Roses that lasted never had much scent, but the jasmine and clematis made up for it, their honeyed fragrance mingling in a gorgeously strong perfume. She’d cut the snowberry and clematis from her own garden, and the jasmine and maidenhair fern from Rhys’s, which meant that she’d got all the greenery she’d needed, more than anybody would have had for sale in the markets. The arrangements were huge, drooping, and extravagant, and they looked as little like something from a floral service as an Indian banquet did from her mother’s Sunday dinner of roast chicken and two veg.
If you were the same as everybody else, why would anybody choose you? Besides, she needed to express herself, to allow herself this burst of sensuality, and to offer it up to her clients like a gift. She was taking a chance again, as usual, as always, because otherwise, what was the point of having your own business?
Paying the mortgage, that was what. Doing the flowers as distinctively and as high-end as she could possibly manage was a business decision, that was all. She needed to be making good decisions now, because the rain had started bucketing down on her way home from taking Rhys to the airport three days ago, like having him wrenched from her was as bad as it felt, and it had kept doing it in fits and starts ever since. The bucket in her bedroom was filling faster, she could swear. There were probably leaks she couldn’t see, drenching her Pink Batts, filling her crawl space with mold, and winter was coming. She needed to buy the van before she did the roof, but she couldn’t.
She set her palms on the table and breathed in and out as the panic tried to set in. She’d wait two weeks, after another couple rounds of payments had come in, and do the roof on a credit card, that was all, so she had enough for the down payment on the van. And she’d do an extra arrangement for Jenna, she decided, and deliver it today. A surprise. Two of the Supreme subscriptions and one of the Deluxes had been from WAGs. She owed Jenna for that, and besides, you rewarded your customers for referrals.
The only solution to money worries was to keep moving. That was the point of owning your own business: that you could always do more. You didn’t have to ask for more hours, then figure out how to get enough daycare to cover them. You could just spend more hours. Hours of shoving pink flyers under windscreen wipers in the carparks of day spas, along side streets in tony Parnell and fashionable Ponsonby, in an effort that might yield eighty dollars extra that week for ten hours of trudging, but she’d needed that eighty dollars, and she hadn’t had money for ads.
She wasn’t sticking flyers under windscreens anymore, and that was progress. She was good. She was fine. She put together Jenna’s arrangement, and was adding some extra roses to it when her phone rang.
“Zora’s Florals,” she said, because she couldn’t identify the caller.
“Hi,” a woman’s voice said at the other end. “I’m calling from Metalcrafters Roofing.”
“Sorry,” Zora said. “Not interested.” She’d checked them out already. In fact, she’d had them out to give an estimate six months ago. They were the best, especially if you went with a metal roof, but they were too pricey.
“It’ll last you at least twice as long,” the bloke had said. “Well worth it on a per-year basis. Barely more than half the cost, looked at like that. The resale value on a metal roof is eighty-five percent. Which means spending four thousand, and getting . . .” He’d hauled out a calculator, and Zora had thought, Isaiah could have done it in his head by now. Of course, she couldn’t have, but she wasn’t selling roofs. “Thirty-four hundred back when you sell,” he said. “Approximately. Very cost-effective on a per-year basis, metal roofing.”
Which was all very well and good, unless you couldn’t afford to think of it on a per-year basis. If you had to think of it on a how-much-can-I-spend-now-oh-my-God-not-nearly-that-much basis.
Now, she said, “I know I asked for an estimate. I told your representative when he rang up, though, that it was out of my price range.” That should get rid of the caller fast.
A short silence on the other end, and she pulled guard petals off roses and didn’t hang up, because they had given her that estimate. And maybe they were having a thirty-percent-off sale. A woman could dream.
“I’m a bit confused,” the voice finally said. “I’m calling to select colors and schedule your install. We’d like to start on Wednesday, since there should be a break in the weather. Two or three days, and we’re done. I gather next week is convenient for you, as you’ll be away from home anyway.”
