Since the visitors were now all busy, she carried the flowers into the kitchen area and laid them on a cutting board so that she could cut the ends off the stems and put them in water. Idiotic. But it, like so many of her nice-Iowa-girl impulses, was like a brainstem reflex. It wasn’t the flowers’ fault that they’d been purchased by gangsters. The latte was enormously pleasurable, and she popped the lid off and threw it away so that she could sink her lips into the warm foam and gulp from it. Peter owned no vases, but she found an earthenware water pitcher that would support the flowers and filled it with water. Then she set about the messy business of tearing away the plastic wrappers and the rubber bands that held the flowers’ stems together.