Baby’s Breath by Leanne Simmons

Peggy Garrett must have been glad that Geary’s had given up on the old way and got a ramp fitted. For years I’d watched her lump poor Jim up the step, the wheels catching on the threshold, before she’d lean forward to see to him, like a magpie claiming a crust. She, always in black with her wispy hair that had turned white the night of the accident.

“You’ll be in at the deep end today,” said Mrs Keane, unbolting the shop door the morning before the funeral and turning the sign over to open. “Aoife’s after breaking a tooth, so you’ll have to make a start on the flowers for the Garretts on your own.” Unlike the rest of the town, bar Jim, I wasn’t attending. I hadn’t been long at my apprenticeship with Mrs Keane and was loath to ask her for the time off; there was always work to be done in a florist’s. Besides, no one knew about Liam and me anyway.

Some said it was because the cinema closed, leaving nothing for the young ones to do. But we were wild as sky that summer, fired by freedom and the dusty lanes of life stretching out before us. If people had known about us, I might have been there that day, at the lake, and I wonder if I had, would things have been different? Would Liam still have loped into the water after Jim, or would I have kept him in the shadow of the willows, with me, away from the water’s edge?

I took delivery of the blooms. Set them in their boxes in the cool of the back room. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Peggy, who was at the hospital twenty-four seven waiting for news on Jim, or Michael, who, as man of the house, had no notion of what he’d call women’s things, but whoever had chosen had chosen well. Milk-white roses for remembrance. Deep-blue hyacinths, the colour of sorrow and longing. I remember the sugar-sweet scent rising when I lifted the kraft paper protecting them.

Peggy must be glad of the ramp on the way in, but less on the way out. She has to quicken her pace to keep up with the wheels turning, her hand hovering over the brake. Jim doesn’t notice, his head half-cocked with a belly full of eggs and rashers. I often wonder what it’s been like for her all these years, caring for Jim, who, like me, never married. How it was when Michael finally passed, though she’d lost him long ago to hours walking the high fields, or looking on Liam’s grave, staunch as a robin standing over a stash of suet.

Everyone, even Mrs Keane, liked the flowers. I was surprised, but no one mentioned the baby’s breath I’d woven in, because when the hearse passed by the shop, and I saw it, fluttering over Liam’s coffin, I thought it was the most beautiful and pure thing I’d ever seen.

Leanne Simmons

Image by Annette from Pixabay – white roses and babies breath.