“Me too,” Iris said and smiled back.

Tess was a social worker in town and worked with disadvantaged teenagers, and although into things like organics and yoga, she wasn’t one of those New Age yogi types and didn’t plague Iris with alternative-health aphorisms. She’d tried more than once to cajole Iris into joining her at a yoga class but Iris said it hurt her back. “Exactly the reason you should be going! You’re only ever using the same old muscle groups. You’ll end up like an upside-down U if you don’t watch it. Too much of anything isn’t good for you.” Iris was about to say something but Tess had already read her and cut her short. “Not even gardening.” She smiled. “Gardening is not the new yoga.”

Her friend understood why Iris now shied away from doctors, medicine, and hospitals and one day a few weeks after Luke’s death, she’d arrived with a basket full of vitamins and herbal teas. There was St. John’s wort and omega 3s and magnesium and melatonin. Something called gamma-aminobutyric acid, tablets of which she still had in the cabinet above the sink. And chamomile and passionflower and valerian tisanes. Iris took the bath salts and a lavender herb bundle and the plastic bottles of supplements and lined them in a row on the counter under the cabinet where she kept tea and coffee.

“Thanks, Dr. Tess, Medicine Woman.” At the bottom of the basket was a bottle of wine. The Malbec Iris liked.

“That’s if none of the others work.” They’d laughed then and it had felt okay to laugh and Tess took Iris’s hands and folded her own over them. “It’s over now and you’re going to be able to move on. And if you don’t, don’t worry, I’ll be here to push you! And while we’re on the subject—”

“What subject?”

“Taking care of yourself.”

“Ri-ight.”

“You need a mammogram.”

“Do I now?”

“You do. You’re in the high-risk category for breast cancer. Come on, Iris, you know that.” It was a touchy subject but Tess was not put off by touchy subjects, she’d continued. “For starters, you didn’t breast-feed.”

“No medals for stating the obvious. And?”

“I hate to remind you—”

“Then don’t.”

Tess smiled. It seemed there was almost nothing Iris could say that would offend her friend. She was permanently in good form even though there was plenty she could complain about. She lived her life half-full, not half-empty.

“Iris?”

“I know.”

“In America they start you at forty, and you’re—”

“Thank you.” Iris had glanced at her friend with a look that said, Please don’t say any more.

“Go for one, will you? So I can stop pestering. And don’t get worked up about it … until you have to. Nothing to worry about. Just arrange it, okay?”

It had taken her almost two years to make that appointment.

The thing about poppies, which one is inclined to forget when one is standing in the garden admiring their pomposity, is that they make frightful cut flowers. Most unsatisfying if not downright depressing.

If you are to have any success with bringing your poppies indoors, you must take a flame to their bottoms.

Until blackened.

With fire.

A well-known British gardener suggests dipping them for thirty seconds in boiling hot water after collecting the flowers in the morning when the stems are fully turgid.

Long live those turgid stems.

Two days after the mammography, on the first of June, Iris had passed L at the entrance of the supermarket in Ennis. The nurse-out-of-uniform was wearing combats and a black T-shirt and if it hadn’t been for the purple-streaked hair, Iris mightn’t have recognized her. The combats must be some sort of defense strategy for nurses who perform breast scans, she thought. As the two women passed, the nurse averted her eyes and declined an invitation to be recognized. Iris was sure of it. She quickened her step and by the time she returned to her car, breathless, she felt exposed, like a dug-up plant whose knobby roots were shriveling in the cold.

Iris spent the next few agonizing days waiting for Dr. O’Reilly to ring. She busied herself in the garden: mowing the lawn, pruning the spirea that had finished flowering, and spraying the rose bed with a Bordeaux mixture recommended by her friend at the Ennis farmers’ market. (She left the fixing of the cabin door for another day.) When she’d finished all her jobs she retrieved her sketchbook from her bedside table where she’d locked it away in a drawer after Luke had died. Making pretty pictures then hadn’t felt right. But now the Icelandic poppies in the front border inspired her to try, to just try. She was attempting to sketch one when the doctor’s office finally telephoned at the end of the week.

“Mrs. Bowen? Will you hold for Dr. O’Reilly?”

Iris paced with the phone from room to room. Her cat was asleep in a square of sun on the sitting room floor, just under the pine table. She left him sleeping and made her way to her daughter’s room where light slanted through the open curtains.

“Iris, how are you?”

“Fine. I’m fine. Well … not really, but—”

“I know. I know. I have the results of the X-ray now. And I want to tell you first of all that I don’t think there is anything for you to be concerned about.”

“O … kaaay…?”

“One of the X-rays was sent down from the Ennis Hospital to the Breast Clinic at the Limerick Regional. Just for confirmation. It appears there’s a disturbance, what the radiologist calls an ‘architectural distortion.’”

Iris took a sudden in-breath, and held it.

“This is really important to hear…” The doctor softened her voice like she was sitting beside Iris holding her hand. “The radiologist phoned me this morning to say it’s nothing for you to worry about, but they do want to see you next week.”

There was silence from Iris’s end. Architectural distortion?

“Iris?”

“Yes.” Iris replied finally. “Sounds iffy all the same, but you say I shouldn’t be worried?”

“I can guess what you must be thinking, after Luke and everything, but it’s not bad news, Iris. Really. The radiologist just wants to make sure. Nine of out ten callbacks are what we call false-positives. The Breast Clinic has already sent you an appointment by post. You should get the letter on Monday.”

“All right.”

“Do you have someone to go with you?”

Iris hesitated. “I do.”

“Okay, then. Cheer up, please, and try to have a good day.” She paused. “I’ll be in touch after you’ve seen the consultant. And Iris?”

“Yes?”

“Call me if you need to.”

Iris didn’t know what she was feeling. It was like nothing. Just a void. Or an empty air pocket. Or that moment when you’ve been asked a question and you don’t know the answer but you know you should. And you panic and suddenly you feel paralyzed. Why hadn’t she asked more questions. Architectural distortion? What the hell? Iris replaced the telephone and hauled herself outside with a crippling sort of feeling, as if her legs had lost their power.

The sun was shining and she noted how odd that felt. The lawn was dappled in patches of different hues of green. If she could have drunk it in, like some green elixir, it might have calmed her. But as it was she stood a few moments, a frenzy building, then she grabbed her secateurs from the wooden table under the porch and scanned the freshly opened poppies. Crimson goblets with beads of light shining through them.

She ordered herself to get a grip. It was a thing of nothing, the doctor implied.

Iris sliced one stem, two stems, then three stems, clear down to the base of the plant.

The cuts were swift and clean. The poppy stems a foot long.

She brought the flowers inside and laid the stems on the counter, balancing them without bruising their petals, their faces clear. She would put these poppies to the test to see if they’d really hold their shape until morning. She’d photograph the sequence of singeing their cut-off ends and arranging them in a vase, and she’d photograph them again in the morning and upload them to her blog.