The Flower Arrangement (33 page)

“What's that for?” The boy had moved away but still kept on with his questions. He was by the conservatory door, pointing at the small bronze statue of the sausage dog on the floor.

“It's a doorstop.” She hurried after him across the marble tiles. Behind her she heard Fergus asking Rebecca about summer camps. “It's for stopping doors.”

“Stopping doors doing what?” The boy leaned on the brass handle of the glass door. “What's in here?”

“It's a conservatory.” Rita tried to shoo him back into the kitchen but he stayed put. She sighed. “A sunroom.”

And just as she said the word “sun,” the glass room beyond the door filled with one last blaze of evening light. The boy was backlit by the setting sun and for a moment it seemed to Rita that Gavin, aged six, was standing in front of her again.

“What's your name?” he asked.

“It's Rita,” she stammered. The light was leaving now as the sun fell behind the pine trees at the back of the garden, but her son was still there in the boy's blonde hair and his navy eyes.

“I'm called Josh,” he announced.

Rita swallowed. She had refused to let Fergus tell her anything about the boy. She had threatened to leave when she found out that he
was sending Rebecca money every month, but he refused to back down and she never mentioned it again. “Rita, he's your grandson. Have a heart.” But the thing was, she had lost her heart when her son was killed, and she had carried on living without one until now.

Rebecca arrived with Josh the next Sunday and soon it became an established weekly visit. She brought him on his birthday and Christmas morning too. The house, frozen for all these years, seemed to thaw as he ran through it trailing Lego blocks and sweet wrappers and discarded garments—pitifully small socks, odd mittens, wet anoraks—and a never-ending stream of questions that flowed out behind him like bubbles in the air.

*   *   *

The florist was saying something.

“Sorry?” Rita said. “I was miles away.”

“I was just saying that we're short on most things today, but if you give me a second, I can run down to the cold room. I think I might still have a wrap of lilies. It's the white ones you like?”

“Rita?” Josh had slipped away from her and was crouching by a bucket near the door. “Can we get these beanstalks?”

Rita went over to take a look at the handful of sunflowers that were left in the bucket.

“They grow from little seeds, you know,” Josh said importantly.

They were happy flowers, she thought. Too bright, too cheerful.

“Are you sure they're the ones you like best?” she asked him doubtfully.

He nodded. “Will I count them in French?”

“All right.”

There were six. One flower for every year since Gavin had died.

*   *   *

There was a lull in the constant stream of customers as Lara wrapped the sunflowers, and then the shop seemed to take a breath. Ciara, who
had brought out all the remaining stock to refill the buckets, stared at the door as it closed behind the woman and the boy. “Five years of lilies, and suddenly sunflowers. What's going on?”

It was yet another unsolved mystery, Lara thought. Like the man who had a single red rose delivered to his girlfriend every day for ten months and then suddenly requested a white one. The married actor who had sent one hundred black tulips to a married actress. The woman who had wanted to send another woman a cactus, anonymously. “We'll probably never know,” she said.

*   *   *

Rita left the sunflowers in their cocoon of cellophane in a sink half full of cold water. She put a frozen mini pizza into the microwave, poured a glass of milk, opened a bag of salad leaves and sectioned a clementine while Josh lay on his stomach on the rug, turning the pages of one of Gavin's old picture books about marine life.

The microwave chirped to tell her the pizza was ready, but she remained standing by the kitchen island, watching Josh. She had read somewhere, maybe in a women's magazine she had flicked through at the doctor's office, that the mother of a six-year-old was asked around a hundred and forty questions a day. Josh had already asked at least a hundred since this morning. There was another hour to go before Rebecca came to pick him up. Rita was sure he could pack the other forty in before then.

He looked up and caught her watching him. “Rita, why don't you put the beanstalks into a vase?” he asked, as if he could read her mind.

“They're for someone else.” She opened the microwave door and slid a plate under the small disc of steaming pizza.

“Who?”

