Mother’s Day is a problem. Lucille crosses her legs on the floor of the stockroom and faces her friend.

‘I want to do something special,’ Kate says.

Her eyes are as shiny as glass jars full of lollipops. Lucille feels she can see her mentally flipping pancakes and placing a daisy in a glass on a tray. While she speaks about cakes, Lucille straightens a box on the shelf, so nothing juts out more than anything else.

She doesn’t blame her for wanting to do something. Mrs Frost is perfect. Just as they are talking about her, she slips in from the shop, as if summoned by a thought.

‘You girls OK there?’ she asks. ‘Not getting into mischief, I hope?’

There’s a wink in her voice like when she tells ancient men buying Brylcreem they look so handsome that, if she was single, she’d run away with them herself. Lucille stares at her spine ironed into a crisp dress, her arms reaching up to the shelf, pale as swans.

‘We were just talking,’ Kate says. Her voice is so grown-up sometimes. She is forever placing a hand on her breastbone like a lady pressing the exact place where she feels offence. ‘Do you mind? We were having a private conversation.’

‘Alright, ladies, I can take a hint.’

Mrs Frost takes a bottle of perfume off the shelf and trots back into the chemists. ‘I have just what you’re looking for,’ she says.

She has just what everyone’s looking for, Lucille is sure. Ladies flock to her to find the shade to shape their lips into something worthy of being kissed. Men buy mouthwash at her counter to make their conversations minty fresh.

On the other side of the store, Mr Frost hunches over the prescriptions. People talk to him on doctor’s orders only, some people are just like that, so quiet they are difficult to like. His personality is a secret he keeps under a crisp white coat with a pen in the pocket, but it’s in there somewhere. Once, when Lucille was waiting for Kate to fetch her coat he wrote out a medicine label, stuck it to an empty bottle and handed it to her. Lucille Harper: Smile, to be taken at least once a day.

She shuffles to see through the doorway that leads to the shop now. Mrs Frost stands at her counter, so straight she puts sunflowers to shame.

‘You’re in luck, it’s our last bottle,’ she tells her customer.

Lucille glances at perfume on the shelf, a dozen the same as the one Mrs Frost holds. The wispy redhead on the label is a water colour woman, resting her head on her hand.

‘Your wife will love this,’ Mrs Frost says, ‘I would.’

She mists scent on her wrist and offers it to the man to sniff. Lucille strains to see him lean so close his nose touches her skin like a rose. She loves Mrs Frost’s wrists. She loves the seam in her stockings and the small of her back the size of a farmer’s hand. Just looking at it makes her think about how it is called ‘the small of a back’. There could be no other word for it with her. It is as if she followed instructions to make herself precisely what a woman should be. The woman watches her customer leave. And Lucille watches her. Cotton dragonflies on her skirt quiver as she scratches a calf with the point of her heels.

On Saturday, Kate’s a stuck record. Suggesting a boy at school likes her only postpones the conversation for half an hour.

‘What are you getting your mother?’ she asks.

Lucille has an idea she can’t share. Why is there a Mother’s Day anyway? It’s feels like a conspiracy, a plot of girls secretly squirreling their pocket money and gluing seascapes made of pasta onto cardboard. It’s a contest of love and she’s losing.

‘I don’t know. I’ll probably just do the dusting or something.’

‘Is she still …?’

Kate leans forward the way her mother does for uncertain customers. Since her family moved here, and she was grafted into a friendship by a shared desk, she’s often wondered about her mother. No one sees her. She is a signature on a note, a vacant seat at the class play. Once, she suggested she could visit sometime. Lucille replied ‘my mother is ill’ in a way that made her afraid to ask more. There was never a right time to mention the rumors she heard at school.

Lucille clutches her cream soda so close bubbles fizz up her nose.

‘She’s so ill she can barely move,’ she says, and her eyes water.

Kate props her head on her hand like in maths, needing all the help she can get to support her thoughts.

‘What about a necklace?’

Lucille pictures a chain snapping. Beads rolling like sweat.

‘She doesn’t wear jewelry.’

‘Bouquet?’

‘She can’t stand flowers. Granddad grows them. We’re up to the neck with roses and dahlia.’

‘What does she like?’

‘Not much.’ Not flowers, or perfume, or stockings like skinny snake skins. She’d rather die than fry her an egg.

‘Chocolate? Mum’s got some pretty boxes in stock. She’ll probably let you have one, if you help around the shop or something,’ says Kate.

