The Flower Arrangement by Ella Griffin Page B

stared into the chaos, feeling as if she was looking into a mirror. One of the low-hanging bulbs had blown. Flattened delivery boxes that should have gone out with the recycling weeks ago were shoved onto the deep shelves that had been built tohold rows of clean jam jars. Unstable stacks of teetering vases stood here and there on the floor. They clinked and jingled as she stepped over them to get to the blocks of Oasis.
    What would happen to Blossom & Grow if she didn’t come back? she wondered, as she stood in the kitchen by the two huge shallow plastic basins, waiting for the feather-light foam to soak. As if in answer to her question, an odor of decay seeped through the doorway from the darkened shop.
    Senescence, she thought. A beautiful word for what happened to all living things as they progressed toward death. Petals fading, leaves falling, stems beginning to rot. It happened to some cut flowers fast—gerbera and irises and brassica—but it happened to all of them in the end, and now it was happening to Blossom & Grow. Lara’s job had been to keep it nourished for five years, but now it was beginning to die.
    She sloshed the water from the basins into the sink and carried the heavy, dripping Oasis upstairs. She set it on the workbench, then found her scalpel and began to cut the foam to fit the frame. She slotted it into place in sections, carefully, then smoothed it down with the palm of her hand and beveled the edges with a sharp knife. She cut thick blue ribbon to length and pinned it along the exposed edges. Then she set to work on the flowers and foliage. Carefully clipping the dark green heather she would use for the fretboard. Searching through the vases for flowers that were open to just the right degree, then cutting each stem on a diagonal to exactly one and a half inches long.
    It was after midnight by the time she began to insert the flowers. Slotting them in one by one at a downward angle so there would be no gaps in the dense tapestry of blue. Dusty hydrangeas pale as robins’ eggs. Delphiniums iridescent as butterfly wings. Cornflowers the hazy blue of the summer skies above the grave where the dead boy would be buried.
    Lara’s mother had chosen her own grave because it had a view of the sea. She had been buried there on a bitterly cold January day the year Lara turned thirteen. Lara remembered looking up and away from the horrible open mouth of the grave, at the gray sweep of the bay, theblack silhouettes of the Wicklow hills on the horizon. What did the view matter, she had thought, when her mother was not alive to see it?
    Her dad never brought Phil and Lara back to the graveyard. He had buried some of her mother’s things beneath a honeysuckle in the garden. A worn leather glove, a birthday card that she had written for each of them. The last photograph of the four of them together.
    There was a wisdom to what he had done; Lara saw it now. As the memory of her mother faded, the honeysuckle grew stronger. When Lara stood beneath it in summer, when it was in full bloom, her mother’s sweetness seemed to live on in the scent of the flowers.
    Her dad had always called her “your mother,” but in those last few weeks before he died, when he was dying, he had started saying her name. Margaret. He had said it with longing and surprise and sometimes with annoyance, as if she was in the room with him. Her name had been his last word. And hearing it was what made it possible for Lara to let him go. The thought that maybe, after so many years apart, her mother and father were finally together again.
    They had buried her dad on a beautiful summer’s day, six weeks ago. Sunshine pulling sequins and glitter from the sea, the hills dreamy and purple and green in the distance.
    â€œI hate this bloody place as much as Dad did,” Phil had whispered, putting his arms around Lara. She buried her face in his shoulder and closed her eyes so she did not have to look at her