The Art of Arranging Flowers

THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) LLC

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

USA • Canada • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China

penguin.com

A Penguin Random House Company

This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

Copyright © 2014 by Lynne Hinton.

“Readers Guide” copyright © 2014 by Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

BERKLEY® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

The “B” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-14645-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Branard, Lynne.

The art of arranging flowers / Lynne Branard.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-425-27271-8 (pbk.)

1. Florists—Fiction. 2. Single women—Fiction. 3. Flower arrangement—Fiction. 4. Flower language—Fiction. 5. Community life—Fiction. 6. Psychological fiction. 7. Washington (State)—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3602.R34485A37 2014

813'.6—dc23

2014001466

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Berkley trade paperback edition / June 2014

Cover photo by Thinkstock.

Cover design by Lesley Worrell.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

To Sally McMillan,

midwife of all my stories, for the calm, easy way you deliver bad news

and the joyful, delighted way you share the good.

For standing with me, for encouraging me,

for always caring about what happens to me,

to my loved ones, and to my work.

You are a brave and beautiful woman

and I am deeply, deeply honored to call you my friend.

I want to unfold. I don't want to stay folded anywhere,

because where I am folded, there I am a lie.

—RILKE

D
AISY
was not crazy. At least not like they said. She wasn't unstable or paranoid. She wasn't dissociative or delusional, nor did she ever display homicidal tendencies. She didn't impose some means of self-mutilation or harbor a borderline personality. She did not require restraints or group therapy and she never intended harm. She took her meds and she was fine. She was not crazy.

The day she died, that cold gray day when I withdrew into myself, that day I cleaned the house from top to bottom, wiped down every wall, emptied every trash can and discarded most of my clothes, that day when I scrubbed and mopped and threw away the things of no matter, closed the curtains in the front room, unplugged all the clocks and disconnected my phone, put on my grandmother's only black suit, changed the sheets, and lay down on the bed, I was the one who was crazy. I was the one who should have caused everyone worry. I was the one who should have been locked up and tended to. I was the one who should have been restrained and drugged and analyzed, because unlike my beautiful and gentle sister, I meant harm to everything alive and breathing.

I meant harm to my colleagues and to my neighbors, to the doctor who could not bring himself to say she was dead but rather mumbled to me about some deleterious psychosis and charted in his notes the date and time that she “expired.” I meant harm to the chaplain who spoke of death as if it were merely waking up from a troublesome night of sleep, the librarian who wanted to fill my arms with books about grief and loss, the church lady who left loaves of bread and tins of cookies at my door, the mailman who kept bringing bills and cards and form letters from magazines for trial subscriptions, the children laughing as they passed by on the street, the birds that would not stop singing, the nurse who called to tell me I left my coat in the waiting room, and all the people watching as I entered and exited her room without saying a single word, shedding a single tear, asking a single question. I hated them all, and I meant harm to every one of them.

But of course, they never knew they were in danger. They never perceived that I could manage such evil, was capable of such heinous, horrible desires. They never asked. And if they had, they would have discovered that the harm I meant for everyone else was secondary to the harm I meant for myself. Mostly, I just wanted to die with Daisy. I wanted to be done with this life of come-and-go mothers and missing fathers. I wanted out of this homeless existence. I wanted to be dead just like my sister. And for a long time I was. It was just that no one knew. I took a leave of absence from law school, stayed in bed, ate only what was left in kitchen cabinets and at the door of my apartment.

I was crazy. I was broken. I was dead.

And then, one day I wasn't. It took months and it took grace and it took some unexpected slight shift of sadness that slipped just enough, just barely enough to make room for beauty. And once it happened, once I saw it happen, I got up from bed and I went out to the corner market for milk and chocolate bars and I decided to live.

Now I am alive and breathing and mostly back together, damaged but still “strong in the broken places,” as Hemingway would say.

When people first asked me about my business venture, about why I do what I do, how I switched from being a student of law to a florist, I used to shake my head, look around at where I was standing, where they were asking, and I would say, “The flowers saved me.”

Of course, that is never the answer anyone expects to hear. It's an explanation that's not deemed acceptable. Most people don't understand a relationship with plants, a love of stalks and blooms, the art of arranging flowers, and most people never heard about my sister's death and my coming back to life.

I cannot fully tell the story of being pulled out of bed one dawn in early spring by the sight of sharp, verdant leaves of ivy: sharp, verdant leaves that were alive and somehow creeping out of a small pot, motioning me to the window. I cannot explain the burst of color, the brightest blue of the hydrangea bush, so bright it hurt my eyes, the tip of the tiniest pink crocus shadowed by slender blades of grass. I can't articulate how I felt about the yellow monkeyflower, the sweet pea and the hollyhock, or how I was saved by the soft petals of the orange rose, the color so elegant, so masterful, it literally forced breath back into my body.

I used to try to explain about my death and resurrection when I was asked in innocence or passing why I became a florist, but I soon learned it is too much of a story. It is too intimate a portrait of loss, and most folks don't want to hear of deep longings, of grief being soothed by beauty. So I never tell that story even when I'm asked how I survived Daisy's death. I never say that I owe flowers my life and that I am simply giving back to the source of my salvation. I never say that I grow, select, arrange, and sell flowers because I now belong to them and because it is my way to honor them. They snatched me from the jaws of death and set me back on the path of life.

I just mention the community college courses in floral arrangements and the chance meeting of the former owner of the florist shop in the small Washington town near my mother's home place. I just explain about the little bit of money I had to invest and that flowers are easier to understand than people. I just say that as odd as it sounds, at the age of twenty-five, I discovered, suddenly and miraculously, that I have a gift for creating bouquets.

And of course, with that, they smile and nod and show a measure of appreciation and then ask if the price quoted online includes delivery. That's really all they want to know of a life like mine anyway, and really, that's all I should be willing to share.

And so, every morning for twenty years, I have risen and taken my place behind a counter, near a large refrigerated storage room known as the cooler, the smells of life and death mingled and waiting in every molecule of space, the deep and bright blooms from gardens near and far flashing all around, and I take in the deepest breath, holding it, closing my eyes, opening them at the moment I exhale, and I think of the magic of it all, the serendipitous magic of how a thing like grief can crack a heart wide open and how color and light, stemmed and covered in leaves, can knit it back together.

That is the real truth of who I am and what I do, but most people here in Creekside don't know anything about that. All they know is that I arrived and occupied Sam Jenkins's place just before they put in the stoplight at the intersection of Main and Fifth streets. They know I keep a file on everyone, remembering dates and favorite flowers.

They know my bouquets last longer and are cheaper than the flowers they order off the Internet. They know I have some knowledge of herbs and remedies and that I can take what they tell me and satisfy their desire of expression.

They know I live alone with my dog, Clementine, ride my bike or walk to work, have a van for deliveries.

They know my name is Ruby Jewell, that I'm Peaches Johnson Jewell's oldest child, Claudette and Wynon's only living granddaughter, and that I own the Flower Shoppe.