Lucille pictures herself polishing Mrs Frost’s counter after school, making it shine. She likes the thought of being called a hard worker.

‘She’d love chocolate,’ she says.

On their way out to town that afternoon, Lucille attempts not to burst. Trips with Mrs Frost are always ‘a breeze’, ‘a spin’ or ‘a ride.’ Kate stomps to the flat upstairs for a cardigan and Lucille waits in the stockroom. There’s a fluttering in her chest like a sparrow lives in it. She snatches a bottle off the shelf and stuffs it in her satchel, glancing at the door.

They stroll along the street, sunlight playing hide and seek behind the leaves of the trees. Mrs Frost pops into shops to touch everything. She rubs her cheek against towels, flicks glassware and holds china to the light. Shopkeepers buzz like bees.

‘What can I do for you today?’

‘Just looking.’ She smiles.

Lucille thinks her smile is something she does for them. It is something she donates to the world. It is worth putting up with Kate complaining she’s bored, just to be in its presence. The ice-cream she takes them for is just a bonus.

The cafe isn’t busy. Mrs Frost folds a paper napkin into a swan and waves at a man walking over.

‘Small world…’ she says

It’s the man who sampled perfume in the chemists. He’s as dark as Mr Frost, but broader, and lacking a tie. His shoulders look used to swinging sheep between his knees. His nails look painfully short.

‘Lovely day,’ He looks at her, instead of looking towards the window.

‘It is,’ she says, ‘well…’

He trails to another table and sips tea. After ten minutes or so, she gets up to powder her nose. Kate wanders to the jukebox with coins to throw at Dean Martin.

‘Are you coming?’

Lucille slurps a watery raspberry milkshake, shaking her head. ‘I’ll stay here. ‘I bet I can guess which song you put on.’

Alone at the table, she strokes her satchel. Through the leather, she feels the surface of the bottle she slipped into it, waiting in the dark.

‘I think your mother dropped this,’ the waitress says, ‘is it hers?’

She holds out a fawn glove. Lucille takes it in her hand.

‘My mother did drop it,’ she says, ‘thank you, she’d hate to lose one. They’re her favorites.’

She dabs her lips with a napkin, because that’s what she’d do if she was the daughter of someone like Mrs Frost. When the woman returns, she doesn’t tell her she became her daughter while she was gone. In a second, it happened. She opened her mouth to correct the waitress and the lie popped out. She’s sure, if she told her, Mrs Frost would laugh, lay a hand on her shoulder and say ‘dear, you’re the daughter I never had.’

The chocolates have a red ribbon. Lucille slips it off, rips the cardboard and stuffs as many of into her mouth as she can. The chocolate is bitter. The fondant’s too pink and has sticky insides, but she swallows. Tossing the box under a hedge, she walks down the lane towards her house, turns back, and stomps it under her foot.

The place isn’t in full shade yet, lemony sun slots through the fence and lies on the grass like a picnic blanket in shreds. Granddad is out digging. He is always outside, pulling weeds, disappearing into his hessian tent that will stop the petals of his flowers getting scorched. Insects won’t know buds as large as his fist; the flowers will win the village show virginal, untouched by any eye but his. The girl thinks it's greedy to keep all those colors locked up. He says it’s the only way to win.

‘Those sweet peas are getting there,’ he says, ‘snow peas too.’

If it wasn’t for vegetables, she doubts he’d speak at all. She watches his dirty neck bowed over his spade and is glad he is there. When she had to draw family pictures at school once, it looked right: one stick girl, another in a dress, and a scarecrow of a man with a spade in his hand. Only some of the drawing was a lie.

‘Hey there, honey bear,’ her mother leans over a pan, mashing potato as Lucille walks into the kitchen. Her chest is an avalanche over the pan. ‘What did you learn today?’

The girl stares at the tops of her wobbling arms. ‘I learnt how to fly. What did you do?’

‘Fred Astaire came over for a waltz.’

‘Again?’

‘What can I say? That man loves me, all men do.’

She jiggles a dance move, slaps her belly and laughs. Lucille hates her for making a joke of her self. She listens to her breathing, loud as wind in the chimney she can hear all night long. Setting the table, she pulls out her mother’s chair. The seat is cracked, reinforced with a plank. She pictures dragonflies on Mrs Frost’s skirt, hovering over her legs.

