The Language of Flowers

“What? What do you mean?”

“Just that. You don’t know her.”

“I don’t understand,” Elizabeth whispered, her voice barely audible over a persistent tapping. It sounded like Grant’s foot on the porch, or his knuckles on the frame of the screen. The noise was nervous, impatient.

“I only came over to tell you to stop calling—please.” There was silence between them.

“You can’t tell me to forget her. She’s my sister.”

“Maybe,” Grant said.

“ ‘Maybe’?” Elizabeth’s voice rose suddenly. I could picture her face flushed, hot. Had Elizabeth been stalking the wrong woman? Was Grant even her nephew?

“All I mean is, she isn’t the sister you knew. Please believe me.”

“People change,” Elizabeth said. “Love doesn’t. Family doesn’t.”

There was silence again, and I wished I could see their faces, to see if they were angry, or indifferent, or on the verge of tears.

“Yes,” Grant said finally. “Love does.” I heard footsteps, and I knew he was leaving. When his voice reached me again, it was from far away. “She keeps filling jam jars with lighter fluid. Lining them up on the kitchen windowsill. Says she’s going to burn down your vineyard.”

“No.” Elizabeth did not sound shocked or afraid, only disbelieving. “She wouldn’t do it. I don’t care how much she’s changed in fifteen years. She wouldn’t do that. She loves these vines as much as I do. She always has.”

His truck door slammed. “I just thought you should know,” he said. The engine started, a quiet hum, and it idled there, in the driveway. I imagined Grant’s and Elizabeth’s gazes meeting, each searching the other for the truth.

Finally, Elizabeth called out to him. “Grant?” she said. “You don’t have to leave. There’s leftovers from dinner, and you’re welcome here.”

Wheels turned in the gravel. “No,” he said. “I shouldn’t have come, and I won’t come again. She can never know.”

3.

I waited a second month, and then a third, just to be certain, slipping rent under Natalya’s door when it was due. By the end of October, the nausea had lessened. It returned only when I didn’t eat enough, which was rare. I had plenty of money for meals. Grant’s cash and my own savings would have kept me well fed throughout my pregnancy, but I knew I wouldn’t have to wait that long.

As the leaves fell, I became sure that Grant had given up. I imagined looking through the windows of his water tower and watching him box up the romantic poets and cover the orange box with an opaque cloth, the calculated actions of a man with a past to forget. And soon, I told myself, he would forget. There would be many women at the flower market, women who were more beautiful, exotic, and sexual than I would ever be. If he hadn’t already found one, he would. But even as I tried to convince myself, Grant’s image passed through my mind, his hooded sweatshirt pulled low over his forehead. Not once had I seen him look up at a woman passing his stall.

The day I felt the baby kick for the first time, I returned to the blue room. I lugged the duffel bag across the city to my car and drove to the apartment. Letting myself in the front door, I carried everything up the stairs in three trips. Natalya’s door was open, and I stood over her bed, watching her sleep. She had recently dyed her hair again, and the pink had rubbed off in streaks on the white pillowcase. She smelled like sweet wine and cloves, and she didn’t stir. I shook her awake.

“Has he come?” I asked.

Natalya covered her eyes with her elbow and sighed. “Yeah, a few weeks ago.”

“What did you tell him?”

“Just that you were gone.”

“I was.”

“Yeah. Where’d you go?”

I ignored her question. “Did you tell him I was still paying rent?”

She sat up and shook her head. “I wasn’t entirely sure the money was from you.” She reached out and placed her hand on my stomach. In just the past few weeks, I had gone from looking fat to looking undeniably pregnant. “Renata told me,” she said.

The baby kicked again, its fingers and feet pressing into my internal organs, scraping the walls of my liver, my heart, my spleen. I gagged and ran into kitchen, throwing up into the sink. Dropping down to the floor, I felt the nausea ebb and flow with the motion of the baby. I thought I was past the sickness of early pregnancy; I also thought I had overcome the urge to vomit every time I was touched. One of my two assumptions was inaccurate.

Renata had told Natalya. If she had told Natalya, there was no reason to think she hadn’t told Grant. I climbed my way up the kitchen cabinets and threw up into the sink a second time.

There was a new sign in the window of Bloom. Shorter hours, closed on Sundays. When I arrived in the early afternoon, the storefront was dark and locked, even though the sign said it should be open. I knocked, and when Renata didn’t come, I knocked again. The key was in my pocket, but I didn’t use it. I sat down on the curb and waited.

Fifteen minutes later, Renata returned, the silver tube of a wrapped burrito in her hand. I watched the light reflect off the aluminum and onto the walls of the buildings she passed. I stood up but did not look at her, even when she was standing directly in front of me. My eyes studied my feet, still visible beneath the curve of my stomach.

“Did you tell him?” I asked.

“He doesn’t know?” The shock and accusation in her voice pushed me backward. I stumbled off the curb and into the street. Renata steadied me with her hand on my shoulder. When I looked up, her eyes were kinder than her words had been.

She nodded to my stomach. “When are you due?”

I shrugged. I didn’t know, and it didn’t matter. The baby would come when it did. I would not see a doctor, and I would not give birth in a hospital. Renata seemed to understand all this without me having to tell her.

“My mother will help you. And she won’t charge you anything. She considers it the work for which she was put on this earth.” I could hear Renata’s words coming out of Mother Ruby’s mouth, her accent thicker and her hands on my body. I shook my head.

“Then what do you want from me?” Renata demanded, her frustration escaping in short, punctuated words.

“I want to work,” I said. “And I want you not to tell Grant—that I’m back or that I’m having a baby.”

She sighed. “He deserves to know.”

I nodded. “I know he does.” Grant deserved a lot of things, all of them better than me. “You won’t tell him?”

Renata shook her head. “No. But I won’t lie for you. You can’t work for me, not with Grant asking me every Saturday if you’ve returned to your job. I’ve never been a good liar, and I don’t want to learn now.”

I crumpled onto the curb, and Renata sat beside me. When I checked my pulse underneath the wristband of my watch, the beat was imperceptible. I couldn’t get another job. Even before getting pregnant, the likelihood was slim, and it would be impossible in my current, increasingly visible, condition. The money I had saved would eventually run out. I wouldn’t be able to feed myself or buy whatever it was that made children so infamously expensive.

“Then what will I do?” My despair became anger as it left my body, but Renata didn’t flinch.

“Ask Grant,” she said.

I stood up to leave.

“Wait a minute,” she said. She unlocked the door to Bloom and opened the cash register. Lifting the cash drawer, she extracted a sealed red envelope, my name printed neatly across the front, and a stack of twenty-dollar