The Flower Arrangement (3 page)

Lara raised her squeegee to wave at Glen, but he turned away quickly, in a way that seemed almost deliberate, and ducked out of sight. He used to call over to Blossom & Grow at least once a week, bringing Lara chocolate and raisin twists and cappuccinos with flower designs traced in chocolate dust on the foam. He'd hung around admiring the flowers, complaining good-humoredly about Dublin's lack of decent baristas and gay bars. But it was at least a month now since he'd dropped in. She tried to think back to their last meeting, hoping that she hadn't said anything to offend him.

A flurry of customers arrived, and by the time the shop emptied out again it was after two o'clock and there was still no sign of her brother. She usually liked to do her own deliveries, but today, without Ciara to look after the shop, she'd asked Phil to do the run.

His phone was about to ring out when he picked up. “What?” He sounded groggy.

“Please tell me you're not still in
bed.
”

“Oh shit! I said I'd come in, didn't I? I forgot to set the clock.” His voice was husky. He'd sounded like this every morning since the age of thirteen, when his voice broke: as if he'd been drinking whiskey and smoking cigarettes in his sleep. “I decided to take a run down to Kilkee on the bike last night.”

“Why?”

“I don't know. Because it was there. At least I think it was there. It was too dark to see it properly. I could hear the roar of the Atlantic, though.”

“You took a six-hundred-kilometer round trip just to hear the sea?”

“It was only five hundred and eighty-four kilometers,” he yawned. “And it's an ocean. I'm not sure I'm in a fit state to drive around Dublin.”

“I'll do the deliveries if you look after the shop.”

“Any chance Michael could do it?”

“He's working on a job in Howth all day.”

Michael had started taking on freelance projects after Lara opened the shop. He worked in his corporate landscaping business Monday to Friday, designing rolling parklands around newly built apartment blocks, dreaming up streams and waterfalls to break up the concrete jungles of business parks, color-coordinating plantings of shrubs and bushes to create pleasing harmonious blurs on the hard shoulders of motorways.

At the weekend, he went back to what he'd been doing when they met—landscaping gardens. Digging out borders, building rockeries and raised beds. Moving earth. Losing himself in activity. Trying to fill the same aching space that she was. She sighed.

“Lara! Stop,” Phil grumbled.

“Stop what?”

“Stop giving me those sad puppy-dog eyes!”

“You can't see my eyes!”

“I don't have to see them to know they're doing that big brown pleading thing. I'll come in for an hour. One hour only, Lara. Then I'm going straight back home to this lovely bed.”

Lara managed to get the delivery bouquets finished between customers. She was about to nip out and load them into the van when she noticed a man in a high-visibility jacket and a hard hat walking purposefully past the window. A moment later, he walked past the other way. Then the door opened a crack.

“Hello,” Lara said.

A head appeared around the door, then the builder edged into the shop in his large dusty boots, looking mortified. He pointed at the flowers in the nearest bucket, some yellow chrysanthemums that Lara kept for funeral wreaths because they were cheerful and because they lasted if not for eternity, at least for a few weeks.

“I'll take ten euros' worth of them,” he mumbled.

“They're a lovely color, aren't they?” She came out from behind the
counter. “But have you seen these?” She pointed at the bucket of sunflowers that blazed in the corner. “They'll really light up a room.”

He nodded. “Okay, those then.”

He retreated to the door while she wrapped them, his tattooed arms crossed on his chest, his jaw clenched as if he was waiting for a filling rather than a bunch of flowers.

“Why don't you pick a card to go with them,” she suggested. “It'll make the flowers last longer.”

His eyebrows, caked in dust, disappeared up under the yellow plastic brim of the hat. “If she puts the card in the water?”

“If she puts it in a drawer or tucks it into a book.” He looked confused. “Women don't throw cards away, you know. She'll find it a year, two years, ten years from now, and remember the sunflowers you gave her.”

The builder took a few tentative steps toward the counter and turned the revolving stand slowly, then furtively picked a card and held it out.

