The Language of Flowers

1.

For eight years I dreamed of fire. Trees ignited as I passed them; oceans burned. The sugary smoke settled in my hair as I slept, the scent like a cloud left on my pillow as I rose. Even so, the moment my mattress started to burn, I bolted awake. The sharp, chemical smell was nothing like the hazy syrup of my dreams; the two were as different as Carolina and Indian jasmine, separation and attachment. They could not be confused.

Standing in the middle of the room, I located the source of the fire. A neat row of wooden matches lined the foot of the bed. They ignited, one after the next, a glowing picket fence across the piped edging. Watching them light, I felt a terror unequal to the size of the flickering flames, and for a paralyzing moment I was ten years old again, desperate and hopeful in a way I had never been before and would never be again.

But the bare synthetic mattress did not ignite like the thistle had in late October. It smoldered, and then the fire went out.

It was my eighteenth birthday.

In the living room, a row of fidgeting girls sat on the sagging couch. Their eyes scanned my body and settled on my bare, unburned feet. One girl looked relieved; another disappointed. If I’d been staying another week, I would have remembered each expression. I would have retaliated with rusty nails in the soles of shoes or small pebbles in bowls of chili. Once, I’d held the end of a glowing metal clothes hanger to a sleeping roommate’s shoulder, for an offense less severe than arson.

But in an hour, I’d be gone. The girls knew this, every one.

From the center of the couch, a girl stood up. She looked young—fifteen, sixteen at most—and was pretty in a way I didn’t see much of: good posture, clear skin, new clothes. I didn’t immediately recognize her, but when she crossed the room there was something familiar about the way she walked, arms bent and aggressive. Though she’d just moved in, she was not a stranger; it struck me that I’d lived with her before, in the years after Elizabeth, when I was at my most angry and violent.

Inches from my body, she stopped, her chin jutting into the space between us.

“The fire,” she said evenly, “was from all of us. Happy birthday.”

Behind her, the row of girls on the couch squirmed. A hood was pulled up, a blanket wrapped tighter. Morning light flickered across a line of lowered eyes, and the girls looked suddenly young, trapped. The only ways out of a group home like this one were to run away, age out, or be institutionalized. Level 14 kids weren’t adopted; they rarely, if ever, went home. These girls knew their prospects. In their eyes was nothing but fear: of me, of their housemates, of the life they had earned or been given. I felt an unexpected rush of pity. I was leaving; they had no choice but to stay.

I tried to push my way toward the door, but the girl stepped to the side, blocking my path.

“Move,” I said.

A young woman working the night shift poked her head out of the kitchen. She was probably not yet twenty, and more terrified of me than any of the girls in the room.

“Please,” she said, her voice begging. “This is her last morning. Just let her go.”

I waited, ready, as the girl before me pulled her stomach in, fists clenched tight. But after a moment, she shook her head and turned away. I walked around her.

I had an hour before Meredith would come for me. Opening the front door, I stepped outside. It was a foggy San Francisco morning, the concrete porch cool on my bare feet. I paused, thinking. I’d planned to gather a response for the girls, something biting and hateful, but I felt strangely forgiving. Maybe it was because I was eighteen, because, all at once, it was over for me, that I was able to feel tenderness toward their crime. Before I left, I wanted to say something to combat the fear in their eyes.

Walking down Fell, I turned onto Market. My steps slowed as I reached a busy intersection, unsure of where to go. Any other day I would have plucked annuals from Duboce Park, scoured the overgrown lot at Page and Buchanan, or stolen herbs from the neighborhood market. For most of a decade I’d spent every spare moment memorizing the meanings and scientific descriptions of individual flowers, but the knowledge went mostly unutilized. I used the same flowers again and again: a bouquet of marigold, grief; a bucket of thistle, misanthropy; a pinch of dried basil, hate. Only occasionally did my communication vary: a pocketful of red carnations for the judge when I realized I would never go back to the vineyard, and peony for Meredith, as often as I could find it. Now, searching Market Street for a florist, I scoured my mental dictionary.

After three blocks I came to a liquor store, where paper-wrapped bouquets wilted in buckets under the barred windows. I paused in front of the store. They were mostly mixed arrangements, their messages conflicting. The selection of solid bouquets was small: standard roses in red and pink, a wilting bunch of striped carnations, and, bursting from its paper cone, a cluster of purple dahlias. Dignity. Immediately, I knew it was the message I wanted to give. Turning my back to the angled mirror above the door, I tucked the flowers inside my coat and ran.

