The Flower Arrangement (8 page)

*   *   *

“Little shit!” Ciara said with venom. “He saw your bike and he's sneaking off in case he bumps into you. It's me he should be afraid of. If I wouldn't miss Mort so much, I'd quite happily do ten years for the pleasure of killing him.”

“Funny how we always want to hurt the accomplice,” Phil sighed, “instead of the betrayer.”

“Oh don't worry, I'd kill Michael too.” Ciara's eyes glinted in the dark. “How could he do it to her? Marry her knowing he was gay. Waste the best years of her life, then drop that bomb on her the week she found out your dad was dying?”

Phil shook his head. His first reaction had been anger too. He had
never been in a fight, not even a schoolyard scrap, but Lara had had to physically stop him getting on his bike and going to confront his brother-in-law. But watching his father die day by day had swept all his rage away. Then grief had tumbled him like a wave, and when he got to his feet again, all he felt was pity. Michael had wasted the best years of his own life too . . .

The street was bright after the cool darkness of the shop. Summer heat rose from the pavement. The air smelled of cut grass, exhaust fumes and pizza. Crowds of drinkers were spilling out of the pub on the corner. Boys in wetsuits were strolling past on their way from swimming in the canal.

“I don't know,” Ciara said, still looking across at the café. “If the sweetest, most beautiful, most generous woman on the planet can be dumped for another person, then what hope is there for anyone?” She shivered suddenly, despite the warmth of the sun on her back. It could never happen to me and Mort, she thought. Could it?

Phil held the cardboard box while she unlocked her bike. “Did you suspect anything?” she said, turning to him suddenly. “Did you have any idea that anything was wrong between them?”

“No,” Phil said, and he meant it. But after she had cycled away, as he was climbing onto the motorbike, he realized that that wasn't true. Not quite. His parents had been the real thing, he knew that. He had no clear memory of seeing them together, but he could remember what their togetherness had felt like. Lara and Michael had never had anything like that.

*   *   *

“So, what are you thinking?” Lara's therapist, Leo, asked.

Lara stared at the gray rug with the abstract black pattern on the floor and listened to the sound of a washing machine running in another room. This was their fourth session. Lara had cried all the way through the first two when she talked about her dad's death, but when
Leo moved on to the breakup of her marriage, the tears had dried up and so had the words.

She was thinking that there must have been signs with Michael, things that any other woman would have seen. That she was stupid and blind and useless. She shook her head.

“No pressure,” Leo said. “Take your time.” He looked at the woman in the armchair opposite him. She was wearing a skirt with the hem coming down and a shapeless jumper. Her long dark hair, flecked with gray, was unwashed. Her eyes were wide and glassy. She looked shell-shocked and he didn't blame her. When her husband had redrawn the boundaries of his life, he had redrawn the boundaries of her life too.

“You think you're the only person this has happened to?” he asked. She looked at him, met his eye for the first time in the half hour since she'd arrived. “In the States, there are two million gay or bi men and women married to straight people. I know that right now you feel like you're alone, but you're not. Other people have come through this and so will you.” Her dark eyes were skeptical. “You've lost your father, you've lost your husband. You're in shock. You're questioning the nature of reality. But time will change your perspective. You know, someday you might even be able to forgive Michael.”

Lara stared at her scuffed boots. It wasn't Michael she needed to forgive; it was herself. For not seeing the truth. For not realizing sooner that he wanted out. For not being brave enough to bring up the subject of having another child after Ryan died. For wasting the years when it might have been possible with someone else. How could she forgive herself for that?

Michael had written to her. There were three letters on the table in the hall in her dad's house, jumbled in with free newspapers and flyers for window cleaners. But reading the letters was one more of the things that Lara could not imagine ever doing. Like sleeping more than three hours straight. Dealing with the sympathy and curiosity of her friends. Going back to work. Facing her customers.

Seeing Phil would have been on that list too, but even though he'd moved back into his own place, he still came over to the house every few days. He brought her groceries she didn't want, cooked her meals she couldn't eat. Insisted, like Leo just had, that she would get through this. Everyone seemed clear about that.

