Chapter One
Faye pulled together a bouquet from the flower shop’s discarded stems. She laid out her choices on the rustic pine workbench behind the cash register and trimmed away the worst of the browning and dry petals.
Her mother, Jean, had requested flowers to take to dinner at the home of William Sullivan, the widower son of Faye’s father’s friend Kevin, who’d died the year before.
Faye remembered that funeral not only because Kevin Sullivan had been the man who’d welcomed them to America, who’d gotten her father, Thomas, his job at Bath Iron Works, but because one of Sullivans’ Boston daughters had specifically asked that there be no lilies, not one—an unusual request. So, they had made the family arrangements with daisies and stock and deterred mourners from lilies as well.
This dinner invitation, a bit out of the blue, was not a formal occasion but a thank-you, according to her father, for help he’d given William earlier that spring at the Sullivans’ rambling farmhouse.
The day’s discards would be good enough for the bouquet.
Likely, this William wouldn’t know the difference.
Faye could hardly tolerate the cinnamon smell of carnations, yet they were, by far, the flower she handled most. She had started working for the florist when she was still in high school, snipping thorns from roses, wiring tulip and daisy stems to keep them from going limp, making sweetheart corsages and boutonnieres for dances she herself didn’t attend.
When she graduated high school, the stooped flower man, Aldo, offered her a full-time job, told her she’d gained a woman’s eye for the new free-form style.
She took it as a compliment, though rarely did either of them have much opportunity to be creative.
Most of the roses were red or white. Occasionally, Aldo would order pink or yellow for variety.
The shop had a standing account with Saint Catherine’s for oversize altar arrangements every two weeks, with an extra refresh during Easter and Christmas.
They tended to split weddings and funerals with the florist on the other side of the bridge, and those flowers were almost always white—the Sullivans’ dreaded lilies, roses, white carnations.
Little imagination was called for when it came to affairs of the church.
Now that Faye was in the shop full-time, Aldo would often linger in his greenhouse or sit on the stool by the door with his beloved spaniel, Emily, who slept the days away in moving beams of sunlight.
Honestly, it didn’t bother her, having him around while she worked.
He would point a long finger at the flowers in the cooler, tell her when she’d chosen right or wrong, tell stories of his children who’d long moved away, a wife with legs like flower stems who left him for another man years ago.
Faye woke each day to the tang of fish, seaweed, and algae in the greening air.
Even in town, the sea clung to the bricks and steel and iron.
Everything here was about the ocean, the fish coming in on the day boats that cruised up to the docks and the bigger trawlers that would go out for weeks at a time.
When she was a little girl, she would taste icicles and snowmen, certain that even winter was made of fish and salt.
In the shop, Faye was surrounded by flowers, a shelter of petals, a garden where she felt safe.
Even the carnations were welcome sentinels.
She liked flower names and would often whisper them to herself when she worked, the satisfying sounds and repeating consonants rumbling off her tongue.
Rudbeckia and ranunculus, zinnia and cosmos, snapdragon and dahlia.
Words had not come easy to her, especially not important ones.
It had been more than a decade since she’d spoken her first words in America.
On the voyage from Ireland across a mercifully calm Atlantic, her father had turned two cane chairs so they could face one another in the tiny cabin.
He would hold her hands in his while her mother Jean wept on the bunk, her back turned.
“I know this is difficult. But we’ve done it now.
You must say it.” Thomas had begged over and over.
“Please. You must answer the question. For all our sakes. What is your name?”
She had felt the warmth of Thomas’s hands holding hers. “Fee. Ah,” she whispered, four days into their journey, five since the same sea had nearly taken her life.
“Yes, that’s a good girl,” Thomas said, exhaling his relief. “And? What else?”
“I am ten.”
Jean let out a wail, rolled back into her stupor.
On the long docks in County Cork, Jean had tried to turn them back. “What if we’re caught? They’ll send us to the jail.”
Thomas insisted. “What’s done is done. That’s all.”
“She’s tricked us.”
“The child? Nonsense,” Thomas rebuked. He lifted his chin skyward. “‘What could she have done, being what she is?’”
