She took Lara's arm. “Let's find a gorgeous man for you to talk to.”

And Lara, who hadn't wanted to talk to a man in over a year, unless she was making a bouquet for his wife or his girlfriend, realized with a shock that a tiny part of her was hoping that Mia would lead her to Ben. The rest of her was horrified. She had thought she was done with all of that.

*   *   *

“Don't give yourself a hard time for being attracted to someone,” Leo said. “There's no real reason why you can't fall in love and have a healthy relationship.”

He was right. There was no real reason, but there was the baby, the one that Lara had imagined in her arms that morning in the kitchen when she was getting ready to tell Michael that they should try again.

She had let her husband and her marriage go, but some part of her was frozen in time, standing in that sunny kitchen holding that imaginary baby in her arms.

She had spent the last year of therapy trying to find a way to move on from that moment and now she had given up. But Leo hadn't. No matter what she started talking to him about, this was where they always ended up.

“How about we do a thought record,” he said now, “about this man you met at your brother's wedding.”

Lara's heart sank. Leo opened a leather folder and pulled out a preprinted sheet divided into columns. He uncapped his fat black lacquered Montblanc pen. His hand hovered over the first column.

Had Ben noticed her hands? Lara wondered. They spent so much time in cold water that they were prematurely old, and pretty soon the rest of her would catch up. Sometimes she wished it would hurry. The place between the bright garden of her twenties and the no-man's-land
of forty-one. Except that it wasn't a no-man's-land anymore. Not since she'd seen Ben in the church.

“Okay,” Leo began, “let's start with facts!”

Lara listed them. “I met him at my brother's wedding, well, before it. He wasn't actually at the wedding. He wasn't invited. He's at least ten years younger than me, maybe more. He's my sister-in-law's ex-boyfriend. Which is incredibly awkward and embarrassing and—”

“Hang on!” Leo was still writing. “We're coming to feelings.” He moved on to the next column. “Okay, naming emotions is the first step to creating new thought patterns. So, is there anything you want to add to ‘awkward' and ‘embarrassed'?”

There was. “Vulnerable,” “afraid,” “humiliated” and “ancient.”

“Ancient is not really a feeling,” Leo pointed out, “but I'll let you have it.”

He listed her automatic thoughts in the third column and circled the hot thought: “I'll never meet anyone else. I'll always be on my own.” Then he made her find evidence to support it.

Lara had never been a girlie girl. She had grown up in a masculine house with no mother to model herself on. Her marriage had been a test that she had failed.

She had already been over all of this with Leo, so she dredged up a headline she'd read in a magazine in the waiting room. “A woman of forty has more chance of being kicked to death by a mule than of meeting someone.”

“A mule?” Leo looked up and frowned. “Like a shoe?”

“Like a donkey.”

His smile was quick and followed by a look she had grown to know and dread. “Let's find some evidence that does
not
support the thought that you will always be on your own.”

They sat for a long time in silence. In the next room, Leo's wife, Hope, was talking on the phone.

“What's the problem, Lara?” Leo asked.

“It's always the same problem,” she said quietly.

“I know, and you know what you have to do. You have to close your eyes and imagine you're back in that kitchen, just before Michael came in.”

“Please don't!” she said. “I can't.”

“And you have to talk to that baby you wanted so badly. You have to tell her that someday, not today, but soon, you're going to let her go.”

*   *   *

When Phil came back from their honeymoon in Marrakesh, Lara hardly recognized him. He turned up at seven in the morning in Katy's car, wearing khaki chinos and a blue linen shirt. It was the first time Lara had seen him without a biker jacket since he was sixteen. She was just back from the flower market and she sent him inside to make coffee while she unloaded the van.

She was stacking boxes by the door when she heard him in the kitchen talking to Ciara.

“Three days into the honeymoon, guess who calls? Katy's ex. Looking for Lara's number.”

“Your girlfriend's ex wants to go out with your sister?” Ciara gasped. “That's a bit Jeremy Kyle.”

She was right, Lara thought. She went back out onto the street, waiting for her personal tsunami of self-pity to roll up, but for once, it failed to show. Instead, she found herself standing on the pavement smiling at the grim-faced pedestrians who flowed around her, hurrying to work. Ben wanted her number. He wanted to see her again.

After she had unpacked the flowers, Phil hung around and helped her with the orders. He chatted about the wedding and the honeymoon, but he didn't mention Ben's call. He wasn't going to tell her, she realized, and she didn't blame him. And part of her was disappointed and part of her was relieved.

When the half-dozen bouquets for the morning delivery were made up, they settled on either side of the counter under the glow of the
chandelier to write the cards. Phil read the messages from the order book. Lara wrote them down carefully on tiny cream cards.

“‘You do to me what spring does to cherry trees,'” he read. “‘Get well soon.' ‘Good-bye, best beloved friend.' Will you come to dinner on Sunday?”

She looked up. “Is that a message?”

“No.” He closed the book. “It's an invitation. Katy wants your advice about fixing up the garden.”