Lara left Leo's with an armful of photocopied sheets. Mood logs to keep, a daily journal to fill out, a list of affirmations to repeat last thing at night and first thing in the morning. She dumped them into a recycling bin by the People's Park in Dún Laoghaire, then stood on the curb of the busy road, without the faintest idea of where to go or what to do next. What was it Leo had said? She was questioning the nature of reality. Well, it was about time, she thought bitterly. She should have grabbed reality by the throat and interrogated it years ago.

Terrible things happened. They could be happening again right now. She had a vivid, terrifying premonition that Phil was going to have a crash. That at this very moment his bike was skidding under the wheels of a juggernaut on the M50. What was the point of loving anyone, she thought, if it was only going to be taken away? Leo had asked her if she had any suicidal thoughts, and she had answered, truthfully, that she hadn't. But now she imagined closing her eyes and stepping out into the road and—

She heard her dad's voice behind her, or thought she did. “Jesus, Lara! Watch where you're going, would you?”

She whipped around, half expecting to see his ghost, but instead she saw Frank, her boss from Green Sea.

He grabbed her arm. “I thought you were going to walk out into the traffic.” The cars had stopped and he steered her across the road.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“I'm taking you to lunch.”

“I'm not hungry.”

“Well, I am. You can keep me company.”

McDonald's was where they'd always gone on the way home from meetings in Naas. They'd pull over at the drive-in on Kylemore
Road and sit in Frank's monstrous Lexus and eat burgers and chips from greasy paper bags, rewarding themselves for getting another piece of decent design over the line.

Lara took a seat at a table by the window with her back to the lunchtime crowd. Knots of office workers and little clusters of mums with preschool babies. Elderly people making a single paper cup of coffee last an hour.

Frank queued at the counter and came back to the table, and when she saw the tray loaded with food, Lara suddenly felt ravenous. They sat in silence, opening paper cartons, ripping open salt and ketchup packets, poking straws into their supersized cardboard cups of Coke. Lara hoped the silence would last. That she could eat and leave without Frank asking her a single question.

He took a gulp of Coke. “So how are you doing?”

She lifted her shoulders and dropped them in an attempt at a shrug. She put two French fries in her mouth and took a bite of her burger so she wouldn't have to speak.

“You must miss him so much.”

She stopped chewing. Did he mean her dad or Michael? Did everybody know about Michael now?

“He was an amazing guy, your dad,” Frank said, ducking his head to slurp a mouthful of Coke through his straw. “If I can be half the father he was, I'll be doing well.”

“How are the girls?” Frank was divorced with two daughters, eight and ten.

“They're going through a bit of a hating-their-old-man phase. But you don't appreciate your parents till they're gone, do you? I certainly didn't. You think of orphans as if they're all little kids from Dickens.” He shook his head. “But here we both are, forty-year-old orphans. Except that you have Michael.” Lara bent her head so he would not see her face. “I seem destined to become one of those sad old blokes you see eating on their own. Which is the reason why I kidnapped you and dragged you here. Well, one of the reasons.”

It was a mystery to Lara, to everyone at Green Sea, that Frank was still single years after his divorce. He was in his early forties now, with a dusting of gray in his blonde hair, carrying a few extra pounds since she'd seen him last. But he was handsome and funny and kind.

He balled up the wrapper from his burger and wiped his hands on a napkin. “I called into Blossom & Grow and talked to what's-her-name, the blonde girl with the raccoon eyes.”

“Ciara,” Lara said. “They're kohl-rimmed.”

“She said you were taking some time out.”

Lara poked a fry into a congealing pool of ketchup. “The thing is, I don't know,” she said carefully, “if I want to go back at all. I don't know if I can cope with all those people.” A flower shop, as Ciara often said, was an emotional revolving door and you never knew what would come through next—love, sadness, guilt, joy. Lara could barely cope with her own feelings. The thought of trying to cope with someone else's was too much to bear.

