“Would you keep it?’

“Well…” Luke started, “we actually picked—”

“Her name is Rose.”

“You all right, pet?” Tess asked again and reached across the table.

Iris came back from the memory. “Yes. Yes. I’m fine.”

*   *   *

Your life can change in a moment. In a moment you’re living or you’re dying. I’m afraid it’s not good news. Immediately after Tess left, Iris rang the Adoption Board in Dublin intending to explain her situation—all of it: Luke’s death; her upcoming callback to the Breast Clinic; Rosie alone in London and that she was coming to up to Dublin the following morning, but a recorded voice apologized. The office was closed. What was she thinking? It was nearly midnight.

That night she tossed and turned in the too-big bed. When she came down to make herself hot milk in the small hours she saw that one poppy, but only one, had dropped its petals on the granite counter.

Four

The next morning was Tuesday. Feeling the particular kind of heaviness that comes with no sleep (and a little too much wine), Iris boarded the train for Dublin at Limerick Station armed only with a gardening magazine and a bottle of sparkling water and the notion that what she was doing was the only option. Dressed in what Rose called her “uniform”—smart olive green trousers with a camel-colored cardigan twin set—she’d even put on eyeliner and brought her lipstick. Where she was going she wanted to make a good impression.

After twenty minutes the train left the outskirts of Limerick city and began its passage into the deep, green middle of the country, past the silver mines, into northern Tipperary, and into rich, horse-breeding farmland. Hedgerows of whitethorn blooming squared off green fields. She thumbed through Gardens Illustrated and read about treatments for a new strand of boxwood blight. She learned how applying cow dung to the base of plants would give the fungus plenty to think about. It was worth a try. She jotted that down on a scrap of paper. In another article she read about an organic gardener’s experiments with a homeopathic remedy called Helix tosta, made from crushed baked snail shells, to keep slugs at bay. Her blog readers, when she gets any, might like that.

When she arrived into Heuston Station she’d been feeling absurdly positive. The possibility of rescuing her boxwood and protecting her plants from slugs (and the birds from poison) lifted her heart. In a small thing there can be hope. She focused on the thought of saving the box hedge and for a time raked aside all the rest of it. She’d ask Tommy Ryan next time he was passing for a load of manure. Standing in the taxi queue, she imagined how much she would need for a ten-square meters. But the moment she entered the taxi and as it took her along the bus lane beside the quays heading toward O’Connell Bridge, and cars honked, she lost her sense of hope. As the taxi approached Trinity College her heart raced. The crowds along Dawson Street seemed to be racing, too, all on urgent missions of their own. Camera-laden tourists stood before the great oak doors to the college, snapping photos. Students jostled, rushing to end-of-term exams.

Iris asked the driver to let her out at the front gates. She paid, then walked slowly under the arch and out along the cobblestone path of the courtyard toward the bell tower straight ahead. She skirted its perimeter, remembering the myth that it was bad luck to walk beneath its dome. This she knew from her days as a student there. She’d planned to walk through the campus and exit right out onto Kildare Street but in choosing this path, she’d tempted fate. She knew it. Luke was everywhere, everywhere around her. His presence, like the ringing of the Trinity bell, was loud and clear and reverberated through her whole being. She nearly lost her footing on the cobbles when the clock rang noon. On a bench not far away she sat, laid her basket at her feet, and closed her eyes, feeling the vibrations of the chimes.

Iris had met Luke on a rainy afternoon when she was waiting for the 46A bus. Her first glimpse of him was walking, a long, grounded stride and sheltering under a black umbrella. He’d been heading down Pearse Street, toward the seafront to his home, he later told her. As she waited, herself umbrellaless, protecting her books from the heavy rain, a notebook slipped from her bundle onto the edge of the pavement, just as he was passing. In that instant while Iris considered how to retrieve her book without tumbling more books, Luke had stopped and snatched it up. Rainwater gathered quickly in the gutter. Years later when they told the story to Rose, Iris said Luke had bumped her accidentally on purpose, but Luke said Iris had dropped the book just as she saw him coming. “I think your mother imagined she was dropping a handkerchief.” And Rose laughed.

“Here you are,” Luke had said, shaking the book free, and, satisfied it wasn’t too wet, he’d landed it gingerly onto the pile she was holding. His smile intoxicated her.

“Thank you.”

“Waiting for a bus?”

“I am. Forty-six A. Going to Ranelagh.” Iris squared her books together. “You?”

“No,” he said without moving and holding the umbrella high enough to include her. “Trinity?”

“Ah-huh.” She nodded. “First year.”

“Me, too … but not first year.” He moved closer. It looked as if he was going to wait with her. Submerged under a sudden wave of warmth Iris was caught for words. Even though she was eighteen she was not very experienced with the currency of flirting.

“A rucksack might be a wise investment,” he continued, “if you’re going to be leaving home without an umbrella, that is. This is Dublin. You know the saying. We have four seasons: rain, rain, rain, rain.”

She considered his green eyes, gauging whether he had said this in good humor or good old Irish sarcasm. It was both. It was a trait she’d come to love—his self-effaced delivery of facts.

“I know. But I was rushing this morning. Lecture at nine. I overslept.”

His square face creased as he smiled. “I had company law this morning and I should have slept in.” The skin around his eyes was pale, thin, and freckled.

“Was it worth it?”

“What?”

“The lecture?”

“Oh. Yes…” she blurted. “‘The Wasteland.’”

He paused. Thought a moment. “Memory and desire … right?”

“Yes. Stirring dull roots with spring rain.”

“Impressive.” He smiled.

She blushed. “Not really. It’s the next line. Ask me to recite any more and you’ll see I belong at the back of the class.”

Luke was from the south side of the city near Sandymount Strand, where he lived with his elderly parents on Gilford Road, one block from the Irish Sea and half a mile from the Martello Tower of Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus. His parents, Agnes and Eugene Bowen, married late in life. They maintained a dental practice together. Like two bookends they supported his life, he’d always said. He later told Iris he never once took for granted the serenity of their life, nor their devotion to him. The sea air around Sandymount was like a tonic, he said, infusing tranquility into the Bowen house. It’d had been a charmed life, he knew.

When they got to know each other better, Luke showed Iris the old leather sofa in the front room where he studied every evening. His mother would bring him a cup of tea and a ham sandwich and slip quietly away. It was so much a part of the fabric of the workings of their life—mother and son—that neither needed to acknowledge her care nor his gratitude. “It just happened like clockwork,” he’d said, “like it was somehow always meant to be that way. Like it was ordained. That’s what I want one day, Iris.” On Saturdays when the dental practice was busy with fathers and teenagers, Luke would bring his mother tea and biscuits at just the hour when he knew she’d be beginning to fade.