I run a small flower shop off the North Circular Road, not far from Phibsborough, the sort of place people pass without noticing unless they need carnations for a school play, lilies for a funeral, or something bright because they’ve run out of words. My mother started it in 1989, and when she died, I kept her handwritten order book, even though everything had gone digital. She said some names deserved ink.
The first Mother’s Day after she passed, I found a page at the back of the book with eight names written under the heading, “Sunday women.” Beside each name was an address, a favourite flower, and a note. Mrs Keogh, Cabra, yellow roses, no baby’s breath. Mrs Hennessy, Marino, tulips if possible, hates fuss. Mrs Byrne, Ringsend, anything blue. I thought they were old standing orders, but there was no payment information, no card message, nothing to charge. Just names.
I nearly ignored it. Mother’s Day is our busiest morning, and grief does not make the phone ring any less. But then I saw my mother’s writing at the bottom of the page: “Deliver before noon. Do not mention me.” So I made the bouquets myself, eight small ones, nothing grand, and drove around Dublin in my old van while the city was still half asleep and smelling of rain.
The first door was in Cabra. Mrs Keogh opened it wearing a cardigan buttoned wrong, her hair pinned up loosely. She looked at the yellow roses and then at me as if I’d brought back a person rather than flowers. “He never forgot,” she said. I didn’t know who she meant, so I just nodded. She touched one rose with two fingers and smiled in a way that made me look down at my shoes.
By the fourth house, I understood. These were widows my mother had quietly kept on a list. Their husbands had once ordered flowers from our shop every Mother’s Day. When the husbands died, the flowers stopped coming, but my mother had continued sending them anyway. No invoice. No signature. Just a knock on the door before lunch, so the day would not arrive empty-handed.
The last delivery was to a flat near Ringsend. Mrs Byrne took the blue irises and asked if I’d come in for tea. I said I had more work to do, which was true, but not the whole truth. I was afraid I’d cry in front of a stranger. She must have seen it because she said, “Your mother used to stand right there and tell me the flowers were from himself. I knew they weren’t, of course. But I let her say it.”
I asked why she never told my mother to stop. Mrs Byrne looked past me toward the river, where the morning light was sitting pale on the water. “Because some kindnesses are not meant to be corrected,” she said. “They’re meant to be received.”
That sentence followed me back to the shop. All day, men and women came in flustered and guilty, asking for “something nice for Mam,” and I tied ribbons, trimmed stems, and smiled when I was supposed to. But underneath it all I was thinking of my mother driving the same roads, year after year, carrying flowers into quiet kitchens where a chair stayed empty and the kettle still boiled for two out of habit.
The next year, I almost stopped. Money was tight. Rent had gone up, suppliers had gone up, and sentiment does not pay electricity bills. I told myself my mother had made her gesture, and I had honoured it once. That should have been enough. Then, two weeks before Mother
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