Vanessa Diffenbaugh - The Language of Flowers

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.”

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.