Eight Perfect Hours by Lia Louis
Chapter Nine
Today, I have opened the website for the summit programme Sam works on three times. Some days it seems totally sweet and harmless, the idea of sending an email. Other times it feels like I might as well be outside his house in a false beard and sunglasses, wearing a hedge and holding an SLR camera. There are sixteen of them, half-written in my drafts folder. I’ve yet to send a single one of course, but sometimes, when he flits into my mind, I’m tempted to press send. I think of him now, too, as I tie these daffodils together with brown hessian twine, the odd plum-coloured tulip nestled in the spray, and remember the conversation we had about flowers during those eight hours in his car.
‘So, would you say your hobby is your job?’ I’d asked Sam beneath my blanket that night, and he’d said, ‘I guess it is, yeah. And what about you?’
‘I wish,’ I’d told him, then I’d shown him photos on my Instagram page, of the posies and bouquets I make for my clients’ reception desks and windows; finishing touches for when the rooms are clean and tidy: a burst of fresh colour, the scent of the season on the other side of the glass. ‘I buy my flowers from the supermarket at the end of the day, mostly,’ I told him, ‘the flowers nobody wants.’ And Sam smiled and said, ‘So, that officially makes you the flower rescuer, then.’
A tingle of something trickles down my spine at the sound of his voice in my head. Maybe that’s what I loved about those hours in the car with Sam. He asked me questions, he listened, and nothing was off the table. I didn’t have to worry about my words inadvertently hurting anyone. Not that talking about my weird and unexpected love of flowers hurts anyone, but it’s loaded, how much I wish I could do something more with them in my life. It started as something I did on a whim – planting bulbs in pots in our tiny concrete courtyard garden the summer after Daisy died. I think it helped, having something to nurture, something to look in on every day. Something that started as nothing, then burst into life and colour. If I didn’t care for the seeds, or the bulbs, if I wasn’t here any more, they’d die, or wouldn’t have the chance to become anything at all. From then, they became an unexpected comfort to me. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t wish they could be a bigger part of my life. To sign up for six-month-long floristry workshops, go to college, try my hand at an actual wedding bouquet that is carried down an aisle instead of put in a vase in the living room and posted online. But if I said any of that to Mum, she’d internalise it. See it as everything I’d do if it wasn’t for having to be here for her.
‘Going to make a camomile, I think.’ Mum comes into the kitchen now, her grey furry mule slippers scraping against the lino, her hand gripping the slate-grey countertop to support her. ‘Took me a bloody age to get off to sleep last night – oh. They’re pretty, darling. Who’re they for?’
‘Jetson’s,’ I say. ‘They’re all on a team-building day tomorrow so I’m going to clean there in the morning. Candice loves daffodils.’
‘The receptionist girl?’
I nod.
Mum smiles, the creases by her eyes like doodles of bare branches. ‘They don’t deserve you,’ she says. ‘They hire a cleaner and get a bloody angel.’
‘They expect it now,’ I say. ‘They get excited, to see what I bring.’
I leave out the part about Candice and Steve asking to book me as their wedding florist months ago, and how it took absolutely everything inside of me to turn it down. But they’re getting married in Edinburgh, which is three hundred and eighty-six miles away (I of course, counted and counted again, to be sure) and it just isn’t doable. With Ian not next door any more, and Dilly on tour with his band living in the back of some sweaty old van, I don’t have anyone to keep checking in for a day or two. One day I hope it’ll be different. But until then, making up little bouquets at my kitchen table will have to do. Big things, I hope, might happen someday, but it’s the little things that are important, isn’t it? They keep us grounded. The little things are the things we miss the most when normality is turned on its head.
Mum yawns, the kettle boiling and clicking off, steam rising under the kitchen cupboards like a mushroom cloud. ‘Dilly said he should be popping home next week,’ she says, ‘for a few days. Says he’s made quite a bit doing the circuit up North.’
‘Let’s hope so,’ I say. ‘Last time Dilly said that, that club owner paid him in meat. Not sure the council accept pork chops and beef sausages as payment for council tax these days.’
Mum laughs, moving a dainty hand flat to her stomach as she waits for the bag to brew in her cup. Sometimes I look at Mum and I can hardly believe her stomach was where I began. Mum is small – petite, is what the clothes shops call it. When she was a performer – a singer, and a truly brilliant one at that – I’d watch her on the stage of holiday parks as a kid, in awe. Everything she wore hung and clung perfectly, and her neat, pixie features under the stage lights made her look like some sort of fifties Hollywood star. Dilly is the same as Mum. Pretty-featured, and lean, despite the fact he eats as if he has a stomach hiding in every limb and consumes entire rotisserie chickens while the rest of us manage a sandwich. I’m not like either of them. I take after Dad. I never really knew him, but I’ve seen photos, have the odd, fuzzy memory of him when Dilly was a baby. He’s tall like me. Curly-haired, like me. When I was a kid, I’d dream of suddenly hearing from him, like they do in movies, that he’d have a perfect reason for his absence and it would all suddenly make sense, and a perfect fix would be revealed. I’d imagine both of us walking along, our wild curls bouncing in unison. But you learn as you get older and wiser, that some people just aren’t meant to be in your life. It just doesn’t work, even if on paper, in theory, it should. It just is the way it is. Mum has always been enough for Dilly and me, anyway. A whole village in one small person. Well, that’s who she was, anyway, until the stroke.
‘Money’s really tight, Noelle.’ Mum’s words pierce my thoughts.
‘What? How do you mean?’
Money is always tight for us. We’ve always had to budget, to tick off the bills as they’re paid on the list on the fridge, to plan ahead for anything we want to buy that isn’t essential. It’s all we’ve ever known.
‘Just – well, I didn’t realise that Dilly’s credit card bill still has six fifty on it,’ says Mum. ‘And the monthly payments are almost double what I thought.’
What?And I want to say it, let it blurt from my mouth like I usually do, but I don’t with Mum. Because I skirt round her like she is brittle glass, as if the slightest tremor can crack her. And I see now, being close to her, that her usually pink, religiously moisturised skin is grey. She looks tired.
‘He said he’d send money back,’ Mum carries on. ‘From the gigging.’
‘And he hasn’t.’
‘I’m sure he’ll bring some with him, Noelle,’ says Mum, her eyes wide and eager, as if to sell it to me. Dilly. Her baby. So like her, in looks, in dreams, in ambition, in musical flair. ‘But it’s just – until then.’ And in case he doesn’t, I think.
‘I’ll speak to him,’ I say. And I want to say so much more. Because every day, I hope Mum will say the words, admit she needs help – counselling, the group therapy, a doctor suggested once – admit she misses who she used to be, before she shrunk herself so small. But I don’t. Because I understand more than anyone. And things could be so much worse. I’m here. I have my family. I have this home. And that is lucky. Luckier than so many. Luckier than where I could’ve ended up, back then …
‘We’ll be OK,’ I say, and I think I convince her. I’m just not sure I’ve convinced myself.
Text message:Hey Nell. Was nice seeing you the other day. Let me know if you wanna grab that coffee :) You can catch me on my new number. 07882 171 7712 x