The Language of Flowers

slowly. His face showed both the pleasure of the food and the pride of the accomplishment. He put down his knife and fork, and when he looked across the table, I could see he was enjoying the sight of my ravenous hunger. His watchfulness made me uncomfortable.

I put down my second drumstick, all bones. “You know it won’t, right?” I asked. “Be us?”

Grant looked at me with confusion.

“At the drugstore, the old couple, the slapping and winking; it won’t be us. You won’t know me in sixty years,” I said. “You probably won’t know me in sixty days.”

His smile faded. “Why are you sure?”

I thought about his question. I was sure, and I knew he could tell. But it was hard to explain why I was so sure. “The longest I’ve ever known anyone—unless you count my social worker, which I don’t—is fifteen months.”

“What happened after fifteen months?”

I looked at him, my eyes pleading. When he realized the answer, he looked away, embarrassed.

“But why not now?” It was the exact right question, and when he asked it, I knew the answer.

“I don’t trust myself,” I said. “Whatever you imagine our life would be like together, it won’t happen. I’d ruin it.”

I could see Grant thinking about this, trying to grasp the chasm between the finality in my voice and his vision of our future, and bridging the divide with a combination of hope and lies. I felt something, a combination of pity and embarrassment, for his desperate imaginings.

“Please don’t waste your time,” I said. “Trying. I tried, once, and failed. It’s not possible for me.”

When Grant looked back to me, the expression on his face had changed. His jaw was clenched, his nostrils slightly flared.

“You’re lying,” he said.

“What?” I asked. It was not the response I had expected.

Grant pinched the skin along his hairline with the fingers of one hand, and when he spoke, his words were slow and careful. “Don’t lie. Tell me you’ll never forgive me for what my mother did, or tell me every time you look at me you feel sick. But don’t sit here and lie to me, talking about how it’s your fault we can never be together.”

I picked up the chicken bones, peeling fat away from the tendons. I couldn’t look at him, needed time to process what he was saying. “What my mother did.” There was only one explanation. When I’d first met Grant, I had searched his face for anger, and when I didn’t find it, I claimed forgiveness. But the reality was something else entirely. Grant was not angry with me because even he didn’t know the truth. I didn’t know how it was possible that he’d lived with his mother at the time and still didn’t know, but I didn’t ask.

“I’m not lying.” It was all I could think of to say.

Grant dropped his fork, the metal clattering against the ceramic plate. He stood up. “You’re not the only one whose life she ruined,” he said, then walked out of the kitchen and into the night.

I locked the door behind him.

10.

July was crowded at the farmers’ market. Strollers heaped with produce and nectarine- smeared toddlers blocked aisles, and elderly men with pushcarts waved impatient arms at distracted mothers. Under my feet, discarded pistachio shells crunched. I skipped to keep up with Elizabeth. She was making her way toward the blackberries.

After lunch, Elizabeth told me, we would make blackberry cobbler and homemade ice cream. It was a bribe to keep me inside the house, away from the record-breaking heat and her quickly ripening grapes, and I had reluctantly agreed. All spring, Elizabeth and I had worked side by side at the vineyard, and I didn’t want to leave the plants alone now that there was little to do but wait. I missed the long mornings suckering the vines, trimming shoots that sprouted from the base of the trunk to keep the strength of the vine focused. I missed carrying a kitchen knife and following behind the small tractor Elizabeth used to disk the rows, pulling the remaining weeds by hand as she had taught me to do: first loosening the roots with the sharp point of the knife, then extracting the plants from the soil. I had been wielding the knife for more than three months before I told Elizabeth that allowing children in foster care to use knives was against the child-welfare code. But she didn’t take it away. You’re not a foster child, she had said simply. And though I no longer felt like a foster child (felt, in fact, so different from the girl who had arrived almost a year before that most mornings I studied my face in the bathroom mirror long after Elizabeth called me to breakfast, looking for physical signs of the change I knew to have occurred), this was not entirely the truth. I was still a foster child, and would be until after my court appearance in August.

Pushing my way through a thick crowd, I reached Elizabeth’s side. “Blackberries?” she asked, passing me a green paper tray. On a red-cloth-covered table the vendor had displayed tall stacks of blackberries, ollalieberries, raspberries, and boysenberries. I plucked one from the tray and put it in my mouth. It was fat and sweet, and stained my fingertips purple where I touched it.

Elizabeth dumped six paper trays in a plastic bag and paid for her purchase, then moved on to the next stand. I followed her around the hot market, carrying the bags that wouldn’t fit in her overflowing canvas sack. At a dairy truck, she handed me a milk jug, the glass of the bottle sweating. “Done?” I asked.

“Almost. Come,” she said, beckoning me toward the far end of the market. Before she had even passed the Blenheim apricots, the last vendor in the line we knew, I understood where we were going. Tucking the slick bottle under my arm, I skipped to Elizabeth, holding her sleeve and pulling her back. But she only walked faster. She didn’t stop until she reached the flower stand.

Bunches of roses lined the table. Up close, the perfection of the flowers was startling: each petal stiff and smooth, pressed one on top of the other, the tips a neat coil. Elizabeth stood still, studying the flowers as I did. I gestured to a mixed bouquet, hoping she might choose a bundle, pay, and turn to leave without speaking. But before she could make a purchase, the teenager swept the remaining flowers from the table, tossing them into the back of his truck. My eyes widened. He would not sell to Elizabeth. I watched her face for a reaction, but she was unreadable.

“Grant?” she said. He did not respond, did not glance in her direction. She tried again. “I’m your aunt. Elizabeth. You must know this.” Leaning over the bed of his truck, he arranged a tarp over the layer of flowers. His eyes focused on the roses, but his ears peeled back slightly, his chin raised. Up close, he looked older. Light fuzz covered his upper lip, and his limbs, which I’d believed to be spindly, were defined. He wore only a plain white undershirt, and the curve of his shoulder blades caused a rise and fall in the thin material that I found mesmerizing.

“Are you going to ignore me?” Elizabeth asked. When he didn’t respond, her voice changed, the way I remembered it from my first few weeks in her home: strict, patient, and then unexpectedly angry. “Look at me, at least, won’t you? Look at me when I speak to you.”

He didn’t.

“This doesn’t have anything to do with you. It never has. For years I’ve watched you grow up from a distance, and I’ve wanted more than anything to run over here and scoop you into my arms.”

Grant secured the tarp with a rope, the muscles in his arms taut. It was hard to imagine anyone scooping him up, hard to imagine he wasn’t always this strong. Tightening a final knot, he turned.

“You should have, then, if that’s what you wanted to do.” His voice was cold, unemotional. “No one was stopping you.”

“No,” Elizabeth said, shaking her head. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Her words were low, underlined by a deep vibration I recognized from previous foster placements as the predecessor to an attack. But she did not leap at him, as I half expected her to do. Instead, she said something so surprising that Grant spun to face me, his eyes meeting mine for the first time.

“Victoria’s making blackberry cobbler,” she whispered. “You should come over.”