The Language of Flowers

by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

  It was almost six by the time I got to the donut shop. I opened the double glass doors and found him sitting alone in a booth, a half-dozen donuts in a pink box before him.

  I walked over to the table but did not sit down.

  “Rhododendron,” I demanded, as Elizabeth once had.

  “Beware.”

  “Mistletoe.”

  “I surmount all obstacles.”

  I nodded and continued. “Snapdragon?”

  “Presumption.”

  “White poplar?”

  “Time.” I nodded again, scattering before him the few thistles I had collected on my walk across the city. “Common thistle,” he said. “Misanthropy.”

  I sat down. It had been a test, and he had passed. My relief was disproportional to his five correct answers. Suddenly starving, I dug a maple bar out of the box. I hadn’t eaten anything all day.

  “Why thistle?” he asked, helping himself to a chocolate old-fashioned.

  “Because,” I said between huge bites, “it’s all you need to know about me.”

  He finished his donut and started on another. He shook his head. “Not possible.”

  I took a glazed and a sprinkled donut out of the box and set them on a napkin. He was eating so fast I was afraid the box would be empty before I finished my first.

  “So, what else is there?” I asked, my mouth full.

  He paused, and then looked into my eyes.

  “Where’ve you been for the past eight years?”

  His question stunned me.

  I stopped chewing and tried to swallow, but I’d put too much in my mouth. I spit a brown ball onto a white napkin and looked up.

  All at once, I saw it. The realization was as shocking for its obviousness as for the fact that we had met again; I couldn’t believe I hadn’t recognized him instantly. The boy he had been lurked inside the man he had become, his eyes still deep and afraid, his body, filled out now, still curved in at the shoulders, protective. I flashed on the first time I’d ever seen him, a lanky teenager leaning against the back of a pickup truck, tossing roses.

  “Grant.”

  He nodded.

  My instinct was to run. I’d spent so many years trying not to think about what I’d done, trying not to remember all that I’d lost. But as much as I wanted to flee, my desire to know what had become of Elizabeth, of the grapes, was stronger.

  I covered my face with my hands. They smelled of sugar. In the space between my fingers I whispered my question, not at all sure he would answer: “Elizabeth?”

  He was silent. I peered at him through lines of flesh. He didn’t look angry, as I’d expected, but tormented. He pulled at a patch of hair above his ear, the skin stretching away from his scalp. “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t seen her since—”

  He stopped, looking out the window and then at me. I dropped my hands from my face, searching for his anger. Still, he looked only distressed. The silence was thick between us.

  “I don’t know why you asked me here,” I said finally. “I don’t know why you’d want to see me, after everything that happened.”

  Grant exhaled, the tension in his eyebrows releasing. “I was afraid you wouldn’t want to see me.”

  He licked a finger. The fluorescent light illuminated his eyes and reflected off the stubble on his chin. I was unaccustomed to men in general, having spent my adolescence in all-female group homes with only an occasional male therapist or teacher, and I couldn’t remember having ever been in such proximity to a man who was both young and handsome. Grant was so different from everything I was used to—from the size of his hands, heavy on the table, to the low, quiet voice that echoed into the silence between us.

  “Your mother taught you?” I asked, gesturing to the scattered thistle.

  He nodded. “But she died seven years ago. Your rhododendron was the first message-laden flower I’ve received since. I was surprised I hadn’t forgotten the definition.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “About your mother.” My words didn’t sound heartfelt, but Grant didn’t appear to notice. He shrugged.

  “Elizabeth taught you?” he asked.

  I nodded. “She taught me what she knew,” I said, “but she didn’t know everything.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “ ‘The language of flowers is nonnegotiable, Victoria,’ ” I said, my voice a stern imitation of Elizabeth’s. “And today, in the library, I learned there are three contradictory definitions of the almond blossom.”

  “Indiscretion.”

  “Yes. And no.” I told Grant that white poplar wasn’t listed in my dictionary, and about my trip to the library and the sighting of the yellow rose.