I was out of breath by the time I returned to the house. The living room was empty, and I stepped inside to unwrap the dahlias. The flowers were perfect starbursts, layers of white-tipped purple petals unfurling from tight buds of a center. Biting off an elastic band, I detangled the stems. The girls would never understand the meaning of the dahlias (the meaning itself an ambiguous statement of encouragement); even so, I felt an unfamiliar lightness as I paced the long hall, slipping a stem under each closed bedroom door.

The remaining flowers I gave to the young woman who’d worked the night shift. She was standing by the kitchen window, waiting for her replacement.

“Thank you,” she said when I handed her the bouquet, confusion in her voice. She twirled the stiff stems between her palms.

Meredith arrived at ten o’clock, as she’d told me she would. I waited on the front porch, a cardboard box balanced on my thighs. In eighteen years I’d collected mostly books: the Dictionary of Flowers and Peterson Field Guide to Pacific States Wildflowers, both sent to me by Elizabeth a month after I left her home; botany textbooks from libraries all over the East Bay; thin paperback volumes of Victorian poetry stolen from quiet bookstores. Stacks of folded clothes covered the books, a collection of found and stolen items, some that fit, many that did not. Meredith was taking me to The Gathering House, a transitional home in the Outer Sunset. I’d been on the waiting list since I was ten.

“Happy birthday,” Meredith said as I put my box on the backseat of her county car. I didn’t say anything. We both knew that it might or might not have been my birthday. My first court report listed my age as approximately three weeks; my birth date and location were unknown, as were my biological parents. August 1 had been chosen for purposes of emancipation, not celebration.

I slunk into the front seat next to Meredith and closed the door, waiting for her to pull away from the curb. Her acrylic fingernails tapped against the steering wheel. I buckled my seat belt. Still, the car did not move. I turned to face Meredith. I had not changed out of my pajamas, and I pulled my flannel-covered knees up to my chest and wrapped my jacket around my legs. My eyes scanned the roof of Meredith’s car as I waited for her to speak.

“Well, are you ready?” she asked.

I shrugged.

“This is it, you know,” she said. “Your life starts here. No one to blame but yourself from here on out.”

Meredith Combs, the social worker responsible for selecting the stream of adoptive families that gave me back, wanted to talk to me about blame.

2.

I pressed my forehead against the window and watched the dusty summer hills roll past. Meredith’s car smelled like cigarette smoke, and there was mold on the strap of the seat belt from something some other child had been allowed to eat. I was nine years old. I sat in the backseat of the car in my nightgown, my cropped hair a tangled mess. It was not the way Meredith had wanted it. She’d purchased a dress for the occasion, a flowing, pale blue shift with embroidery and lace. But I had refused to wear it.

Meredith stared at the road ahead. She didn’t see me unbuckle my seat belt, roll down the window, and stick my head out until my collarbone pressed against the top of the door. Tilting my chin up into the wind, I waited for her to tell me to sit down. She glanced back at me but didn’t say anything. Her mouth remained a tight line, and I couldn’t see her expression underneath her sunglasses.

I stayed this way until Meredith touched a button on her door that made the window rise an inch without warning. The thick glass pressed into my outstretched neck. I flew back, bouncing off the seat and sinking down onto the floor. Meredith continued to raise the window until the wind rushing through the car was replaced by silence. She did not look back. Curling up on the dirty carpet, I pulled a rancid baby bottle from deep beneath the passenger seat and threw it at Meredith. It hit her shoulder and flew back at me, leaking a sour puddle onto my knees. Meredith didn’t flinch.

“Do you want peaches?” she asked.

Food was something I could never refuse, and Meredith knew it.

“Yes.”

“Then get in your seat, buckle your seat belt, and I’ll buy you whatever you want at the next fruit stand we pass.”

I climbed onto the seat and pulled the seat belt across my waist.

Fifteen minutes passed before Meredith pulled off the freeway. She bought me two peaches and a half-pound of cherries, which I counted as I ate.

“I’m not supposed to tell you this,” Meredith began as we turned back onto the road. Her words were slow, the sentence drawn out for effect. She paused and glanced back at me. I held my gaze out the window and rested my cheek against the glass, unresponsive. “But I think you deserve to know. This is your last chance. Your very last chance, Victoria—did you hear me?” I didn’t acknowledge her question. “When you turn ten, the county will label you unadoptable, and even I won’t keep trying to convince families to take you. It’ll be group home after group home until you emancipate if this doesn’t work out—just promise me you’ll think about that.”

