discovery of the yellow rose.
It was dark out by the time I came in for dinner. The house was bright, and inside the frame of the open door, Elizabeth sat alone at the kitchen table. She had made chicken soup—the smell had reached me in the vines, the scent a physical draw—and she sat hunched over her bowl, as if studying her reflection in the broth.
“Why don’t you have any friends?” I asked.
The words escaped without premeditation. For a week I’d watched Elizabeth manage the harvest with a heavy, dejected quality, and the image of her sitting at the kitchen table, alone and so obviously lonely, pushed the words right out of me.
Elizabeth looked over to where I stood. Quietly, she stood up, dumping the contents of her bowl back into the soup pot. With a match, she lit the blue ring of fire beneath it.
She turned to me. “Well, why don’t you?”
“I don’t want any,” I said. Besides Perla, the only children I knew were from my class at school. They called me
“Why not?” Elizabeth pressed.
“I don’t know,” I said, my voice growing defensive. But I did know.
I had been suspended for five days for my attack on the school bus driver, and for the first time in my life, I was not miserable. Home with Elizabeth, I didn’t need anyone else. Every day I followed behind as she managed the harvest, steering workers toward ripe vines and away from grapes that needed another day in the sun, another two. She popped grapes into her own mouth and then into mine, spewing numbers that correlated to the ripeness: 74/6, 73/7, and 75/6.
The soup began to simmer, and Elizabeth stirred it with a wooden spoon. “Take off your shoes,” she said. “And wash up. The soup’s hot.”
At the table, Elizabeth set out two bowls and loaves of bread as big as cantaloupes. I tore the bread in half, scooping out the soft, white middle and dipping it in the steaming broth.
“I had a friend, once,” Elizabeth said. “My sister was my friend. I had my sister and my work and my first love, and there was nothing else in the world I wanted. Then, in an instant, all I had was my work. What I lost felt irreplaceable. So I focused every waking moment on running a successful business, on growing the most sought- after wine grapes in the region. The goal I set was so ambitious, and took so much time, that I didn’t have even a minute to think about everything I’d lost.”
Taking me in, I understood, had changed that. I was a constant reminder of family, of love, and I wondered if she regretted her decision.
“Victoria,” Elizabeth asked abruptly. “Are you happy here?”
I nodded, my heartbeat suddenly racing. No one had ever asked me a question like that without immediately following with something like,
“I hate school,” I said. Just uttering the word made my soup bubble up at the back of my throat, a sick, nauseous feeling.
“Do you really hate school? Because I know you don’t hate to learn.”
“I really hate it.” I swallowed once, and then told her what they called me, told her it was just like every school I’d ever been to, that I was singled out, labeled, watched, and never taught.
Elizabeth took her last bite of bread, and then carried her bowl to the sink.
“We’ll withdraw you tomorrow, then. I can teach you more here than you’ll ever learn in that school. And if you ask me, you’ve suffered enough for one lifetime.” She came back to the table, retrieved my bowl, and refilled it to the brim.
My relief was so expansive I finished the second bowl, and then a third. Still, an internal lightness threatened to lift me off the chair and throw me, spinning, up the stairs and into bed.
My photographs were awful. They were so bad I blamed the one-hour photo lab where I had them printed and took the negatives to a specialty store. The sign in front boasted that they printed only the work of professionals. It took them three days to make the prints, and when I picked them up, they were just as bad. Worse, even. My mistakes were more pronounced, the blurry green-and-white blobs more defined within the muddy background. I threw the photos into the gutter and sat down on the curb outside the photography store, defeated.
“Experimenting with abstraction?” I turned. A young woman stood behind me, looking at the photographs littering the street. She wore an apron and smoked a cigarette. The ash floated down around the photos. I wished they would catch fire and burn.
“No,” I said. “Experimenting with failure.”
“New camera?” she asked.
“No, new to photography.”
“What do you need to know?”
I picked one of the prints up out of the street and handed it to her. “Everything,” I said.
She stepped on her cigarette and considered the print. “I think it’s a film-speed issue,” she said, motioning for me to follow her inside. She led me to the film display, pointing out numbers on the corners of the boxes I hadn’t even noticed. The shutter speed was too slow, she explained, and the film speed a poor match for the low light of late afternoon. I wrote everything she said down on the back of the prints and shoved the stack into my back pocket.
I was anxious to get off work the following Saturday. The store was empty; we didn’t have a wedding. Renata was doing paperwork and didn’t look up from her desk all morning. When I tired of waiting for her to release me, I stood close to her desk and tapped my foot on the concrete floor.
“All right, go,” she said, waving me away. I turned and was halfway out the door when I heard her add, “And don’t come back tomorrow, or next week, or the week after.”
I stopped. “What?”
“You’ve worked twice as many hours as I’ve paid you for, you must know that.” I hadn’t been keeping track. It wasn’t as if I could have gotten another job even if I’d wanted to. I had no high school diploma, no college degree, and no skills. I assumed Renata understood this and worked me as she wished. I didn’t feel resentful.
“So?”
“Take a few weeks off. Stop in the Sunday after next and I’ll pay you as if you’d worked—I owe you the
