The Language of Flowers

“See you then,” he called after us. I turned, my eyes quizzical. He held up three fingers.

The space below my rib cage expanded. The room felt unnaturally bright and filled with too much oxygen. I concentrated on exhaling, following Renata’s orders without thinking. We had loaded everything into her truck before I remembered my promise of the week before.

“Wait,” I said, slamming the truck door and leaving Renata inside the cab.

I raced through the market, looking for red roses and lilac. Grant had bucketsful, but I passed him without looking up. On the way back to the car, I passed him again. Shielding my face with a stalk of white lilac, I peeked in his direction. He held up three fingers again and cracked a shy smile. My face was hot, embarrassed. I hoped he didn’t think the flowers in my arms were for him.

I worked all day in a nervous haze. The door opened and closed, and customers came in and out, but I never looked up.

At half past one, Renata lifted the hair off my forehead, and when I raised my head, her eyes were inches from mine.

“Hello? I’ve called you three times,” she said. “There’s a lady waiting for you.”

I grabbed the roses and lilac from the walk-in and went into the showroom. The woman faced the door as if she might leave, her shoulders low.

“I didn’t forget,” I said when I saw her. She turned.

“Earl said you wouldn’t.” She watched me work, arranging the white lilac around the roses until the red was no longer visible. I wound sprigs of rosemary—which I had learned at the library could mean commitment as well as remembrance—around the stems like a ribbon. The rosemary was young and supple, and did not break when I tied it in a knot. I added a white ribbon for support and wrapped the whole thing in brown paper.

“First emotions of love, true love, and commitment,” I said, handing her the flowers. She handed me forty dollars. At the register I made change, but when I looked up, she was gone.

I returned to the worktable, and Renata examined me with a half-smile. “What were you doing out there?”

“Just giving the people what they want,” I said, rolling my eyes the way Renata had the first day we’d met, when she stood on the sidewalk with dozens of out-of-season tulips.

“Whatever they want,” Renata agreed, clipping a row of sharp thorns off a yellow rose. A yellow rose for her niece’s wedding: her fugitive, eloping, using niece. Jealousy, infidelity. The specifics of the definition didn’t matter much in this case, I thought. The outcome did not look good. I finished my last table arrangement and looked at the clock. Two-fifteen.

“I’ll just load these up,” I said to Renata, grabbing as many vases as I could carry. They were too full, and water soaked into my shirt where it spilled over the tops.

“Don’t worry about it,” Renata said. “Grant’s been waiting on the stoop for two hours. I told him if he was going to sit there, he better not scare away my customers, and he would do my heavy lifting as payment.”

“He agreed?”

She nodded, and I set the vases down. Pulling on my backpack, I waved goodbye to Renata, avoiding her eyes. Grant sat on the sidewalk, leaning against the sun-warmed brick wall. He startled as I walked out the door, jumping to his feet.

“What’re you doing here?” I was surprised by the accusation in my voice.

“I want to bring you to my farm. I have disagreements with your definitions, and you’ll understand better with my flowers in your hands. You know I’m no good at debating.”

I looked up and down the hill. I wanted to go with Grant, but being with him made me nervous. It felt illicit. I didn’t know if the feeling was left over from my time with Elizabeth or if it was just too close to romance or friendship, two things I’d spent a lifetime navigating around. I sat down on the curb, thinking.

“Good,” he said, as if my sitting down was an act of assent. He held out his car keys and nodded across the street. “You can wait in the truck, if you want, while I carry Renata’s flowers. I brought lunch.”

With the mention of lunch, I overcame my reluctance. I grabbed his keys. In the truck, a white paper bag sat on the passenger seat. I picked it up and climbed inside. The truck was filled with the remains of flowers: Stem clippings littered the floor, and wilted petals worked themselves into the upholstery. I sunk into the seat and opened the bag. A sandwich on a thick French roll: turkey, bacon, tomato, and avocado, with mayonnaise. I took a bite.

Across the street, Grant carried vases two at a time up the hill. He paused only once at the top, looking downhill to where I sat in the parked car. He smiled and mouthed the words Is it good?

I hid my face behind the sandwich.

2.

The driver leaned away from me as I climbed onto the school bus. I recognized the look on his face—pity, dislike, and more than a little bit of fear—and I slammed my backpack against the empty seat as I sat down. The only reason he should feel sorry for me, I thought angrily, was because I had to look at his ugly, bald head all the way to school.

Perla sat down across the aisle from me and handed over her ham sandwich before I could demand that she do so. Two months into school, and she understood the drill. I ripped off large chunks and forced them into my mouth, thinking about the way Elizabeth had hurried out of the house that morning, leaving me alone to put my lunch in my backpack and find my shoes. I hadn’t wanted to go to school—had begged to stay home for the first day of harvest. But she had ignored my appeals, even when they turned violent. If you loved me, you’d want me here, I said, hurling my math book at the back of her head as she hurried out the door. I wasn’t fast enough. She disappeared through the doorway and jogged down the front steps, not even turning around at the sound of the book hitting the door frame. I could tell by the way she walked that she wasn’t thinking of me. She hadn’t been all morning. The stress of the harvest was all-consuming, and she wanted me gone, out of her hair. It was the first time I felt that I understood Elizabeth, and in my anger I yelled after her that she wasn’t any different from all my other foster mothers. Stomping all the way to the bus stop, I ignored the stares of the workers arriving by the truckload.

The bus driver glared at me in the rearview mirror, following each bite of sandwich into my mouth with the same two eyes that should have been watching the road. I opened my mouth while I chewed, and the bus driver’s face pinched in repulsion.

“So, don’t watch!” I yelled, springing to my feet. “If it’s so disgusting, just don’t watch.” I picked up my backpack, thinking vaguely that I would jump off the moving bus and walk the rest of the way to school, but instead I swung my bag high into the air and brought it down on the driver’s shiny scalp. There was a satisfying smack as my full metal thermos collided with his skull. The bus swerved, the driver swore, and the children screeched at an almost deafening pitch. Somewhere within the layers of noise I heard Perla’s small voice begging me to stop, and then she started to cry. When the bus skidded to a halt on the side of the road and the driver cut off the engine, Perla’s sobs were the last remaining sound.

“Off,” the driver said. A large knot was already forming on his head, and he pressed the palm of one hand against it while he reached for a radio with the other. I put on my backpack and climbed off the bus. Dust from the road swirled around me as I looked up through the open doors.

“Your mother’s name,” the driver demanded, pointing down at me.

“I don’t have one,” I said.

“Your guardian, then.”

“The State of California.”

“Then who do you fucking live with?” The radio crackled with harsh words, and the driver turned it off. The silence on the bus was complete. Even Perla had stopped crying and sat motionless.

“Elizabeth Anderson,” I said. “I don’t know her phone number or her address.” My entire childhood I had