Read Her Name Is Rose for Free Online Page A

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.
    â€œYou’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.
    Bird jam. Listen to the dawn chorus. To calls, whistles, trills, cackles, coos, chattering, and twittering.

    Omens are everywhere. Birds are everywhere. Love is somewhere.

    Anxious to lift a corner on the veil of the future, we are attracted to omens and birds. In the days of the Romans, a bird appearing at a person’s right indicated fortune. A bird to the left … well, you guessed it … avoid it.
    The blog seemed a lesser thing to Iris. Did anyone care? And who the hell out there was ever going to read it? Yet the blinking cursor was alive on the white template. It could link anywhere. Connect to perfect strangers, even. By such a thin thread she could connect with the world beyond Clare, she thought. She’d set up a Wordpress site and she owned the domain [email protected]. She could hyperlink between the two blogs now and felt a little pleased with herself. When she missed Rose and Luke the most, she could blog. The blog could be her dialogue … with somebody. Anybody. She looked out down the slope of the garden toward the trees. She watched the sudden flight of a blue tit heading for the cherry blossoms. Then she typed:
    A bird flying to you is a benediction. Grab it before it flies away.
    After uploading the poppy photos (the sketch she’d attempted was laying, half-finished, beside the telephone), and writing step-by-step instructions and posting, Iris went outside. Suddenly she wanted to hear the cuckoo. She walked eastward along the front of the house, along the border that was stippled with wild columbine, and turned right to face the valley. Nothing.
    â€œWhere are you?” she asked toward the treetops.
    Listening for the first call of the cuckoo was a thing she and Luke used to do. In the brightening of spring they’d keep track, year on year, who would hear him first. (Luke, fourteen. Iris, eleven.) The cuckoo comes in April. She walked backward in case her left ear should catch him. Then she stopped and faced east. No sound. He sings his song in May. Sing, cuckoo.
    She called: Goo-ko, goo-ko , willed him to fly up from the valley and sing across the top of the spruce forest.
    Goo-ko, goo-ko …
    Nothing.
    All she could hear was Tommy Ryan’s van from half a kilometer away as it stopped and started to deliver post into neighbors’ boxes along the road. Still wearing her nightdress and one of Luke’s shirts, her hair undone, Iris hid behind the hedge. Tommy was a kind man but she was in no humor to speak with him. He played cards most nights in Nolan’s pub since his own wife had died suddenly of a heart attack at fifty-two. Now when he saw Iris he seemed to look at her like she was wearing some dark mantilla of