Free The Flower Arrangement by Ella Griffin

would ever see?
    As they waited for the traffic lights to change so they could turn in to the hospital grounds, her dad turned to look at her and she saw, in the bright spring sunlight, how much the last four weeks had changed him. The skin on his face was too loose for the bones. The white baseball cap he wore at a jaunty angle didn’t hide his threadbare eyebrows. The too-bright yellow golf jumper bagged across his thin chest.
    â€œLara, I need you to do me a favor.”
    â€œAnything, Dad.”
    He exhaled slowly. “Will you think about trying for another baby?”
    This was what he wanted—something for her, not for him! He had spent a lifetime putting her and Phil first and he was still doing it, even now.
    She had to swallow the lump in her throat before she could answer.“I have been thinking about it already,” she said quietly. Since the day she’d held the newborn baby at the hospital, she thought about it all the time, but she had been too caught up in her dad’s illness to do more than think. “I’ll talk to Michael this weekend,” she said. “I promise.”
    â€œGood! Great!” Her dad started to laugh. “Jesus! If I’d known I could get my way like this, I’d have gotten cancer years ago.”
    â€œDad! That’s not funny!” But secretly Lara was glad that her dad was laughing, as the lights changed and she turned the car onto the long avenue that led up to the hospital.
    â€œThis time next year,” she said, “you could be driving me to the maternity hospital.”
    â€œI could!” he said, turning away quickly so that she couldn’t see his face. “Couldn’t I?”
    *   *   *
    Lara had asked Ciara to open the shop on Saturday and Phil had promised to call into the hospital. She left Michael sleeping and went downstairs to make breakfast. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d taken a Saturday morning off to spend with him.
    Looking back, it seemed like all they talked about the first three years of their marriage was getting pregnant. And after they lost the baby, it was as if they had run out of things to say.
    They still made love, occasionally, but from the very start, the desire for a child had been so strong that it overshadowed their desire for one another. When it was gone, what was left behind felt halfhearted and hollow.
    They had put up a wall between them, Lara could see that now. Whatever happened, this morning’s conversation would bring them closer.
    She put the coffee on to brew, then opened the back door and stepped outside in the flimsy silk nightdress she had not worn since her honeymoon. The small pergola that Michael had built was covered in loops of jasmine, and Lara’s flower beds were blazing with color. Blowsy white peonies, dusky purple irises with golden stripes, paleorange poppies with sooty centers. The first tea roses of the year were budding. Elinas, pink petals tipped with crimson, and the ivory Jeanne Moreaus that smelled faintly of lemons. Lara wanted to pick one and put it on the breakfast tray, but Michael hated cut flowers.
    She went back inside and began to set the tray. Her mother’s blue Venetian glass dish filled with raspberries. Orange juice in a white jug. A honey pot with a wooden dipper.
    Sunshine streamed in through the window, warming the terracotta tiles beneath her bare feet. She could not have cut flowers in the house so she had pictures of them instead. Two huge framed Georgia O’Keeffe poppy prints. An apron with a pattern of climbing roses. A wooden clock that Phil had given her with a pendulum in the shape of a red rose.
    She broke eggs into a bowl. The second one had a double yolk. If they weren’t pregnant within six months, she had decided, they’d try IVF. That would mean a chance of twins. She thought about the havoc, the challenge of juggling two babies and a full-time business, and could