She took a breath. “They're for your dad.” He could not, for some reason, connect his dad with the teenage pictures of Gavin, but when she had shown him the dog-eared photo in her wallet that had been
taken when Gavin was eight, she thought that maybe he had come closer to understanding.

He inspected the plate carefully and transferred the salad leaves onto the saucer she had put under the milk glass.

“My dad is dead,” he said in a matter-of-fact way.

“Yes,” Rita said. It was strange to hear herself admitting the fact that she had fought so hard against for years.

Josh took a noisy slurp of milk. “Then how are you going to find him to give him his beanstalks?”

“I'm going to put them at the place where he died.”

“He died beside a river.” Josh put his glass down.

“Yes,” she said softly. “On Arran Quay.”

Rita had gone to the place Gavin had died the week after the accident and every week since, bringing white lilies and, at Christmas, a simple holly wreath.

The quay was one of the main busiest streets in the city, and she had to endure the curious eyes of the drivers as she kneeled down and opened her bag. She carried the same things every week. Scissors to cut the wire on the old, faded flowers. A sheet of newspaper to wrap them in. A roll of garden wire to tie the new bouquet on. A copy of Gavin's photograph in case the one in the plastic zipped pocket she'd taped to the lamppost had gotten wet in the heavy winter rain or faded in the June sunshine.

She had thought all these years that the flowers were a simple tribute, but now it struck her that they were something else. A way of prettifying bitterness. A performance for the audience of drivers in their cars who were watching the brokenhearted mother grieve for her son.

She had blamed Rebecca for the fact that Gavin was on Arran Quay that day in the rain, but he had cycled across the city to say good-bye to her because Rita was sending him to boarding school. If anyone was to blame, she was.

“Do you know how big a whale's heart is?” Gavin had asked her once, when he was about seven, as full of impossible questions and odd
facts as Josh was now. “It's so big that a whole person can fit inside it,” he'd told her.

She thought about her own heart. It had dried and shriveled as the years slipped past, until there was no room in it for anyone. Not even the son she'd lost.

The doorbell rang.

“It's Mum!” Josh leapt excitedly to his feet, scattering pizza crusts, clementine segments and salad leaves on the rug, and skidded along the polished marble in his socks.

Rita didn't expect Rebecca to accept her offer of coffee. They were still awkward with one another. But Josh accepted it for her, mostly, Rita thought, because he liked feeding the little capsules into the Nespresso machine. Rebecca wouldn't sit down. She stood behind the kitchen island with her mug in her hand while Josh filled his backpack and put on his coat. She and Rita talked carefully, avoiding one another's eyes, sticking to safe territory. Where Rita had taken Josh and what he had said and eaten.

“Okay, buddy,” Rebecca said, “have you got everything?”

He nodded and ran over and took her hand. In her skinny jeans and hoodie and sneakers, with her long hair in a ponytail, she looked, Rita thought, more like his older sister than his mother.

Rebecca put her empty mug down on the draining board beside the sink full of sunflowers. “They're lovely,” she said. “We tried to grow some last year, didn't we, Joshie? But we might have watered them a bit too much!” She smiled nervously at Rita over his head.

They were almost at the door when Rita stopped. “Hold on!” she said, and hurried back into the kitchen. When she came out again, Rebecca was kneeling on the floor redoing the toggles on Josh's duffle coat. She looked up and saw the sunflowers.

“Will you take them?” Rita held them out, not caring that the stalks were dripping onto the cream carpet.

Rebecca looked at her warily. “What for?”

“It's Mother's Day.”

*   *   *

She watched them from the window, the tall girl and the small boy walking hand in hand to the gate. Rebecca was swinging Josh's backpack and her son was carrying the sunflowers, his arms wrapped around them tightly. She had the strongest, sweetest feeling that her own son was standing beside her. That he had come back to be with her for Mother's Day.

*   *   *

Lara was cashing up when Ben came in on a jangle of door chimes, a breath of icy March air.

“Will you turn the ‘Closed' sign around?” she asked him, taking off her reading glasses, which she knew magnified all the little lines around her eyes.