“Probably best if you write it.” She slid a pen over to him. It stayed where it was for a long moment, then a huge hand snaked out and took it. The builder hunched over the card, nibbling his knuckles.

“I can't think of anything to say.”

“Just say whatever you'd say in a text.” Lara put the finished bouquet on the counter. “A romantic one. I just need to pop upstairs for a minute. I'll leave you in peace.”

She went up to the workroom and spent a minute checking over a vase of Memory Lane roses she'd left to open by the window. When she came down again, the builder and the bouquet and the card were gone and there was a pile of change on the counter. She smiled to herself as she put the money away.

*   *   *

It had taken careful nurturing and tending and six days of her life every week for two years, but despite the recession and all of Michael's worries, Blossom & Grow had broken even two years ago and had been
in profit ever since. Lara was still only earning half the salary she'd made as a graphic designer, but it was enough to cover the mortgage and her share of the bills and to pay back the six thousand euros her father had lent her to start the business, though he always insisted the money was a gift, not a loan.

She and Phil joked that they had to be careful what they said to their father. If Lara mentioned on the phone that she was thinking of repainting her living room, he was quite likely to be at the front door with paint and a ladder before they'd finished the call.

Families fell apart when mothers died, especially when the children were young, but theirs had grown closer, held together by the glue of their father's love and determination. Overnight, his Dick Francis and Stephen King novels had disappeared and were replaced by dozens of books on parenting. He had taken a two-year sabbatical from his marketing job until Phil was old enough to go to school. Walked twelve-year-old Lara down to the local hair salon and asked the hairdresser to teach him how to French-plait her hair. Brought Phil to the toddler playgroup, sat cross-legged on the floor playing patty-cake and singing “The Wheels on the Bus,” not giving a damn that he was the only man there.

He had never missed a school concert or a parent-teacher meeting or a hockey game. He had done the washing and the ironing and the vacuuming. Checked their homework every night. Taught both of them to play golf and to fish and to name every plant in the garden. Turned himself, after a rocky start, into a fairly decent cook, though he had never got the hang of baking. Lara remembered coming down in the middle of the night for a drink of water when she was fourteen and finding him in his dressing gown in a blizzard of flour on his third attempt to master a Victoria sponge for her school cake sale.

*   *   *

When Phil arrived, Lara left him propped up at the counter with his leather jacket zipped up, complaining about the cold. She made him a cup of strong coffee and told him to call her if there was anything he
couldn't deal with. But her brother was good with flowers, she thought, loading bouquets into the back of her pink van, and with people.

Every light seemed to be green, every loading bay had a free space and she flew through the deliveries to the restaurants and the charity ball. She drove through sun and rain out to Donnybrook to drop off the birthday flowers, making sure that the manager of the restaurant found a champagne bucket to keep them in so they wouldn't wilt before the party started. Then she got into her van again and headed on to Foster Avenue, taking the long way along the Goatstown Road so she could see her favorite tree, a rare magnolia Genie that had taken over the entire garden of a suburban house. The tree was ugly in winter, a tangle of twisting branches like scrawny limbs, but in March it was covered in heart-stoppingly lovely pink and cream flowers the size of teacups.

She had delivered lilies and twisted hazel to that house once, and an elderly woman in a dressing gown with a hot-water bottle tucked under her arm had opened the door and burst into tears when she'd seen the bouquet.

“I'm sorry,” she said, after Lara had found her a tissue and brought her inside into a hallway that felt colder than the doorstep had. “They're from my son in Sydney. I don't know how to tell him . . .” She sat down on the bottom step of the stairs and began to cry again. “I don't need flowers, I need money to pay the gas bill.”

Lara had given her the money her son had spent on the flowers and left her the bouquet as well. She hadn't told Michael. He had warned her many times that she'd have to separate her heart from the business, but how was she supposed to do that when the flower business was all about heart?