“I think there’s been a mistake,” Zora said. “I don’t have the money to install a new roof, period, at the moment, and I don’t have the money to install a metal roof ever.”
“Ah,” the woman said. “Huh. We have a credit card on file, so that’s all taken care of. Hubby didn’t let you know, maybe? Or maybe it was meant to be a surprise?”
Who gave a new roof to somebody as a surprise? Anything less of a surprise would be hard to imagine. A bit difficult to ignore a team of blokes taking the cover off from over your head.
“Whose credit card?” she asked. Only one answer, really. Her parents. She should maintain her independence, probably. Pity she wanted a metal roof so badly. In mid-gray. Was it very bad if you accepted a roof? Did it give them room to criticize her life? She’d have to ask Hayden. She was very much afraid that the answer to that was “Yes.”
“Ah . . .” There was some rustling of paper. “Rhys Fletcher. That Rhys Fletcher? Wait. Zora Fletcher. Sorry. Your—brother? was, ah, always a favorite of mine. Nice of him to shout you a new roof.”
Rhys got the call when he was in the hotel gym with Finn. Or, rather, he realized he’d missed the call, and rang Zora back.
She didn’t bother saying hello. She said, “I’m driving. I’m probably going to crash now.”
He said, “What? Put the phone down.”
“Nah. You’re on speaker. Rhys.” She was laughing. He thought. Sort of. “I’m gobsmacked. I’m also telling you no. You can’t buy me a roof.”
“Why shouldn’t I buy you a roof? You need a roof. Isaiah told me so.”
“When?”
“First night, in the van. What does it matter when?”
“When you sleep with a woman,” Zora said, in a too-reasonable tone that promised objections coming up, “you send her flowers. It’s a lovely gift. A normal gift. A gift a woman knows how to interpret. It says, ‘I would like to continue this relationship, because I find you attractive.’ Which would be why it’s customary.”
“I couldn’t send you flowers, though, could I? You’re a florist. I call that unreasonable. What do today’s look like, by the way? You could send me a photo.”
“Today’s what? Flowers? You do not want to see a photo of my flowers. And how do you know I’m doing them today?”
“It’s Friday. Residential deliveries are on Friday. And yeh, I do want to see a photo of your flowers. Your flowers are dead sexy, and my work laptop’s got some sort of filter on, so I can’t get the good porn. I’m getting desperate here.”
Finn was shaking his head, then stacking weights on the Universal machine, lying down on his back, and beginning to do chest presses, like a bloke who was saying, “She isn’t going to let you buy her a new roof after one night.” Which was what he had said, two days ago.
Zora made a noise, sort of a muffled scream, like it was coming from behind clenched teeth. “Earrings,” she said. “Pearl studs. There you are. Romantic. Extravagant. Probably still well and truly over the top. Definitely well and truly over the top.”
“Insulting,” he said. He was beginning to enjoy this.
“Pardon bloody me? Insulting how? I just demanded jewelry.” She was either still narky, or she was laughing. Possibly both.
He climbed onto a leg press, adjusted the weights, and started in. “Pearl studs? That’s what you call ‘jewelry?’ I can do better. You should want better.”
She said, “What are you doing? Why are you breathing hard?”
“Because I’m pleasuring myself. A
rguing with you does that to me. Or because I’m doing a bit of strength training. Take your pick.”
“Right,” she said. “Revisiting the roof idea. You don’t think that’s a bit excessive? A metal roof is four thousand dollars, even on my tiny place. I got an estimate.”
“Really? They told me five thousand.” He added another twenty Kg’s of weight to the stack and started his second set. “Could be I went for higher quality, of course.”
“Rhys,” she said helplessly. “No.”
“On the other hand,” he said, “the thing I wanted to buy you was nine thousand five hundred. You could say that you were on a forty-percent discount. I won’t say it, though. Crass, probably.”
“There are letters all over the place to relationship gurus,” she said. “With answers saying that early gift-giving is inappropriate. Red flag, they say.”