Granddad washes his hands and sits at the table. Lips tight as twine, while his daughter butters her potatoes. The girl dabs butter beside hers, so as not to take sides. He can’t stand seeing her mother smother whatever he grows with butter or ketchup. The pair rarely speak. It has something to do with the woman on the photo in the living room.

‘Your grandmother was not a happy woman. He didn’t make her happy,’ her mother once said.

The child looked out the window at him curling a cucumber vine around his thumb, teaching it to hold on to the string.

‘I know he’s your granddad, but good granddads aren’t always good husbands or fathers. He’s just old now that’s all, like a dog on a chain.’

Lucille nodded, understanding that age is the chain and the dog is the young man he was.

The photograph is of a woman holding a scrawny girl in bunches. It’s hard to believe it’s the person who always sits on the sofa beside it. Lucille pinches her own arms and legs, wondering if a fat woman is hidden inside her, waiting to burst out. The satchel sways on a hook by the door, she eyes it, nerves rattling more than its contents.

‘I can bring you ice-cream,’ she says. ‘Why don’t you sit and finish your book? I’ll bring it in.’

Her mother pats her shoulder and hauls herself to the sofa. Lucille listens for the groan of it as she sits, the sharp metal sound of her grandfather resuming his digging outside. She opens the satchel, tips a pill out the bottle and grinds it into powder she mashes into the ice-cream.

‘Here you go.’

‘You’re an angel.’

Lucille watches and smiles. It’s been a long time since she could witness her eating without imagining someone with toothache biting rock.

Glassware on the sideboard chatters as her mother drags herself to bed. When stairs became mountains, she started to sleep in the dining room. Lucille flicks through the magazine in her old room upstairs. The women all have handbags as if they’re going somewhere where they’ll need a little, but not a lot. The magazine has a photo of a brunette in a red sweater blowing a kiss, ‘To keep a slender figure reach for a Lucky cigarette.’ Lucille knows her mother would never smoke because Granddad does, though only at night after dinner. He rolls a cigarette and looks out over his garden as if the small orange tip is his personal sun.

The girl flicks to an ad for underwear that promises to take off pounds. Today, she doesn’t close the magazine in disgust. Everything looks different. Better, now she knows what she wants. She wants her mother to be like Mrs Frost, to stroll around and look at swimsuits and fur coats in department stores. The magazine has the answer. One advertisement makes it so simple. The slimming pills promise miracles.

Lucille closes her eyes feeling lighter, the days events lifting a weight off her mind. Today she started giving her mother a gift that won’t be over in a day; she’ll give for as long as it takes. And it will be a surprise. One day her mother will get out of bed like a lady in a magazine holding out her dress and peering down the front, to find the other half of the woman she was inside.

The shelves in the storeroom smell of lemons and wax. Lucille polishes her fingertips off the jars.

‘Did your mother like the chocolates?’ asks Mrs Frost.

‘Very much.’

Mother’s Day came and went, and she is still dispensing the pills. She slipped more off the shelf a week after the first time. Now the bottle is empty.

Kate flips through Bunty in the corner of the store room. Lucille waits. She’s been waiting for what feels like her whole life, though it’s only six weeks.

'Oops.’ She knocks a jar of bath salts to the floor. ‘I’m sorry, I’ll pay for it, I’ll work another month.’

‘No need,’ Mrs Frost’s hand on Lucille’s shoulder is a feather, there, then gone as she fetches the duspan.

‘I want to. I like being useful. Its Granddad’s birthday soon, I was looking at the aftershave… I could work to get him some.’

She tries not say please, reveal her desperation to have a reason to be here. Grandad thinks the smell of hard work is all a man needs. She agrees.

‘How thoughtful! You’re such a hard worker!’ says Mrs Frost.

Just like Lucille imagined, glancing at Kate idling through her comic, but she can’t bask. She is dying to be left alone.

‘Would you like a sandwich?’ Mrs Frost finally asks.

Yes. Yes, Lucille would, and she likes Kate accompanying her with strict instructions on what to put in it even more. She listens to them creak up to the flat above shop, grabs one bottle of pills, then another, lifts her skirt and stuffs them in her pants.

‘What are you up to?’

Mrs Frost holds a glass of milk in each hand. Kate trails behind her, balancing triangular sandwiches on a lily coloured plate.

‘Just straightening the shelves,’ Lucille blushes.

