I used to think Mother’s Day was the happiest day in a florist’s calendar. That was before I owned a little flower shop near Rathmines and learned how many different kinds of love come through a door holding exact change in one hand and grief in the other. Men came in red-faced, pretending they knew the difference between lilies and lisianthus. Children pointed at pink roses like they were choosing treasure. But the orders that stayed with me were the quiet ones, the ones written weeks in advance by husbands who would not be there to collect them.
The first was a man named Tom, from Harold’s Cross. He came in one February afternoon, rain running off his cap, and asked if I could deliver tulips to his wife on Mother’s Day. He said it in a very ordinary way, then added, “Only I might not be around by then.” He had cancer, though he didn’t use the word until the end. He chose yellow tulips because she said they made the kitchen look like morning. He paid in full and wrote the card himself. “To my Maura, from the three of us, always.” I remember thinking the three must mean their children, but when I delivered the flowers, Maura told me their only child had died as a baby. “The three of us,” she said, holding the card against her chest, “that was how he always counted.”
After that, I began to understand that flowers were not just gifts. Sometimes they were messages sent across impossible distances. Tom had asked me to send the tulips every Mother’s Day for as long as the money lasted. It lasted four years. On the fifth year, I sent them anyway. I told myself it was bad business, but I had never felt more certain about anything. Maura opened the door in her slippers, saw the yellow wrapping, and started crying before I said a word. She invited me in for tea, and we sat in her small kitchen while the tulips leaned in a jug by the window.
Word travels in strange ways in Dublin. A nurse from St. James’s heard about Tom’s flowers from Maura’s neighbour. Then a solicitor in Portobello sent a note on behalf of a dying client. Then a daughter in Australia rang the shop at four in the morning, forgetting the time difference, asking if I could bring daffodils to her mother in Phibsborough because her father had always done it. By the time I was forty-two, I had a list in the back of my order book called “Mother’s Day deliveries.” I never wrote “widows” beside it. It felt too blunt for what those women were. They were women who had been loved in advance.
Every Mother’s Day, I started before sunrise. I drove from Rathmines to Drumcondra, across to Glasnevin, down toward Ringsend, sometimes out as far as Clontarf if the van was behaving. The city looked softer at that hour, before the buses filled and the cafés opened. I passed the Grand Canal when it was still grey and quiet, and I often thought of all the lives hidden behind curtains, all the empty chairs at breakfast tables. I carried bouquets into red-brick terraces, apartment blocks, old cottages swallowed by new roads. Some women smiled as if they had been waiting all morning. Some were angry, because grief can arrive wearing anger’s coat. Some would not open the door, so I left the flowers carefully on the step with the card tucked dry underneath.
There was one delivery that nearly made me stop. Her name was Eileen, and she lived near Glasnevin Cemetery. Her husband, Frank, had arranged white freesias for her, her favourite, and asked me to deliver them the first Mother’s Day after he died. When I knocked, she answered with a face so tired it frightened me. She looked at the flowers and said, “No. Take them away.” I apologised and stepped back, but she followed me down the path, shaking. “He doesn’t get to do this,” she said. “He doesn’t get to leave and still be kind.”
I drove around the corner and parked. I sat there with the freesias on the passenger seat, feeling like I had trespassed into a private room. After ten minutes, I went back, not to persuade her, just to ask what she wanted done with them. She was sitting on the front step in her coat. She said Frank had died suddenly, just after they had an argument about selling the house. His last words to her had been ordinary and cross, something about a
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