  “Jealousy,” Grant said, when I described the small illustration on the cover of the book.

  “Exactly what it said,” I told him. “But not what I learned.” I finished the last donut, licked my fingers, and retrieved my worn dictionary from my backpack. I opened to the R’s and scanned the page for rose, yellow. I pointed.

  “Infidelity.” His eyes widened. “Whoa.”

  “Changes everything, right?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Changes everything.”

  He reached into his backpack and pulled out a book with a red cloth cover and stem-green endpapers. He turned to the page with yellow rose and set the dictionaries side by side. Jealousy, infidelity. This simple discrepancy, and the ways in which the yellow rose had altered both our lives, hung between us. Grant might have known the details, but I didn’t, and I didn’t ask. Being with him was enough; I had no desire to further uncover the past.

  It didn’t seem like Grant wanted to dwell on the past, either. He closed the empty donut box. “You hungry?”

  I was always hungry. But even more, I wasn’t ready to say goodbye. Grant wasn’t angry; being with him felt like being forgiven. I wanted to soak it up, take it with me, face the next day a little less haunted, a little less hateful.

  I took a breath. “Starving.”

  “Me, too.” He closed both dictionaries and slid mine across the table toward my backpack. “Let’s get dinner and compare. It’s the only way.”

  Grant and I decided to eat dinner at Mary’s Diner, because it stayed open all night. We had hundreds of pages of flowers to compare, and for every discrepancy, we debated the better definition. We agreed that the loser would cross the old definition out of their dictionary and write in the new one.

  We got stuck on the very first flower. Grant’s dictionary defined acacia as friendship, mine as secret love.

  “Secret love,” I said. “Next.”

  “Next? Just like that? You didn’t make much of a case.”

  “It’s thorny and pod-bearing. Just the sway of the tree makes you think of shifty-eyed men in convenience stores, untrustworthy.”

  “And how is untrustworthy related to secret love?” he asked.

  “How is it not?” I shot back.

  Grant appeared unsure how to respond, so he chose another approach. “Acacia. Subfamily: Mimosoideae. Family: Fabaceae. Legumes. They provide sustenance, energy, and satisfaction to the human body. A good friend provides the same.”

  “Blah,” I said. “Five petals. So small they’re almost hidden by a large stamen. Hidden,” I repeated. “Secret. Stamen: love.” My face flushed as I said this, but I didn’t turn away. Grant didn’t, either.

  “Yours,” he said finally, reaching for the black permanent marker on the table between us.

  We continued this way hour after hour, eating and debating. Grant was the only person I had ever met who could match me bite for bite, and, like me, he seemed to never grow full. By sunrise we had ordered and eaten three meals apiece and were only halfway through the C’s.

  Grant surrendered a columbine defeat and snapped his dictionary shut. I hadn’t let him win, not once. “I guess I’m not going to the market today,” he said, looking at me with a guilty expression.

  I looked at my watch. Six a.m. Renata would already be t
here, throwing a surprised glance at Grant’s empty stall. I shrugged. “November’s slow, Tuesday’s slow. Take a day off.”

  “And do what?” Grant asked.

  “How should I know?” I was suddenly tired, ready to be alone.

  I stood, stretched, and put my dictionary in my backpack. Sliding the check across the table toward Grant, I walked out of the restaurant without saying goodbye.

  1.

  Like Elizabeth, Grant was hard to forget. It was more than the intersection of our pasts, more than the drawing of the white poplar, which, in its obscurity, had led me to the truth about the language of flowers. It was something about Grant specifically, the seriousness with which he regarded the flowers, or the tone of his voice when he argued, simultaneously pleading and forceful. He’d shrugged his shoulders when I expressed sympathy at the death of his mother, and this, too, I found intriguing. His past—with the exception of the moments I’d glimpsed as a child—was a mystery to me. Group-home girls divulge their pasts relentlessly, and on the rare occasion I’d met someone unwilling to expose the details of her childhood, it was a relief. With Grant, I felt different. After only one night, I wanted to know more.