Mrs Frost strokes her hair briefly on her way back into the shop. ‘I have just what you’re looking for,’ she spritzes her wrist and offers it, ‘You’re lucky, this just came in. It’s been flying off the shelves.’

Lucille crushes pills in the kitchen and stirs them into a china cup. It’s safer than mashing them into cake, her mother hasn’t finished a slice in a while. She taps her fingers on the arm of the sofa when the tea arrives. The child watches her sip. Everything she eats or drinks is a miracle, as long as she serves it.

It starts with tea every morning, then another cup after school. And it’s working. Not Alice in Wonderland fast, but so slowly Lucille read one a day and wondered, what will it matter if I give her two? Three? Four?

There’s definitely more of the floral pattern visible on the sofa where her mother sits, the neck of her dress hangs low. These days, she has so much energy she can barely sit still. There’s so much to do, and she wants to do it all. Now. She runs a duster around, stopping just once to place a hand on her chest, heart fluttering, breathless.

‘You should go see a doctor,’ Granddad says, ‘you’re not sleeping properly, you keep getting dizzy...’

‘What’s the use? I could get stung by a wasp and he’d just tell me to lose weight!’ She laughs until she has to sit down.

It’s Friday when Lucille arrives home to find the old man outside with clean hands, and a spade still in the ground. She attempts to walk past him to the kitchen.

He shakes his head and lays a hand on her shoulder, stopping her still. It’s such a rare act, she knows. She stands beside him for a long time, not touching. His hand falls then lifts, as if it wants to pull her close but doesn’t know how.

‘How?’

She doesn’t know why she knows, she just does. Not much can pry a rake out of her the man’s hands. If she is honest, she has felt as if her mother is an accident waiting to happen for years.

‘Heart.’ He looks down at his bucketful of snails by the door. There’s no more to say. No more she can hear for the sound pouring out of her. When she has ran out of steam, they remain by the door, listening to the breeze in the grass.

‘But she was getting better. I gave her a cure, I gave her…’ Lucille takes the pills out of her satchel and shows him. They are smaller than beans.

‘How many did you give her?’ One hand is on her arm. The other grabs her shoulder like it wants to shake her until her teeth rattle.

‘Two a day, then three, four.’

Her voice strains, though she doesn’t know why, ‘I just wanted...I wanted…’

‘I know... Look, this didn’t happen. You didn’t do anything,’ he says, letting go. ‘Right? No one needs to know.’

She isn’t sure how anything from a magazine full of such beautiful women can be wrong, but he sounds like the accomplice of someone on the run. In just a minute his voice went from zero to seventy, and back.

‘We’ll flush the bottle. They were never here.’ He considers the worry and grief knotted to her face, and says, ‘Don’t worry, here…’

Walking down the steps, he tilts his head for her to follow. The shed smells of wood and wire wool. She breathes in the cool damp, the honest scent of soil. He takes an envelope out of his pocket and places a trowel in her hand.

‘Every time you’re sorry for something, plant a seed,’ he says. He bends over the garden and makes a trough with his hands. ‘Well… ‘

Lucille kneels, pops a seed into a hole, then one more. She imagines seeds grasping for roots underground as they return to the house and sit opposite the sofa. The frame of the door is missing, pried off to make something fit through, but she won’t ask about this now. She will think of seeds in a row.

She pictures seeds as she stares at her feet, squeezed into shoes shiny as beetles. If anyone notices the coffin is large, no one says.

‘So sorry, Lucille,’ Mrs Frost says, ‘if there’s anything we can do, you are welcome anytime. Our home is yours.’

Outside the church, the girl shivers, accepting her embrace, light as a chiffon scarf draped over someone without a coat in a blizzard.

The sun is low in the sky when she sees her again. The old man unwraps his flowers for the show in a big tent on the outskirts of the village. He tilts sunflowers this way and that, pokes wire into stems to make them stand tall.

‘Now what?’ Lucille asks.

‘Now we wait,’ he says.

They walk around, killing time while the judges deliberate. Granddad browses the hardware store. Lucille wanders into a café, spotting Mrs Frost inside. She approaches and sees her drop a hand under the table.

‘Small world, and just as I ran into this gentleman here…’ The woman’s hand swirls the air as if to conjure the name of the man sitting opposite her, out of nowhere. ‘How are you, Lucille? I haven’t seen you in a while. Small world…’ she says again.

‘It really is.’

Leaving the woman in her small world, she turns and steps out into the not quite autumn day.

The Power of Prose