“Mm. Are we nearly done here? Because this is a bit dull, and the chest press is calling my name. I could say that’s for reasons of fitness, but the truth is that I’d like to come home looking jacked. I have a feeling I might get lucky if I do. How about if we agree that this would be a rubbish romantic gift, so I must be doing it for some other reason? We could say that you don’t owe me anything, and that all I’m doing is making sure my daughter and nephew aren’t sitting around all winter in a leaky, moldy house. Casey could get asthma. What kind of shape must those Pink Batts be in now?”
She said, “How do you know that? I was just thinking that.”
“Because I’m brilliant.” His voice softened. Finn might be listening, and he might not. He didn’t care. “Or because I’ve thought about it, and Finn told me that you told Jenna that your roof was leaking. Come on, baby. Let me do this for you. Make me happy. It’s one tiny little thing.”
“It’s five thousand dollars.”
“The bunny hutch was nearly a thousand.”
He didn’t hear anything for a long minute. “You spent a thousand . . . dollars . . . on a bunny hutch.”
“Very easy to clean. Molded plastic. And there was the walk-in run, since Casey wasn’t going to have the rabbits in the house. My plans have had a way of not quite working out lately. The rabbits haven’t chewed through the electric cords yet and started any fires, I guess, because you would’ve told me.” He switched to leg curls and started working, which might muffle his voice a bit, as he was lying face-down, but too bad. A man couldn’t neglect his workout, not if he wanted a woman to touch him all over. And kiss him there, too, possibly. She’d seemed, that first time, like she’d wanted to undress him. He wanted to know if it were true.
Eight more days.
“You are insane,” she said.
“I could be. Better take advantage of it.”
“I have to . . . deliver these flowers. I . . . You’re . . . I’ll talk to you later.”
She hung up on him again. On purpose this time.
He should be upset about that.
Nah.
Hayden turned up on Wednesday evening.
“I’m here, and I brought kebabs,” he called into the strange, echoing space that was a house being re-roofed. “Although I could ask,” he said when Zora came around the corner from the lounge, “why you’re here. When am I going to get to see this flash house of Rhys’s?”
“I wanted to make sure everything was buttoned up tight,” she said, “and covered, of course, in case it does rain overnight.” She took the food bag from him and set it on the plastic covering the kitchen benchtops, started opening boxes, and said, “Mm.”
Isaiah skidded into the room, with Casey behind him. “Hey, mate,” Hayden said, ruffling Isaiah’s hair, then offering Casey a high-five, which she returned with relish.
“We’re getting a much better roof than Mum planned,” Isaiah informed him. “It costs almost two times as much, but it lasts more than two times as long, so that’s less expensive, really, if you live in your house for fifty years. It’s made out of metal.”
“I see,” Hayden said. “Where are we eating?”
“Lounge,” Zora said. “Coffee table.” Which meant, “On top of a different sheet of plastic.”
“How did this happen, then?” Hayden asked Zora, when they were sitting on the floor and he’d begun tackling his lamb kebab. “I thought you couldn’t afford to do your roof yet. Now you’re doing a metal one? Business that good?”
She wished she hadn’t shared quite so much with him. “No,” she said. “Rhys is doing it, as Casey’s here all the time. And Isaiah, of course.”
“Wait,” Hayden said, arrested in the midst of lamb pursuit. “Rhys is buying you a new roof?”
“Yes,” Isaiah said. “Because he probably makes about five times as much as my mum does. Maybe ten times. She makes about fifty thousand dollars a year, once you take out how much she spends on the van and flowers and things. I don’t know how much Uncle Rhys makes, but it’s probably heaps more.”
“Which isn’t our business,” Zora hurried to say. “And doesn’t obligate Uncle Rhys to buy us anything, much less a roof. That isn’t how money works. Also, love, we don’t talk about how much money people make, remember?”
“Except he wanted to buy us a roof,” Isaiah said. “He said so. You can do it if you want to. It was a present. Presents are OK. And it’s Uncle Hayden. You can talk about how much money in your family.”
