The Flower Arrangement

The Flower Arrangement by Ella Griffin Read Free Book Online Page A

Book: The Flower Arrangement by Ella Griffin Read Free Book Online
Authors: Ella Griffin
flower shop.”
    â€œA flower shop? I thought she was a graphic designer.”
    â€œShe was”—he feels his throat tighten with sadness—“but she lost a baby. He died when she was six months pregnant.” He has to swallow before he can say his name. “Ryan.”
    â€œShe was going to call him Ryan?” Margaret’s eyes widen.
    He has to look away. “I thought she’d never recover, to be honest. But the shop has been great for her. All those people and all those flowers.” Lara always loved flowers. Was always at his elbow in the garden, soaking up the Latin names for plants like a thirsty plant herself. “It’s that little place on Camden Street, you can’t miss it. It’s painted bloody pink. Blossom & Grow.”
    â€œThat rings a bell.” Margaret smiles down at the photograph for a long moment. “She’s lovely,” she says.
    Lara’s dark hair is as long as it was when she was a little girl, long enough to sit on. She still has the bony-shouldered gymnast’s body she had back then and the same watchful kindness in her dark eyes. Only her hands show her age, the skin dry and flaking from so much time in cold water, her fingers permanently nicked from thorns.
    â€œWhat about him?” Margaret touches the glass over Phil’s face with a fingertip.
    â€œDon’t talk to me about that fella. I put him through college. You know what he did with his degree? Pulled a bloody rickshaw. He’s a motorbike courier now. With an IQ of a hundred and forty-five.”
    â€œHe looks happy.”
    Phil was born happy. A C-section. He was pulled out of his mother’s belly like a rabbit out of a hat. The first thing he did was pee all over the pompous obstetrician, and when the nurse handed him to his father to hold, he was smiling. Ted half expected him to wink.
    â€œIs he married too?” Margaret asks.
    â€œAre you joking?” Ted snorts. “He’s had a string of girlfriends. It was like bloody Miss World at home till he moved out. A herd of leggy beauties trampling up and down the stairs, but he won’t settle. He’s twenty-bloody-seven. I don’t know what he’s waiting for.”
    Margaret puts the photograph back and swings her legs up onto the bed. She moves the oxygen tube out of the way and tucks her head into the space between his chin and his shoulder. “Don’t you?” she asks.
    And suddenly, he does. This is what his son is waiting for, the feeling of fitting perfectly against another person, like the parts of a two-piece jigsaw puzzle.
    He turns his face so he can press his lips against the crown of her head. “
Miluji tě
,” he whispers.
    â€œ
Miluji tě
too!” She rubs her nose against a patch of stubble on his Adam’s apple. “You missed a bit. But I like the aftershave.”
    â€œIt’s for you.”
    *   *   *
    â€œWhat’s for me, Dad?”
    He opens his mouth and pain slams into his chest like a juggernaut. He claws for the morphine pump, and by the time he can breathe again, he is too worn out to speak.
    â€œLook.” Lara holds a bunch of small flowers close to his face. His cheek touches the damp velvet of something that smells of the garden and rain. Pansies. The name comes from a French verb. To something, he thinks, but to what?
    Margaret used to press pansies. He’d pick up a book, years aftershe’d gone, and the wafer of a dried flower would slip out and slice open the scar she’d left like a scalpel. He feels for the pump again.
    â€œDad?” He hears his daughter’s voice from a long way off. She sounds frightened.
    â€œGone to sleep again,” his son says teasingly. “Lazy bugger!” His voice softens. “But you look like you haven’t slept for a week. Come on. Let me buy you a hospital canteen-achino, a.k.a. the world’s worst coffee. We’ll let him

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