money. I’ll need you again around Christmas, and I have two weddings on New Year’s Day.” She handed me an envelope of cash, the one she should have given me the following day. I put it in my backpack.
“Okay,” I said. “Thanks. I’ll see you in two weeks.”
Grant was in the parking lot of the market when I arrived, loading up a bucket of unsold flowers. I approached and held up the blurry photos, spread out like a fan. “Now you want a lesson?” he asked, amused.
“No.” I climbed inside his truck.
He shook his head. “Chinese or Thai?”
I was reading the notes I had scratched on the back of the embarrassing prints and didn’t answer. When he stopped for Thai, I waited in the car.
“Something spicy,” I called through the open window. “With shrimp.”
I had purchased ten rolls of color film, all different speeds. I would start with 100 in the bright afternoon light and work my way to 800 just after sunset. Grant sat on the picnic table with a book, glancing in my direction every few pages. I barely moved from a low crouch between two white rosebushes. All the flowers were open; in another week, the roses would be gone. As I had the week before, I numbered all my photographs and noted every angle and setting. I was determined to get it right.
When the darkness was nearly complete, I put away my camera. Grant no longer sat at the picnic table. Light shone from the windows of the water tower through a thick layer of steam. Grant was cooking, and I was starving. I gathered all ten rolls of film into my backpack and walked into the kitchen.
“Hungry?” He watched me zip up my backpack and inhale deeply.
“Are you really asking me that?”
Grant smiled. I walked to the refrigerator and opened the door. It was empty except for yogurt and a gallon of orange juice. I picked up the orange juice and drank it out of the container.
“Make yourself at home.”
“Thanks.” I took another swig and sat down at the table. “What’re you making?”
He pointed to six empty cans of beef ravioli. I made a face.
“You want to cook?” he asked.
“I don’t cook. Group homes have cooks, and since then, I’ve eaten out.”
“You’ve always lived in group homes?”
“Since Elizabeth’s. Before that I lived with lots of different people. Some were good cooks,” I said, “others weren’t.”
He studied me as if he wanted to know more, but I didn’t elaborate. We sat down with bowls of ravioli. Outside, it had started to rain again, a pounding rain that threatened to turn the dirt roads into rivers.
When we finished eating, Grant washed his dish and went upstairs. I sat at the kitchen table, waiting for him to come back down and drive me home, but he didn’t. I drank more orange juice and looked out the window. When I grew hungry again, I searched the cupboard until I found an unopened package of cookies and ate every one. Grant still did not return. I put on a pot of tea and stood over it, warming my hands on the open blue flame. The kettle began to whistle.
Filling two mugs, I pulled tea bags from a box on the counter and climbed the stairs.
Grant was sitting on the orange love seat on the second floor, a book open on his lap. I handed him a mug and sat down on the floor in front of the bookshelf. The room was so small that even though I sat as far away from him as possible, he could have touched my knee with his toes by stretching his legs. I turned to the bookshelf. On the bottom was a stack of oversized books: gardening manuals, mostly, interspersed with biology and botany textbooks.
“Biology?” I asked, picking one up and opening it to a scientific drawing of a heart.
“I took a class at a community college. After my mother died, I thought briefly of selling the farm and going to college. But I dropped out of the class halfway through. I didn’t like the lecture halls. Too many people, and not enough flowers.”
A thick blue vein curved out of the heart. I traced it with my finger and looked up at Grant. “What’re you reading?”
“Gertrude Stein.”
I shook my head. I’d never heard of her.
“The poet?” he asked. “You know, ‘A rose is a rose is a rose’?”
I shook my head again.
“During the last year of her life, my mother became obsessed with her,” Grant said. “She’d spent most of her life reading the Victorian poets, and when she found Gertrude Stein, she told me she was a comfort.”
“What does she mean, ‘A rose is a rose is a rose’?” I asked. Snapping the biology book shut, I was confronted with the skeleton of a human body. I tapped the empty eye socket.
“That things just are what they are,” he said.
“ ‘A rose is a rose.’ ”
“ ‘Is a rose,’ ” he finished, smiling faintly.
I thought about all the roses in the garden below, their varying shades of color and youth. “Except when it’s yellow,” I said. “Or red, or pink, or unopened, or dying.”
“That’s what I’ve always thought,” said Grant. “But I’m giving Ms. Stein the opportunity to convince me.” He turned back to his book.
I pulled another book off the shelf, higher up. It was a thin volume of poetry. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I had read most of her work in my early teens, when I’d discovered the Romantic poets often referenced the language of flowers, and read everything I could get my hands on. The pages of the book were earmarked with notes scribbled in the margins. The poem I opened to was eleven verses, all beginning with the words
Grant looked up. He checked his own watch and then looked out the window. It was still raining. “You want to go home?”
The roads were wet; the drive would be slow. I would get soaked in the two blocks between Bloom and the blue room, and Natalya’s band would be practicing. Renata did not expect me at work the following day. No, I realized, I did not particularly want to go home.
“Do I have another choice?” I asked. “I’m not sleeping here with you.”
“I won’t stay here. You can have my bed. Or sleep on the couch. Or wherever.”
“How do I know you won’t come back in the middle of the night?”
Grant pulled his keys out of his pocket and detached the key to the water tower. He handed it to me and walked down the stairs. I followed him out.
In the kitchen he grabbed a flashlight out of a drawer and a flannel jacket off a hook. I opened the door, and he walked out, lingering under the cover of the stoop. Rain ran in sheets around the protected step. “Good night,” he said.
“Spare key?” I asked.
Grant sighed and shook his head, but he was smiling. He leaned over and picked up a rusted watering can, half full of rainwater. He poured the water through the spout as if he was watering the sodden gravel. In the bottom was a key. “It’s probably rusted beyond use. But here you go, just in case.” He handed me the key, and our hands clasped around the wet metal.
“Thanks,” I said. “Good night.” He stood still as I inched the door closed and turned the lock.
I breathed in the emptiness of the water tower and climbed the stairs. On the third floor, I pulled the blanket off Grant’s bed and returned to the kitchen, curling up underneath the picnic table. If the door opened, I would hear it.
But all I heard, all night, was the rain.
Grant knocked on the door at half past ten the next morning. I was still asleep under the table. It had been twelve hours, and my body was stiff and slow to rise. At the door I paused, leaning against the solid wood and rubbing my eyes, my cheekbones, and the back of my neck. I opened the door.
Grant stood in the clothes he’d worn the night before and looked only slightly more awake than I felt. Stumbling into the kitchen, he sat down at the table.
