The Language of Flowers

“I’m sorry,” I said. “About your mother.” My words didn’t sound heartfelt, but Grant didn’t appear to notice. He shrugged.

“Elizabeth taught you?” he asked.

I nodded. “She taught me what she knew,” I said, “but she didn’t know everything.”

“What do you mean?”

“ ‘The language of flowers is nonnegotiable, Victoria,’ ” I said, my voice a stern imitation of Elizabeth’s. “And today, in the library, I learned there are three contradictory definitions of the almond blossom.”

“Indiscretion.”

“Yes. And no.” I told Grant that white poplar wasn’t listed in my dictionary, and about my trip to the library and the sighting of the yellow rose.

“Jealousy,” Grant said, when I described the small illustration on the cover of the book.

“Exactly what it said,” I told him. “But not what I learned.” I finished the last donut, licked my fingers, and retrieved my worn dictionary from my backpack. I opened to the R’s and scanned the page for rose, yellow. I pointed.

“Infidelity.” His eyes widened. “Whoa.”

“Changes everything, right?”

“Yes,” he said. “Changes everything.”

He reached into his backpack and pulled out a book with a red cloth cover and stem-green endpapers. He turned to the page with yellow rose and set the dictionaries side by side. Jealousy, infidelity. This simple discrepancy, and the ways in which the yellow rose had altered both our lives, hung between us. Grant might have known the details, but I didn’t, and I didn’t ask. Being with him was enough; I had no desire to further uncover the past.

It didn’t seem like Grant wanted to dwell on the past, either. He closed the empty donut box. “You hungry?”

I was always hungry. But even more, I wasn’t ready to say goodbye. Grant wasn’t angry; being with him felt like being forgiven. I wanted to soak it up, take it with me, face the next day a little less haunted, a little less hateful.

I took a breath. “Starving.”

“Me, too.” He closed both dictionaries and slid mine across the table toward my backpack. “Let’s get dinner and compare. It’s the only way.”

Grant and I decided to eat dinner at Mary’s Diner, because it stayed open all night. We had hundreds of pages of flowers to compare, and for every discrepancy, we debated the better definition. We agreed that the loser would cross the old definition out of their dictionary and write in the new one.

We got stuck on the very first flower. Grant’s dictionary defined acacia as friendship, mine as secret love.

“Secret love,” I said. “Next.”

“Next? Just like that? You didn’t make much of a case.”

“It’s thorny and pod-bearing. Just the sway of the tree makes you think of shifty-eyed men in convenience stores, untrustworthy.”

“And how is untrustworthy related to secret love?” he asked.

“How is it not?” I shot back.

Grant appeared unsure how to respond, so he chose another approach. “Acacia. Subfamily: Mimosoideae. Family: Fabaceae. Legumes. They provide sustenance, energy, and satisfaction to the human body. A good friend provides the same.”

“Blah,” I said. “Five petals. So small they’re almost hidden by a large stamen. Hidden,” I repeated. “Secret. Stamen: love.” My face flushed as I said this, but I didn’t turn away. Grant didn’t, either.

“Yours,” he said finally, reaching for the black permanent marker on the table between us.

We continued this way hour after hour, eating and debating. Grant was the only person I had ever met who could match me bite for bite, and, like me, he seemed to never grow full. By sunrise we had ordered and eaten three meals apiece and were only halfway through the C’s.

Grant surrendered a columbine defeat and snapped his dictionary shut. I hadn’t let him win, not once. “I guess I’m not going to the market today,” he said, looking at me with a guilty expression.

I looked at my watch. Six a.m. Renata would already be there, throwing a surprised glance at Grant’s empty stall. I shrugged. “November’s slow, Tuesday’s slow. Take a day off.”

“And do what?” Grant asked.

“How should I know?” I was suddenly tired, ready to be alone.

I stood, stretched, and put my dictionary in my backpack. Sliding the check across the table toward Grant, I walked out of the restaurant without saying goodbye.

Part Two Unaquainted

1.

Like Elizabeth, Grant was hard to forget. It was more than the intersection of our pasts, more than the drawing of the white poplar, which, in its obscurity, had led me to the truth about the language of flowers. It was something about Grant specifically, the seriousness with which he regarded the flowers, or the tone of his voice when he argued, simultaneously pleading and forceful. He’d shrugged his shoulders when I expressed sympathy at the death of his mother, and this, too, I found intriguing. His past—with the exception of the moments I’d glimpsed as a child—was a mystery to me. Group-home girls divulge their pasts relentlessly, and on the rare occasion I’d met someone unwilling to expose the details of her childhood, it was a relief. With Grant, I felt different. After only one night, I wanted to know more.

For a week I rose early and spent the library’s open hours comparing definitions. I filled my pockets with smooth stones from a display in front of the Japanese teahouse in Golden Gate Park and used them as paperweights. Lining up dictionaries on two tables, I opened each to the same letter and placed rocks on the corners of the pages. Moving from one book to the next, I compared the entries flower by flower. Whenever I found conflicting definitions, I had long, drawn-out debates in my mind with Grant. Occasionally, I let him win.

On Saturday I arrived at the flower market before Renata. I handed Grant the scroll I had created, a list of definitions through the letter J, including revisions I’d made to the list we compiled together. When Renata and I returned to Grant’s stall an hour later, he was still reading the scroll. He looked up to watch Renata finger his roses.

“Wedding today?” he asked.

Renata nodded. “Two. Small, though. One is my oldest niece. She’s eloping but told me because she wanted me to give her flowers.” Renata rolled her eyes. “Using me, the doll.”

“An early day, then?” Grant asked, looking at me.

“Probably, the way Victoria works,” she said. “I’d like to close the shop by three.”

Grant wrapped Renata’s roses and gave her more change than she deserved. She had stopped bargaining with him; there was no need. We turned to leave.