I rolled down the window and spit cherry seeds into the wind. Meredith had picked me up from my first stay at a group home just an hour before. It struck me that my placement in the home might have been purposeful—in preparation for this exact moment. I hadn’t done anything to get kicked out of my last foster home, and I was in the group home only a week before Meredith came to take me to Elizabeth.

It would be just like Meredith, I thought, to make me suffer to prove her point. The staff at the group home had been cruel. Every morning the cook made a fat, dark-skinned girl eat with her shirt pulled up around her neck, her bulging belly exposed, so she would remember not to eat too much. Afterward, the housemother, Miss Gayle, chose one of us to stand at the head of the long table and explain why our family didn’t want us. Miss Gayle picked me only once, and since I was abandoned at birth, I got away with saying “My mother didn’t want a baby.” Other girls told stories of the awful things they’d done to siblings, or why they were responsible for their parents’ drug addictions, and almost always they cried.

But if Meredith had placed me in the group home to scare me into behaving, it hadn’t worked. Despite the staff, I liked it there. Meals were served at regular hours, I slept under two blankets, and no one pretended to love me.

I ate the last cherry and spit the seed at the back of Meredith’s head.

“Just think about it,” she said again. As if to bribe me into contemplation, she pulled over and purchased a steaming basket of fish and chips and a chocolate milkshake from a drive-through. I ate quickly, sloppily, watching the dry landscape of the East Bay turn into the crowded chaos of San Francisco and then open up into a great expanse of water. By the time we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, my nightgown was covered in peaches, cherries, ketchup, and ice cream.

We passed dry fields, a flower farm, and an empty parking lot, and finally came to a vineyard, the vines neat stripes on the rolling hillside. Meredith braked hard and turned left onto a long dirt driveway, increasing her speed on the bumpy road as if she couldn’t wait another moment to get me out of her car. We went flying past picnic tables and rows of carefully tended, thick-trunked grapevines growing on low wires. Meredith slowed slightly at a turn before picking up speed again and driving toward a gathering of tall trees in the center of the property, dust billowing around her county car.

When she stopped and the dust cleared, I saw a white farmhouse. It stood two stories tall with a peaked roof, a glass-enclosed porch, and lace curtains covering the windows. To the right was a low metal trailer and more than one slumping shed, toys, tools, and bikes scattered between them. Having lived in a trailer before, I immediately wondered if Elizabeth would have a foldout couch or if I would have to share her bedroom. I didn’t like listening to people breathe.

Meredith didn’t wait to see if I would get out of the car voluntarily. She unbuckled my seat belt, grabbed me under my arms, and pulled me kicking to the front of the large house. I expected Elizabeth to come out of the trailer, so I had my back to the front porch and didn’t see her before feeling her bony fingers on my shoulder. Shrieking, I bolted forward, sprinting on bare feet to the far side of the car and then crouching down behind it.

“She doesn’t like to be touched,” I heard Meredith say to Elizabeth with obvious annoyance. “I told you that. You have to wait until she comes to you.” It angered me that she knew this. I rubbed the skin where Elizabeth had grabbed me, erasing her fingerprints, and stayed out of sight behind the car.

“I’ll wait,” Elizabeth said. “I told you I would wait, and I don’t intend to go back on my word.”

Meredith began to recite the usual list of reasons she couldn’t stay to help us get to know each other: an ailing grandparent, an anxious husband, and her fear of driving at night. Elizabeth’s foot tapped impatiently near the rear tire as she listened. In a moment Meredith would be gone, leaving me exposed in the gravel. I crawled backward, low to the ground. Darting behind a walnut tree, I stood up and ran.

At the end of the trees I ducked into the first row of grapes, hiding within a dense plant. I pulled down the loose vines and wrapped them around my thin body. From my hiding spot I could hear Elizabeth coming toward me, and by adjusting the vines I could see her walking along one of the aisles. I let my hand drop from my mouth with relief as she passed my row.

Reaching up, I picked a grape from the nearest bunch and bit through the thick skin. It was sour. I spit it out and smashed the rest of the bunch one at a time under my foot, the juice squishing between my toes.

