Declan and Deirdre kept jabbering away on the phone. Lucy looked out the window while Declan asked about the polar bears, the ice floes, the tundra, and all that sort of National Geographic stuff. Lucy herself had never fit in as a child and her ambition had been to see to it that her children did. She had failed there, that was for sure. Despite Lucy’s best efforts over the years, all her daughter valued was gallivanting all over the earth, more interested in meeting people who offered her seal eyeballs than in settling down and having a regular life.

Lucy looked at the garden hose outside, leaning against the bird feeder. It was long and green, a handsome hose, coiled like a snake, complete with a power-pressure Garden King nozzle from the hardware store, seven different settings from Irish Mist to Northern Blast. Declan had given it to her for Mother’s Day along with a lovely card he bought at the drug store. Lucy’d put the card on her dresser and hooked the nozzle up as soon as the warm weather had come. They had put the garden in after the planting moon. She treasured this about Declan, how he was one of those husbands who appreciated her efforts to mother, unlike Deirdre who didn’t appreciate a single thing Lucy did.

Lucy had had no choice but to take the garden hose to Deirdre all those years ago. No matter how much things settled down, Deirdre was always there reminding her of every mistake she had ever made, always demanding Lucy make some sort of atonement for her wicked parenting. Lucy had decided to show her daughter just what kind of ritual would set things right, what sort of spell was needed to force Deirdre to see it was she who should be making amends and changing her ways, not blaming her mother for every single thing. There was only so much a mother could be expected to do. Lucy had found that there came a time when there was nothing to lose by acting like a witch since her own daughter always made her feel like one anyway.

Early one morning when Deirdre was twenty years old and home from university for the summer working in the pie factory down the road, Lucy found her face down in the yellow roses at dawn. Her long red hair was caught like seaweed on the thorns of the rose bush they had planted on her thirteenth birthday, vomit hanging off the delicate petals, clinging to the long pieces of Deirdre’s hair, sun bouncing off the strands and scattering rays of red and mahogany, shattered in places by the gloppy vomit. Lucy had come around the corner of the house that morning, sat down on the verandah, taken a sip of coffee, and looked at her toes in the dewy grass. She saw Deirdre’s hand flopped there on the front lawn.

The smell of vomit and sweet rose hanging thick on the hot June morning air reminded her of the funeral home. Lucy’d had a flash of standing by the coffin, looking at her father, dead from the booze at sixty, though they all liked to say it was the heart disease that killed him. But Lucy was beginning to see it was your life that killed you — in the end it was how you lived that took you out. Life shaped your heart and it killed you.