Vanessa Diffenbaugh - The Language of Flowers

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 bills. Walking back outside, she held out the cash.

“Your final paycheck,” she said. I didn’t count the money she handed me, but I could tell it was much more than I had earned. When I had put it in my backpack, she handed me the envelope and her unopened burrito. “Protein,” she said. “That’s what my mother always says. It builds the baby’s brain. Or maybe it’s the bones—I can’t remember.”

I thanked her, turning to walk down the hill.

“If you ever need anything,” she called after me, “you know where to find me.”

The rest of the day I spent in the blue room, fighting off waves of nausea as the baby fluttered inside me. The red envelope lay on the white fur floor like a bloodstain, and I sat cross-legged beside it. I couldn’t decide whether to open it or to slip it under the rug and forget about it.

Finally, I decided I had to know. It would be hard to read Grant’s words but even harder to go through the pregnancy without knowing if he had guessed the reason for my abrupt parting.

But when I opened the envelope, it was not what I had expected. It was a wedding invitation: Bethany and Ray, the first weekend in November, Ocean Beach. The wedding was less than two weeks away. I was invited, Bethany wrote on the back, as a guest, but would I also do the flowers? What she wanted most, she wrote, was permanence, and after that, passion. The opposite of the cherry blossom , I thought, cringing at the memory of the afternoon in Catherine’s studio and everything that moment had become. I would suggest honeysuckle, I decided, devotion . The very strength of the vine suggested a permanence I had never experienced but hoped Bethany would.

Bethany had included her phone number and asked me to call by the end of August. The date had long passed, and she had likely found another florist, but I had to try. It was the only foreseeable source of income in what would be a long, idle winter.

Picking up on the second ring, Bethany gasped at the sound of my voice.

“Victoria!” she said. “I’d given up! I found another florist, but that woman is about to lose a job, deposit or no.”