She took a left onto the Kilmacud Road and then another right onto Sweetbriar Grove. She pulled over and opened the back of the van and took out the anniversary flowers. A sullen woman in her thirties with her hair scraped back in a severe ponytail opened the door. “Can't you read?” she snapped, pointing at a printed sign over the letter box. “No junk mail, no sales calls, no—” Her eyes widened, her hand floated up to her mouth
and here it was, the tiny gap between the moment a woman saw the flowers she'd been sent and the moment when she said “Ah” or “Oh” or “Wow” or, in this case, “Are they for me?”

And maybe Lara was just imagining it, but it always seemed to her that the relationship between the woman and the person who had sent her flowers fit into that gap somehow, in all its beauty and complexity, the way the magnolia tree fit into the tiny suburban garden.

Her heart lifted as she walked back to her van, then sank a little as she began the drive back into town to make the final delivery. The one she had left till last.

*   *   *

Her dad had taken her for an extravagant lunch to celebrate after Lara had paid him back. She had wanted to invite Michael and Phil along but he was having none of it. “Bring that pair into a Michelin-starred restaurant? Don't be daft. Michael would trample mud all over the carpet and Phil would show up dressed like a bloody Hell's Angel. Anyway, it'll do my street cred some good to be seen out in a posh nosherie with a glamorous woman.”

“Hardly glamorous, Dad,” Lara had sighed, but she had dressed up for the occasion, the way her mother would have. Swapped her shop thermals and jumpers and jeans for an elegant blue jersey dress, worn high shoes.

Afterward, they walked across Merrion Square to where she'd parked, stopping to admire the flowers in the brightly planted beds. Her dad walked her to the Holles Street gate, then stopped and took her arm and gently turned her around to face him.

For a long time he had looked years younger than he really was. Then, in his mid-sixties, he had started to look his age. Now, every year, her brother looked more like the dashing dark-haired father she remembered from her childhood, and her father looked like her grandfather did in photographs. His hair was thinning on top, silvering at the temples. His skin, always tanned from the golf course, was deeply
lined. Only his eyes were unchanged. Dark as her own, sparkling now with the wine he'd drunk at lunch and a touch of mock annoyance. He'd been trying to persuade her for most of the afternoon that the money she'd paid back was a gift.

“Make an old man happy.” He put his hands on her shoulders. “Let me put it into a deposit account with your name on it.”

“We've been through this,” she sighed. “And you're not old! You're mature.”

“Like a cheese, and you, you're like your mother.” He shook his head. “You won't do what I want but you give me the brush-off so elegantly that I'm happy anyway. I suppose the money doesn't matter. All that matters is that you're happy. You
are
happy”—he looked at her closely—“aren't you?”

“Of course I am.” She smiled. “I wake up wanting to go to work. I think that's about as good as it gets.”

“You've done a great job with the shop. You should be very proud of yourself.” He cleared his throat, a signal that he was straying onto uncomfortable ground but that he was determined to give it to her straight—the way he had when he told her about periods, and later, when he asked her if she needed to go on the pill. He had never shied away from any of the conversations she would have had with her mother, no matter how hard they were for him.

He looked pointedly at the maternity hospital across the street and Lara felt a flutter of anxiety. Please! No! she thought.

“Work is all very well, but it isn't enough. Kids are what give life meaning, Lara. I wouldn't have wanted to go on if it hadn't been for you and Phil. I hope that's not, what do they call it these days, too much information?”

Lara shook her head, hoping that was it, but he went on.

“I know you had your heart broken into a million pieces over there.” He nodded at the hospital. “I know the last thing you want to do is talk about it. But some women are meant to be mothers, and what happened doesn't change the fact that you're one of them. You know,
when your mother and I were dragging our heels about having another baby, you invented an imaginary one of your own.” He looked wistful. “What did you call her again?”

Lara had called her Lily, but she couldn't say that. If she tried to say anything, she would start to cry. She held her breath and managed a jerky shrug.

“Well, I've said my piece.” He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “I'll shut up now and get out of this lovely hair of yours.” He gathered her into a fierce hug. “
Ti amo molto
. You know that, don't you?”