“Ack,” Jean scoffed. “Enough with your Yeats.”
“Besides,” he’d said. “This is on us all now.”
The leaving had been swift and stealth, by dark of night, away from eyes who would recognize the ruse afoot.
On deck for air, as they had watched Ireland slip away at Fastnet Light, Thomas had held Faye close while Jean had stared as if some grim spell had been broken and the curse upon her was clear.
When they’d disembarked in America, the magnificent green woman and her torch welcoming them to this foreign place, Faye spoke little except her name, “Fiadh,” and her age, “I am ten.” Yet every time she said it, Jean let out a cry until she could not tolerate the name aloud.
“Call her anything. But not that. Not anymore.”
“Faye then,” Thomas said.
It was settled.
The men who came to the shop to buy flowers for wives and girlfriends would ask Faye to write endearments on the card.
Honey, sweetheart, dearest, darling. She was no one’s dearest except maybe her father’s.
She could tell when flowers were a romantic gesture because the men seemed eager for her approval.
“What would you choose? What do you like?” She tried to keep those bouquets sweet and simple, to meet the shy gesture.
But there were other types, too, sheepish, careless men who came in looking for a peace offering after a late-night bender or a missed anniversary.
“Nothing’s too good for my gal,” they’d say.
Or “Do you have something to get me out of the doghouse?” She was often able to upsell them, and Aldo would wink when she moved the offender off carnations onto something more exotic.
Cads never wanted to keep a receipt as evidence and paid in cash since the woman who would receive the flowers often kept the checkbook.
If Aldo wasn’t in the shop, Faye would overcharge by a dollar and stuff the bill into her pocket.
She had heard the phrase “sin tax” and thought of the stolen money that way.
She kept these dollar bills in a coffee can in her bedroom under the eaves in the house on the cove.
Each time she added one, she counted them all, beads on a rosary.
Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. She told herself that someday she might use the money to right wrongs, though she was never sure where one would begin to reconcile a past like hers.
When she replaced the lid, she hoped the squirreling away might be enough to prove to some watching god that she was not all bad, that intention mattered even if no action came of it.
As far as she could recall, she’d never seen William Sullivan in the flower shop.
But that would make sense, him being a widower.
She’d heard the story of it, something about a young wife who’d died in childbirth along with the baby.
That morning over breakfast, the blueberry pie she baked already out of the oven and cooling on the sill, her father had said William didn’t discuss that tragedy so there would be no bringing it up at dinner.
“Leave the past in the past,” he’d said. “His and ours.”
Her mother had pushed away from the table with a sigh so deep it felt like the whole cottage sunk a foot into the ground. “Yes,” she’d said and climbed the stairs to her sewing room.
Now, Faye locked the door to the flower shop, the shabby bouquet wrapped and tucked into the crook of her arm. She hoped her mother wasn’t still doleful. Bad enough they were having dinner with a dour widower. They didn’t need to bring their own family ghosts.
That evening, Faye and her parents drove inland, the Buick turning and twisting past apple orchards and turnip fields, family farm stands where, in this buzzy, late-summer heat, they would sometimes stop for fresh produce and honey.
The blueberry pie rested on her mother’s lap, its crusty sweetness slathering the air around them, thick as jam.
When they pulled into the long drive up to the house, a man stepped out from the porch shadow into the lowering sun, his hand visoring his eyes.
This was a widower? His hair was high and red, and it swooped like a character’s in the funnies.
He wore a white shirt, black pants, suspenders.
When Jean opened the car door, he raised his hand in a casual wave and walked to greet them.
He was tall, over six feet, with a trim waist and the muscular forearms and biceps of a man who, like her father, did not work with his arms by his sides.
Thomas extended his hand to the man. “Will, thanks for having us. I think you remember my wife, Jean?”
“Of course, yes ma’am. Thanks for coming.” His voice was higher than Faye might have guessed, almost nasally.
“Our pleasure,” Jean said. “So nice to be on a farm again.”
“And this is our Faye. Probably you haven’t seen her since she was a girl. All grown up now,” Thomas added.