They’d sat in the peach office of the oncologist Dr. Conway. The office was on the second floor of the Limerick Regional Hospital and Iris remembers looking out at the traffic, the buses and cars and taxis, and thinking, This is just a bad dream. A bus stopped and two older women helped each other off. One was wearing a red hat and a black-and-white-checked jacket. Everything was so normal. Middle of a Wednesday afternoon in early March. Blue sky. Spring. A few clouds. But at a tidy desk with a brown folder a voice was saying, “I’m afraid it’s not good news.”

When they came out to the car park that day Iris couldn’t find the parking ticket and she pulled everything out of her bag, pulled it all out and let it fall on the ground. Check book, old shopping receipts, wallet, a packet of tissues, lipstick, her hairbrush, sunglasses. Loose coins. Everything. A man came up quickly behind them and said, “Here, take mine,” as though he knew all the people coming and going from that particular car park might have just heard, I’m afraid it’s not good news. Maybe by giving her his ticket his news would be better.

Next came the treatments and the short spells of hope, the urgings of good cheer, visits from neighbors and friends all wanting her to hope for the best. There’s always room for hope, they’d said. Iris had a mania for feeding Luke green leafy vegetables and juicing arugula with lemon and olive oil—good for the liver and pancreas, Tess said. But that passed when he couldn’t eat anymore, when he lost his appetite and became the thin figure with no strength left. Then she tried to feed him applesauce. They nursed him at home and Sheila, a hospice volunteer, came every afternoon. Every day Iris brought something fresh in from the garden. Petals of forget-me-nots, like blue confetti, lay sprinkled on top of his bedside table. The CD player was playing Bach concertos, and then sometimes Luke would ask Rose to put Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” on repeat.

Luke’s health declined quickly. (He hadn’t been feeling well since early December, but hadn’t let on.) Then, one afternoon in the week before he died, he reached for her hand across the cream candlewick bedspread. Iris had looked at him with fear in her eyes that this was the end. But she was surprised by his sudden strength, and briefly, like a sun ray breaking through a storm cloud, a glimmer of hope eased her face.

“Luke?”

He angled himself up in the bed. He took a moment to moisten his throat, as if the words were hard and dry, and yet he had to say them. The green of his eyes had deepened. “Luke? What is it?”

“Iris … after me. If anything happens to you—”

“Stop. Nothing is going to happen to me. Lie back.”

“Iris. Listen … I—”

“No.”

The pressure of his fingers on her hand tightened.

“Listen to me. Please. I don’t want Rose to be alone.”

Iris turned to look away out the window, tilted back the tears, and held her mouth tightly.

“You … need to make sure that doesn’t happen. Iris, you … have to explore all possibilities. Without you … there will be no one.”

“Nothing is going to happen to me,” she said. “Lie back.”

“Say you understand.”

She hesitated. “Do you know what you’re asking me?”

“I do.”

But did he? Did he really? It pained her to think about what he was asking. This man she’d loved for nearly three decades was dying but he was talking about life. Not his life. He was talking about life after him.

“I’m going now,” she said. He loosened his grip. “Rose has her French practice exam tomorrow.” Then, to make him laugh (because they all knew she was hopeless at languages), she added, “I promised I’d quiz her on grammar.” But he didn’t laugh.

“I just wanted to make you smile.”

There were tears in his eyes; there were always tears in his eyes now, just on the edge of spilling.

“Iris. Please … she’ll have no one. Do it for me.”

Iris held her breath.

Then he spoke the words she didn’t want to hear. “Try to find her … find Hilary.”

He didn’t know what he was saying. Find Hilary? It was an impossibility. They’d had one meeting with her. The three of them and a social worker. Years ago. It was crazy. Iris rose from the bed and went to the window. Pulling the curtain aside, she saw the poppies needed staking.

Iris tidied the bed tray, smoothed the blanket, poured water into a plastic cup, and straightened the pile of magazines—The Economist, Wine Spectator—and the novel Luke was still hoping to read, The Third Policeman. She couldn’t think straight but she pretended calmness. He knew. He knew her inside out. When she came to kiss his forehead, he caught her arm. His voice was hoarse.

“Iris, we have to keep showing up for each other, for Rose.” He closed his eyes and fell back.

She kissed him on his forehead and let her cheek linger on the side of his face. The softness of his skin at that moment was extraordinary. As though he was already becoming transparent, already leaving the world.

She whispered, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry this is happening.” She clenched her teeth. She didn’t want to cry. They’d been all through this. The unfairness of it. The sadness. The end.

“Say you’ll promise.” He held his grip on her arm.

“I’ll make a phone call this week,” she’d said. Then she held his face between her hands. “I promise.”

*   *   *

Luke died a few days later on a sunny day at the end of May, two weeks before Rose’s Leaving Cert exams, a month before her seventeenth birthday.

Iris had rallied as best she could. She’d coached their daughter through the exams because there was no other way. She had to take them, but she only had to pass. And somehow they’d got on. Somehow they did. Iris and Rose, with a lot of help from Tess. Then, four months later, Rose entered London’s Royal Academy of Music.

The surviving pieces, after the center had been blown out their lives, fell into place, as if ordained from on high, as if in compensation. The life insurance benefits were held in trust for Rose, and after paying her rent and school fees she had a monthly stipend for living expenses.

*   *   *

Iris stayed in Ashwood. And in the unyokedness of being a widow she was adrift in the world, like a dandelion when its yellow florets have died and turned to seed, parachuting into the air, like a ruptured cloud burst. She was all over the place. No center to hold on to.

She’d never imagined a life without Luke. She hadn’t prepared. And yet now here she was, a damp morning in the beginning of June standing in her kitchen with the radio playing requests, wearing her nightdress with its watering-cans-and-Wellingtons pattern Luke had given her one Christmas, and her long, wavy red hair that Luke never wanted her to cut, having to imagine the possibility of a cancer growing in her, too. What were the odds? Nine out of ten callbacks. False-positive. It was simply unimaginable, and yet.

Instinctively she moved her hand to her left breast, and then took it away.

“You’re fine,” she said to no one listening. “You’re perfectly fine. Don’t go getting all dramatic. You’re fine.”

She stood at the counter, looking at the poppies she’d singed and propped in the vase. When she’d come into the kitchen the next morning, the day after Dr. O’Reilly telephoned, she’d expected to see their turgid stems bare with petals fallen on the counter. But the flowers were perpendicular, just as she’d left them. Alive, erect, and vibrant still. The BBC gardener was right. The purple stamens nodded as she turned the vase around and a fine black dust whispered down the inside of the petals.

She opened her laptop and brought up the blog page on The Banner County News Web site. The country had gone from boom to bust and there were neither new houses nor new gardens, but there were still gardeners. Gardening doesn’t stop when the economy tanks. She took a moment and then tapped the keys in a flurry.