Ruby laughed. “You didn’t even want that stupid cat to be around the shop. It would have starved if Clinton hadn’t fed the poor thing. I agree that Goldie is a poor name, but if that’s what Anna Rose wants to call her, then it is what it is.”
Taryn put a forkful of mashed potatoes in her mouth, and she felt Clinton’s knee nudge hers. His touch set off another volley of sparkseven warmer than the ones she had experienced before, but she wasn’t willing to admit that she was attracted to him. They were friends, and if she spoiled that, then it’d ruin both things at the flower shop and with their new baby visitor. She glanced over at him, and he gave her a sly wink.
The sparks can fly around like Fourth of July fireworks, and I’m going to ignore them,she thought, but when he reached for the salt and his shoulder touched hers, she had trouble sticking to her vow.
“This is so much fun. I’m having a great time,” he said out of the corner of his mouth. “I love a family like this. Mine has always been so stuffy.”
“You’re welcome to all you want of it.” She smiled and went back to eating.
“I’ll take all I can have,” he said.
Before them sat life in all its stages: Zoe as the baby, Taryn and her cousins and Clinton in the middle, and Ruby and Nana Irene in their golden years. Start to nearly finish around one table, making up a family—whether they were related by blood or not.
Yet the end of their time with Zoe would come when Rebecca had recovered and returned to Shamrock to take her away. Having seen Miz Leona in the casket brought home the fact that her grandmother—as active and sassy as she was—was not a spring chicken anymore. And those were Irene’s words, not Taryn’s.
Life is an emotional roller coaster,she thought.
“I didn’t really want to do all this now. It’s kind of depressing,” Taryn said as she unlocked the back door to the shop and flipped on the lights.
“Me too,” Anna Rose agreed. “Have y’all even looked at the long list of folks’ graves that they want us to put flowers on? It’s kind of depressing to think of so many of their family and friends already being gone.”
Jorja laid the list on the table and headed to the shelves where the artificial flowers were kept. “Looks like we’ve got half a dozen vase arrangements and a few more wreaths. Nana only wanted one tombstone saddle for Grandpa.”
“That means about four or five each, right?” Anna Rose gathered up a fistful of pink and yellow flowers. “I’ll do the two baby girls first.”
Clinton brought Zoe in and laid her in the playpen. “Poor little darlin’ is worn out from all the excitement at Irene’s place. She fell asleep on the way home and will probably take a long nap. I’ll get to work on the saddle for your grandfather’s grave. Irene told me as we were leaving that she wants it in red, white, and blue because he was a veteran. She just said to make the rest of them look pretty!”
“Daddy followed in his father’s footsteps,” Taryn said as she ran her finger down the list and decided to make a wreath for Ruby’s father. “Nana Irene said that she lived in fear every day that two uniformed military guys would come to her doorstep and tell her that he was missing in action or dead like they did when Grandpa died.”
“She never got over that happening with Grandpa,” Jorja said with a sigh.
Anna Rose wrapped a Styrofoam wreath in a wide pink ribbon and glued a bouquet of baby’s breath and tiny yellow rosebuds to it. “Can you imagine it? There she was, with three little kids to raise, and her husband wasn’t coming home.”
“When did they confirm that he was gone and not just MIA?” Clinton asked.
“About five years later,” Taryn answered. “They sent his body home from Vietnam, and she finally had a funeral and got a little bit of closure. She doesn’t talk about it much, but when I was a little girl, I’d see her holding his picture up to her heart.”
“How couldyougo into the military knowing that?” Jorja asked.
Taryn talked as she worked. “I wanted out of Shamrock. I didn’t like the idea of college, and it seemed like a better thing than flipping burgers.”
Taryn hadn’t thought about the fear that her grandmother must have faced over the years that her son and granddaughter had been in the military. Had Taryn’s mother worried about hearing that knock on the door? She tried to imagine how she would feel if Zoe came in during the last weeks of her senior year and told her that she would be joining the air force the day after graduation.
That’s crazy,the pesky voice in her head shouted.Zoe is not your child. You’ve only known her a few days, and she will be going back to her mother about the same time you leave Shamrock.
Taryn shook off the voice and kept working on the wreath. She had gone with her grandmother to the cemetery to put flowers on the graves just before she left for basic training, but she hadn’t been back since. She remembered the general area they were located in; the O’Reilly family was under a big shade tree, and the O’Malleys—Nana Irene’s mama and daddy and siblings—weren’t far away.
“Did y’all ever go help Nana Irene put flowers out?” she asked.
“Not me,” Anna Rose answered.
“I wasn’t here last year,” Clinton said.
Jorja shook her head. “Or me, either. Did you?”
“Yes, I did, and she told me the stories of each person as we scrubbed the tombstones and freshened up the grave sites,” Taryn said. “She and Grandpa got married a few weeks before he went off to the military. She got pregnant when he came home from basic and had my dad while Grandpa was in his training. She stayed right here and worked at the flower shop. That was back before she and Ruby pooled their money and bought the place. She wound up having three kids in less than five years and raised them right here in this shop—kind of like we’re doing with Zoe.”
Anna Rose finished the first small wreath and set it to the side. “Guess it was named right and was lucky in some ways. She had a job that let her bring her children to work, and later, she and Ruby could buy it.”