  For a week I rose early and spent the library’s open hours comparing definitions. I filled my pockets with smooth stones from a display in front of the Japanese teahouse in Golden Gate Park and used them as paperweights. Lining up dictionaries on two tables, I opened each to the same letter and placed rocks on the corners of the pages. Moving from one book to the next, I compared the entries flower by flower. Whenever I found conflicting definitions, I had long, drawn-out debates in my mind with Grant. Occasionally, I let him win.

  On Saturday I arrived at the flower market before Renata. I handed Grant the scroll I had created, a list of definitions through the letter J, including revisions I’d made to the list we compiled together. When Renata and I returned to Grant’s stall an hour later, he was still reading the scroll. He looked up to watch Renata finger his roses.

  “Wedding today?” he asked.

  Renata nodded. “Two. Small, though. One is my oldest niece. She’s eloping but told me because she wanted me to give her flowers.” Renata rolled her eyes. “Using me, the doll.”

  “An early day, then?” Grant asked, looking at me.

  “Probably, the way Victoria works,” she said. “I’d like to close the shop by three.”

  Grant wrapped Renata’s roses and gave her more change than she deserved. She had stopped bargaining with him; there was no need. We turned to leave.

  “See you then,” he called after us. I turned, my eyes quizzical. He held up three fingers.

  The space below my rib cage expanded. The room felt unnaturally bright and filled with too much oxygen. I concentrated on exhaling, following Renata’s orders without thinking. We had loaded everything into her truck before I remembered my promise of the week before.

  “Wait,” I said, slamming the truck door and leaving Renata inside the cab.

  I raced through the market, looking for red roses and lilac. Grant had bucketsful, but I passed him without looking up. On the way back to the car, I passed him again. Shielding my face with a stalk of white lilac, I peeked in his direction. He held up three fingers again and cracked a shy smile. My face was hot, embarrassed. I hoped he didn’t think the flowers in my arms were for him.

  I worked all day in a nervous haze. The door opened and closed, and customers came in and out, but I never looked up.

  At half past one, Renata lifted the hair off my forehead, and when I raised my head, her eyes were inches from mine.

  “Hello? I’ve called you three times,” she said. “There’s a lady waiting for you.”

  I grabbed the roses and lilac from the walk-in and went into the showroom. The woman faced the door as if she might leave, her shoulders low.

  “I didn’t forget,” I said when I saw her. She turned.

  “Earl said you wouldn’t.” She watched me work, arranging the white lilac around the roses until the red was no longer visible. I wound sprigs of rosemary—which I had learned at the library could mean commitment as well as remembrance—around the stems like a ribbon. The rosemary was young and supple, and did not break when I tied it in a knot. I added a white ribbon for support and wrapped the whole thing in brown paper.

  “First emotions of love, true love, and commitment,” I said, handing her the flowers. She handed me forty dollars. At the register I made change, but when I looked up, she was gone.

  I returned to the worktable, and Renata examined me with a half-smile. “What were you doing out there?”

  “Just giving the people what they want,” I said, rolling my eyes the way Renata had the first day we’d met, when she stood on the sidewalk with dozens of out-of-season tulips.

  “Whatever they want,” Renata agreed, clipping a row of sharp thorns off a yellow rose. A yellow rose for her niece’s wedding: her fugitive, eloping, using niece. Jealousy, infidelity. The specifics of the definition didn’t matter much in this case, I thought. The outcome did not look good. I finished my last table arrangement and looked at the clock. Two-fifteen.

  “I’ll just load these up,” I said to Renata, grabbing as many vases as I could carry. They were too full, and water soaked into my shirt where it spilled over the tops.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Renata said. “Grant’s been waiting on the stoop for two hours. I told him if he was going to sit there, he better not scare away my customers, and he would do my heavy lifting as payment.”

  “He agreed?”