I didn’t see or hear Elizabeth come back in my direction. But just as I began to smash a second bunch of grapes, she reached down into the vines, grabbed me by the arms, and pulled me out of my hiding spot. She held me out in front of her. My feet dangled an inch above the ground while she looked me over.

“I grew up here,” she said. “I know all the good hiding spots.”

I tried to break loose, but Elizabeth held firmly to both my arms. She set my feet down on the dirt but did not loosen her grasp. I kicked dust onto her shins, and when she didn’t release my arms, I kicked her ankles. She did not step back.

I let out a growl and snapped my teeth toward her outstretched arm, but she saw me coming and grabbed my face. She squeezed my cheeks until my jaw loosened and my lips puckered. I sucked in my breath in pain.

“No biting,” she said, and then leaned forward as if she would kiss my pink puckered lips but stopped inches from my face, her dark eyes drilling into mine. “I like to be touched,” she said. “You’ll have to get used to it.”

She flashed me an amused grin and let go of my face.

“I won’t,” I promised. “I won’t ever get used to it.”

But I stopped fighting and let her pull me up the front porch and inside the cool, dark house.

3.

Meredith turned off Sunset Boulevard and drove too slowly down Noriega, reading each street sign. An impatient car honked behind us.

She’d been talking continuously since Fell Street, and the list of reasons my survival seemed unlikely stretched halfway across San Francisco: no high school diploma, no motivation, no support network, a complete lack of social skills. She was asking for my plan, demanding I think about my own self-sufficiency.

I ignored her.

It hadn’t always been this way between us. As a young child I’d soaked up her chatty optimism, sitting on the edge of a bed while she brushed and braided my thin brown hair, tying it up with a ribbon before presenting me like a gift to a new mother, a new father. But as the years passed, and family after family gave me back, Meredith’s hopefulness chilled. The once-gentle hairbrush pulled, stopping and starting with the rhythm of her lecturing. The description of how I should act lengthened with each placement change, and became more and more different from the child I knew myself to be. Meredith kept a running list of my deficiencies in her appointment book and read them to the judge like criminal convictions. Detached. Quick-tempered. Tight-lipped. Unrepentant. I remembered every word she said.

But despite her frustrations, Meredith had kept my case. She refused to transfer it out of the adoptions unit even when a tired judge suggested, the summer I turned eight, that perhaps she’d done all she could. Meredith negated this claim without pause. For a buoyant, bewildered moment I thought her reaction had come from a place of hidden fondness for me, but when I turned my gaze I saw her pale skin pink in embarrassment. She had been my social worker since birth; if I was to be declared a failure, I was, by extension, her failure.

We pulled up in front of The Gathering House, a peach, flat-roofed stucco house in a row of peach, flat-roofed stucco houses.

“Three months,” Meredith said. “I want to hear you say it. I want to know you understand. Three months’ free rent, and after that you pay up or move out.”

I said nothing. Meredith stepped out and slammed the car door behind her.

My box in the backseat had shifted during the drive, my clothes spilling out onto the seat. I piled them back on top of the books and followed Meredith up the front steps. She rang the bell.

It was more than a minute before the door opened, and when it did a cluster of girls stood in the entryway. I clutched my box tighter to my chest.

A short, heavy-legged girl with long blond hair pushed open the metal screen and stuck out her hand. “I’m Eve,” she said.

Meredith stepped on my foot, but I didn’t reach for her outstretched hand. “This is Victoria Jones,” she said, pushing me forward. “She’s eighteen today.”

There was a mumbling of happy birthdays, and two girls exchanged eyebrow-arched glances.

“Alexis was evicted last week,” Eve said. “You get her room.” She turned as if to take me there, and I followed her down a dark, carpeted hall to an open doorway. Slipping inside, I closed the door and turned the lock behind me.

The room was bright white. It smelled like fresh paint, and the walls, when I touched them, were tacky. The painter had been sloppy. The carpet, once white like the walls but now mottled from use, was streaked with paint near the baseboard. I wished the painter had kept going, painted the entire carpet, the single mattress, and the dark wood nightstand. The white was clean and new, and I liked that it had belonged to no one before me.

From the hall, Meredith called me. She knocked, and knocked again. I set my heavy box down in the middle of the room. Pulling out my clothes, I piled them onto the closet floor and stacked my books on the nightstand. When the box was empty, I ripped it into strips to cover the bare mattress and lay down on top. Light streamed through a small window and reflected off the walls, warming the exposed skin on my face, neck, and hands. The window was south-facing, I noticed, good for orchids and bulbs.