“Not in your family, either,” Zora said. She wasn’t looking at Hayden. She couldn’t. She got up and went back to the kitchen to get her mail instead. Two days’ worth, since she hadn’t come inside yesterday at all, and had only come over to do her spa flowers. Rhys’s house was just so comfortable.
When she came back, Hayden said, “That’s a pretty good present. I thought men usually sent flowers.”
She wasn’t listening. She’d ripped open the envelope from BNZ, and now, she was looking at the letter inside, unable to make sense of it. She’d never had an account there. This was a mistake, surely. Had she been hacked?
She couldn’t get her breath. She needed to check her accounts now, but she couldn’t. Her computer was at Rhys’s. Oh. She could check on her phone. She stared at the few lines of text and fought the lightheadedness, the sudden panic.
“What is it?” Hayden asked. He picked up the ripped envelope where she’d set it on the coffee table. “BNZ. Addressed to Dylan. Is that still bothering you?”
“Is what bothering you, Mum?” Isaiah asked.
“Sometimes,” Hayden told him, “seeing the name of somebody you’ve lost takes you by surprise.”
“Oh,” Isaiah said, exchanging a dubious glance with Casey. “But you heard their name all the time when they were still alive, so why would it be different if they’re dead? Plus, Dad’s name is the same as Mum’s name.”
“I don’t know,” Hayden said. “Hard to say.”
“No,” Zora said. “It’s nothing. I’m fine.” She folded the paper up again, avoiding Hayden’s eye, and stuffed it back into the envelope. “Surprise, that’s all. Like you say.”
“Casey and me both have dead parents,” Isaiah announced. “That’s called being a half orphan. I read it in a book.”
“It is?” Casey asked. “A norphan is if you don’t have parents, though. Besides, I don’t think you can be half of something. You’re not half of a person.”
“You’re right,” Hayden said, when Zora didn’t answer. “There’s no such thing. You’re an orphan, or you’re not. You each have a parent who’s alive. Nobody here is an orphan.”
She didn’t have time for this, she thought the next morning. She had more than a day’s worth of accumulated paperwork and bookkeeping to do, and only today to do it. Tomorrow was residential deliveries, then that wedding on Saturday, and then, on Sunday afternoon, Rhys was coming home. Paperwork was her least favorite thing, and if she didn’t schedule it, it didn’t happen. You couldn’t run a business like that.
She was standing in front of the BNZ branch anyway, clutching a manila envelope and shifting fro
m foot to foot. Five minutes to nine, and everybody was at their desk or behind the counter inside, so why couldn’t they open up?
Finally, a thirtyish woman in a black pantsuit came forward, unlocked a padlock, then unwound a chain between the handles before she pushed the door open and told Zora, “Come in.”
Zora said, “I need to talk to somebody in, ah . . . customer service. A banker. Not a teller.”
The woman said, “What is this about?” She was eyeing Zora a bit askance. She probably looked wild-eyed. Possibly like a bank robber. It couldn’t be her clothes. She’d dressed in her most businesslike attire for this, which happened to be the blue dress she’d worn to go out with Rhys. She was short on businesslike attire. Also date attire. She was short, in fact, on everything but “Arrange flowers attire,” which trended distinctly in the shorts and yoga-pants direction.
Never mind. She sat in a visitor’s chair, handed over the letter, and waited some more.
The woman scrutinized the letter, then handed it back and said, “I’m afraid the account holder would have to come in himself.”
“He can’t exactly do that,” Zora said, “as he’s been dead for two years. I’m his widow. I’m also his sole beneficiary.”
“Do you have paperwork showing that?” the woman asked.
“Trust me,” Zora said. “I have paperwork showing everything.”
She folded the letter up again and put it away. She didn’t have to look. She knew what it said.
Dear Customer,
This letter is to inform you that the account referenced above will be deemed dormant due to inactivity in sixty (60) days, as three years have elapsed since the last activity on the account. We have attempted without success to contact you at the email address and telephone number listed in conjunction with the account. If we do not hear from you within sixty days, your account will be deemed dormant, and additional service charges will apply.
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