  She nodded, and I set the vases down. Pulling on my backpack, I waved goodbye to Renata, avoiding her eyes. Grant sat on the sidewalk, leaning against the sun-warmed brick wall. He startled as I walked out the door, jumping to his feet.

  “What’re you doing here?” I was surprised by the accusation in my voice.

  “I want to bring you to my farm. I have disagreements with your definitions, and you’ll understand better with my flowers in your hands. You know I’m no good at debating.”

  I looked up and down the hill. I wanted to go with Grant, but being with him made me nervous. It felt illicit. I didn’t know if the feeling was left over from my time with Elizabeth or if it was just too close to romance or friendship, two things I’d spent a lifetime navigating around. I sat down on the curb, thinking.

  “Good,” he said, as if my sitting down was an act of assent. He held out his car keys and nodded across the street. “You can wait in the truck, if you want, while I carry Renata’s flowers. I brought lunch.”

  With the mention of lunch, I overcame my reluctance. I grabbed his keys. In the truck, a white paper bag sat on the passenger seat. I picked it up and climbed inside. The truck was filled with the remains of flowers: Stem clippings littered the floor, and wilted petals worked themselves into the upholstery. I sunk into the seat and opened the bag. A sandwich on a thick French roll: turkey, bacon, tomato, and avocado, with mayonnaise. I took a bite.

  Across the street, Grant carried vases two at a time up the hill. He paused only once at the top, looking downhill to where I sat in the parked car. He smiled and mouthed the words Is it good?

  I hid my face behind the sandwich.

  2.

  The driver leaned away from me as I climbed onto the school bus. I recognized the look on his face—pity, dislike, and more than a little bit of fear—and I slammed my backpack against the empty seat as I sat down. The only reason he should feel sorry for me, I thought angrily, was because I had to look at his ugly, bald head all the way to school.

  Perla sat down across the aisle from me and handed over her ham sandwich before I could demand that she do so. Two months into school, and she understood the drill. I ripped off large chunks and forced them into my mouth, thinking about the way Elizabeth had hurried out of the house that morning, leaving me alone to put my lunch in my backpack and find my shoes. I hadn’t wanted to go to school—had begged to stay home for the first day of harvest. But she h
ad ignored my appeals, even when they turned violent. If you loved me, you’d want me here, I said, hurling my math book at the back of her head as she hurried out the door. I wasn’t fast enough. She disappeared through the doorway and jogged down the front steps, not even turning around at the sound of the book hitting the door frame. I could tell by the way she walked that she wasn’t thinking of me. She hadn’t been all morning. The stress of the harvest was all-consuming, and she wanted me gone, out of her hair. It was the first time I felt that I understood Elizabeth, and in my anger I yelled after her that she wasn’t any different from all my other foster mothers. Stomping all the way to the bus stop, I ignored the stares of the workers arriving by the truckload.

  The bus driver glared at me in the rearview mirror, following each bite of sandwich into my mouth with the same two eyes that should have been watching the road. I opened my mouth while I chewed, and the bus driver’s face pinched in repulsion.

  “So, don’t watch!” I yelled, springing to my feet. “If it’s so disgusting, just don’t watch.” I picked up my backpack, thinking vaguely that I would jump off the moving bus and walk the rest of the way to school, but instead I swung my bag high into the air and brought it down on the driver’s shiny scalp. There was a satisfying smack as my full metal thermos collided with his skull. The bus swerved, the driver swore, and the children screeched at an almost deafening pitch. Somewhere within the layers of noise I heard Perla’s small voice begging me to stop, and then she started to cry. When the bus skidded to a halt on the side of the road and the driver cut off the engine, Perla’s sobs were the last remaining sound.

  “Off,” the driver said. A large knot was already forming on his head, and he pressed the palm of one hand against it while he reached for a radio with the other. I put on my backpack and climbed off the bus. Dust from the road swirled around me as I looked up through the open doors.

  “Your mother’s name,” the driver demanded, pointing down at me.