The Language of Flowers

11.

The image of Grant’s face, disappointed and desperate, kept me awake. I gave up trying to sleep before dawn and sat at the kitchen table, waiting for the sound of the truck’s engine. Instead, I was startled by a quiet knock. When I opened the door, Grant walked sleepily past me and up the stairs. The water started in the shower. I realized it was Sunday.

I wanted to return to the blue room, to Renata, to payday and the approaching frenzy of holiday arranging. I had stayed at Grant’s too long. But he wouldn’t be driving to the city. I sat down on the bottom step and thought about how to convince him of the three-hour round trip on his day off.

I was still thinking when Grant’s foot pushed on the triangle between my shoulder blades. The unexpected pressure caused me to slip off the bottom step and onto the kitchen floor. I scrambled to my feet.

“Get up,” he said. “I’m taking you back.”

His words were familiar. I flashed on the variations of the phrase I’d heard throughout the years: Pack your things. Alexis doesn’t want to share her room anymore. We’re too old to go through this again. More often than not, it was simply Meredith’s coming, with an occasional I’m sorry.

To Grant, I said what I always said: “I’m ready.”

I grabbed my backpack, heavy with his camera and dozens of rolls of film, and climbed into the truck. Grant drove quickly down the still-dark country roads, swerving into oncoming traffic to pass pickups loaded with produce. He took the first exit south of the bridge, and then pulled onto the shoulder of the busy off-ramp. There wasn’t a bus stop in sight. Unmoving, I looked up and down the street.

“I have to get back to the farmers’ market,” he said. He wouldn’t look at me.

Grant cut the engine and walked around the front of the truck. He opened the passenger door and reached inside to grab my backpack from where it rested on my feet. His chest brushed my knees, and when he pulled back, the heat between our bodies dispersed in a cold rush of December air. I jumped out and grabbed my backpack.

So this is how it ends, I thought, with a camera full of images of a flower farm to which I would never return. I missed the flowers already but would not permit myself to miss Grant.

It took four buses to get back to Potrero Hill, but only because I took the 38 in the wrong direction and ended up at Point Lobos. It was mid-morning when I arrived at Bloom, and Renata was just opening the shop. She smiled when she saw me.

“No work and no help for two weeks,” she said. “I’ve been bored out of my mind.”

“Why don’t people marry in December?” I asked.

“What’s romantic about bare trees and gray skies? Couples wait for spring and summer, blue skies, flowers, vacation, all that.”

Blue and gray were equally unromantic in my opinion, I thought, and harsh light was unflattering in photographs. But brides were irrational; I had learned this from Renata, if nothing else.

“When do you need me to work?” I asked.

“I have a big Christmas Day wedding. Then I’ll need you every day through the first weekend in January.”

I agreed, and asked Renata what time I should arrive.

“On Christmas? Oh, sleep in. The wedding’s late, and I’ll buy the flowers the day before. Just make sure you’re here by nine.”

I nodded. Renata withdrew an envelope of cash from the register. “Merry Christmas,” she said.

Later, in the blue room, I opened the envelope and saw that she’d paid me twice as much as she’d promised. Just in time to buy holiday gifts, I thought wryly, tucking the money into my backpack.

I spent most of my bonus on a case of film at a wholesale photography supplier and the remainder at an art store on Market. My dictionary would not be a book; instead, I bought two cloth-covered photo boxes, one orange, the other blue, archival black cardstock cut in five-by-seven-inch rectangles, a spray can of photo mount, and a silver metallic marker.

There were ten days until Christmas. With the exception of shooting my neglected garden in McKinley Square—the heath and helenium surviving despite the bad weather and desertion—I took a break from photography. I had taken twenty-five rolls of film at Grant’s, and it took me the full ten days to have the film developed, sort the prints, mount them on cardstock, and label them. Under each flower photograph, I wrote the common name, followed by the scientific, and on the back I printed the meaning. I made two sets of each flower and placed one in each photo box.

On Christmas Eve, every photo had been mounted and dried. Natalya and her band had gone wherever people go for the holidays, and the apartment was deliciously quiet. Carrying the photo boxes downstairs, I spread the cards out in the empty practice room in neat rows, with aisles wide enough for me to walk down. The cards for the orange box I placed flower side up, the cards for the blue box flower side down. I paced the aisles for hours, alphabetizing first the flowers, then the meanings. When I was done, I replaced all the cards in the boxes and opened Elizabeth’s flower dictionary to admire my progress. It was the middle of winter, and my illustrated dictionary was already half finished.

The pizzeria at the top of the hill was deserted. I took my pizza to go and ate it on Natalya’s bed, looking down over the empty street below. Afterward, I lay down in the blue room. Even though it was quiet, warm, and dark, my eyes kept popping open. A sliver of pale white light shone from the streetlight into Natalya’s room and pushed its way through the crack in the closet door. The light was pencil-thin and drew a line down the wall opposite and through the middle of my photo boxes. The blue box was exactly the same color as the wall, and the orange box, sitting on top of it, looked like it was floating in air. It didn’t belong there.

It belonged on Grant’s bookshelf, across from his orange couch. I had chosen the color specifically for that purpose, even though I hadn’t admitted it to myself. Grant was gone. The need to avoid flower-language miscommunications no longer existed, yet I had purchased an extra box, an orange box, and made a second set of cards. I unlocked the half-door leading to the living room and put the orange box out.

12.

Grant did not come over for blackberry cobbler. He should have, I thought, licking the bottom of the dish the next morning. It was delicious.

As I set the dish in the sink, Elizabeth swept through the back door, breathless. Her hair was loose around her shoulders, and I realized that I had never, in nearly a year, seen her without a tight bun at the back of her neck. She smiled, her eyes filled with an unrestrained happiness I’d never seen.

“I’ve figured it out!” she said. “It’s absurd I didn’t think of it sooner.”

“What?” I asked. Her joy made me inexplicably nervous. Licking congealed blackberry juice off a spoon, I watched her.

“When I was at boarding school, Catherine and I wrote letters—until my mother started intercepting them.”

“Intercepting?”

“Taking. She read them all—she didn’t trust me, thought somehow my letters would corrupt Catherine, even though I was a child and Catherine was already nearly an adult. For years we didn’t write at all. But just after my sister’s twentieth birthday, she discovered a Victorian flower dictionary on my grandfather’s bookshelf. She started