“What will you do?” Frank asked. “If you don't go back?”

“I don't know.”

He let her off the hook. Changed the subject, told her anecdotes about clients, tidbits of scandal from the incestuous design world. Drank her Coke as well as his own.

He had told her once, when he was drunk at an awards ceremony, that she was the most beautiful woman in the room. Maybe, she thought suddenly, crazily, she should have had an affair. If she had been more experienced, she would have known that everything wasn't right with Michael.

“I miss you, Lara,” Frank said, then added quickly, “We all do. Green Sea hasn't created a decent corporate identity since you left. If you decide not to carry on with the shop, we'd take you back in a heartbeat.”

Go back to design? Lara stared at him.

“Think about it? Will you?”

She nodded. “Okay.”

Outside the sky had opened up, high clouds, patches of blue, a stiff breeze coming from the direction of the sea.

“Thanks,” Lara said. “For making me have lunch. I was hungry. I just didn't know it.”

“My pleasure.” He looked at her for a long moment, then leaned over and kissed her quickly on both cheeks. She felt his stubble graze her ear, caught the familiar scent of his aftershave.

“Look both ways this time,” he said as she turned to cross the road. “Every time. Promise?”

She nodded. He stood where he was and watched her walking away. She took the narrow road that led to the seafront; the wind lifted her hair, making dark scribbles with it in the air.

And as he watched her go, the warm glow that had spread through Frank's chest in McDonald's began to fade, and by the time she turned the corner, it had gone.

*   *   *

Phil had persuaded his boss to slot him in for the 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. shift so he could spend the afternoons doing deliveries for Blossom & Grow. On Friday morning, he was on his way back from a drop-off in Arklow when the phone in the breast pocket of his leather jacket began to buzz like an angry wasp. He ignored it till the Enniskerry turnoff, then pulled over, kicked down the stand and parked the bike.

“Ciara, I'm on the road.”

“It's an emergency.” She sounded brittle. “Funeral flowers for one of the regulars. Her son.”

“How old?”

“Twelve or thirteen,” Ciara said in a bright, hard voice.

“Cancer?”

“A heart condition.”

Phil stared unseeing at the litter on the hard shoulder, the beer cans and crisp packets, the sodden newspapers, the discarded teat from a
baby's bottle. It was hard enough when your seventy-year-old father died; how would it feel to lose your twelve-year-old kid?

“His mother,” Ciara was saying, “the regular, she wants a wreath, a really complicated one, and she wants Lara to do it. She's coming into the shop in an hour. Will you tell Lara that it's Karina?”

*   *   *

She should never have let Phil talk her into this, Lara thought, clinging to her brother's back as the bike ducked and dived between cars on the Ranelagh Road. Fear expanded in her diaphragm like an inflating balloon, but it wasn't Phil's driving that scared her; it was the thought of seeing Blossom & Grow. She tightened her arms around her brother's waist, trying to signal to him to stop the bike, but he didn't notice, or pretended not to. Five minutes later, they were pulling over outside the shop.

She climbed off the bike, pulled off her helmet and looked up at the tall pink building, the fronds of ivy she had painted so carefully, the pale green logo with pink type she had spent weeks perfecting. She felt as if she was looking at a ghost.

It wasn't just the thought of the customers that had kept her away for the last six weeks. She blamed herself for not knowing about her dad's illness and her husband's unhappiness, but she blamed Blossom & Grow too.

The shop had soaked up all her attention and her energy. It had blocked her from feeling the raw pain of losing Ryan, but it had blinded her to the truth of what was going on around her too. And if it weren't for Blossom & Grow, Michael would not have met Glen.

If she turned and looked across the street, she would see the tasteful gray sign above the Camden Deli. She might even see Glen watching her through the window. Maybe Michael was in there too. Maybe they were both looking out at her, pitying her for being such a fool. Why had she let her brother talk her into this? She wanted to ask him to take her home again, but he was already at the door of the shop.