“Does this mean I have you all to myself?” He came over and wrapped his arms around her.

She opened her mouth to tell him that Ciara was still upstairs but he closed it with his own. She tried to resist him for a fraction of a second, then stopped trying and fell into the kiss.

“Will you marry me?” he said, when they came up for air. He'd been true to his word, asking her every day for the last two weeks.

“I'm sure he doesn't mean it,” Lara had said to Leo at their last session. “He'd probably run a mile if I said yes.”

But when Leo gave her a thought record to fill out, the only proof she could find to support that was the age gap.

As if he had been anticipating this conversation, Leo was wearing a T-shirt that said:
Leap and the Net Will Appear
. “Maybe, just maybe, the age difference doesn't matter to him,” he said.

Maybe, Lara thought, but maybe it did. Perhaps Ben had was keeping his doubts hidden the way Michael had kept his sexuality secret all those years.

“Why won't you marry him?” Ciara was standing in the doorway to the kitchen in her fluorescent yellow jacket, her cycle helmet in her hand.

“Yeah, why not?” Ben, who was still holding on to Lara, head-butted her softly.

“Because I don't have time for this nonsense. I've got work to do.” Lara slipped out of her cardigan and escaped behind the counter.

“Tell you what, Ben!” Ciara said. “I'll work on her tomorrow if you help do the cleaning up.” She waved at the floor of the shop, which hadn't been swept for hours. “I'm late for my Icelandic lesson again. They probably won't let me in.”

“Deal!” Ben said. “What's with the Icelandic?”

“A medium told me that I would moving out of darkness into light,” she said. “There are twenty-two hours of light in Iceland in summer, so I thought I'd go there at some stage, to shorten the odds.”

“I used to work with an Icelandic bloke,” Ben said, “at the library. I think he still does conversation classes. Maybe you should give him a call.”

“Why not?” Ciara handed over her phone and bent to put on bicycle clips while Ben tapped a number into her contacts.

“You believe in all that psychic stuff?” he said, handing it back.

“I do, and so does Lara!” Ciara's eyes glittered with mischief. “The psychic she went to the Christmas before last told her that her soul mate would be along soon.”

“Ciara!” Lara threw a roll of ribbon after her as she headed for the door.

Ben grinned. “Well, he's here now. Come on, I'll give you a hand.” He took off his heavy jacket and draped it over Lara's shoulders and they set to work.

The Icelandic bloke had taught Ben a few phrases. He tried to remember them as he poured water out of buckets into the sink, sterilized them and stacked them while Lara swept the fallen leaves and petals into rustling piles.

“You work too hard,” he told her when they were finished. She had been on her feet for nearly fourteen hours.

She was washing her hands at the sink. Her fingers were chapped and her wrists were dotted and dashed with thorn scratches. “It doesn't
feel like hard work.” She looked around. “It's tiring but it gives me more than I give it. It's good to get lost in other people's lives sometimes, to get away from your own.”

He wondered if she still felt like getting away from her life now that he was in it.

“Oh!” Lara said suddenly. “We forgot all about this.” She picked up a huge arrangement that had been left in a bucket by the sink. “It was ordered and then canceled. It seems a shame to take it apart. What about your mother?”

He shook his head. His mother didn't deserve them. She hadn't been nice to Lara the one time they had met. Ben was her only child and she had been counting on grandchildren. But he'd had a lifetime of pleasing other people; now he just wanted to please himself.

“Why don't you take them to
your
mother? We could go to the graveyard.”

She looked taken aback. “I don't really go there. I've only been three times.”

He counted them off in his head. Her mother, her father, the baby she had lost. “Well, let's make it four,” he said. “It's about time you took me to meet the parents.”

*   *   *

It was too cold for snow, that's what Lara's dad would have said. The air was sharp as a blade and the sky as black as spilled ink as they parked outside the graveyard. When they got out, Lara was relieved to see that the gates were locked.

She loved that Ben challenged all the old rules she'd made in her life, that he shook her loose from her past. But this was different. This was a place she had always hated.