“Victoria?” Meredith called again. “I need to know your plan. Just tell me your plan and I’ll leave you alone.”

I closed my eyes, ignoring the sound of her knuckles against the wood. Finally, she stopped knocking.

When I opened my eyes, an envelope lay on the carpet near the door. Inside, there was a twenty-dollar bill and a note that read: Buy food and find a job.

Meredith’s twenty-dollar bill bought five gallons of whole milk. Every morning for a week I made my purchase at the corner store, drinking the creamy liquid slowly throughout the day as I wandered from city parks to schoolyards, identifying the local plants. Having never lived so near the ocean, I expected the landscape to be unfamiliar. I expected the dense morning fog, hovering only inches from the soil, would cultivate an array of vegetation I had never before seen. But except for wide mounds of aloe near the water’s edge, tall red flowers reaching for the sky, I found a surprising lack of newness. The same foreign plants I’d seen in gardens and nurseries all over the Bay Area—lantana, bougainvillea, potato vine, and nasturtium—dominated the neighborhood. Only the scale was different. Wrapped in the opaque moisture of the coast, plants grew bigger, brighter, and wilder, eclipsing low fences and garden sheds.

When I finished a gallon of milk I would return home, cut the jug in half with a kitchen knife, and wait for night. The soil in the next-door neighbor’s flower bed was dark and rich, and I transferred it into my improvised flowerpots with a soupspoon. Poking holes in the bottoms of the jugs, I set them in the center of my bedroom floor, where they would get direct sun for only a few hours in the late mornings.

I would look for a job; I knew I needed to. But for the first time in my life I had my own bedroom with a locking door, and no one telling me where to be or what to do. Before I started searching for work, I’d decided, I would grow a garden.

By the end of my first week I had created fourteen flowerpots and surveyed a sixteen-block radius for my options. Focusing on fall-blooming flowers, I uprooted whole plants from front yards, community gardens, and playgrounds. Usually I walked home, my hands cradling muddy root balls, but on more than one occasion I ended up lost, or too far from The Gathering House. On these days I would sneak onto a crowded bus through the back door, push my way onto a seat, and ride until the neighborhood became familiar. Back in my room, I spread out the shocked roots gently, covered them with the nutrient-rich soil, and watered deeply. The milk jugs drained right onto the carpet, and as the days passed, weeds began to sprout from the worn fiber. I hovered, watchful, plucking the invasive species almost before they could push their way out of the darkness.

Meredith checked in on me weekly. The judge had declared her my permanent connection, because emancipation legislation required a connection and they couldn’t dig anyone else out of my file. I did my best to avoid her. When I returned from my walks, I surveyed The Gathering House from the corner, walking up the front steps only when her white car wasn’t parked in the driveway. Eventually she divined my tactic, and in early September I unlocked the front door to find her sitting at the dining room table.

“Where’s your car?” I demanded.

“Parked around the block,” she said. “I haven’t seen you in over a month, so I figured you must be avoiding me. Is there a reason?”

“No reason.” I walked to the table and pushed someone’s dirty dishes out of the way. Sitting down, I placed fistfuls of lavender—which I had uprooted from a front yard in Pacific Heights—on the scratched wood between us. “Lavender,” I said, handing her a sprig. Mistrust.

Meredith spun the sprig between her thumb and forefinger and set it down, uninterested. “Job?” she asked.

“What job?”

“Do you have one?”

“Why would I have one?”

Meredith sighed. She picked up the lavender I’d given her and launched it, tip first, in my direction. It nose-dived like a poorly constructed paper airplane. Snatching it off the table, I smoothed its ruffled petals with a careful thumb.

“You would have one,” Meredith said, “because you’ve looked for one, and applied, and been hired. Because if you don’t, you’ll be out on the street in six weeks, and there won’t be anyone opening their door for you on a cold night.”

I looked to the front door, wondering how much longer until she’d leave.

“You have to want it,” Meredith said. “I can only do so much. At the end of the day, you have to want it.”

Want what? I always wondered when she said this. I wanted Meredith to leave. I wanted to drink the milk on the top shelf of the refrigerator labeled LORRAINE and add the empty jug to the collection in my room. I wanted to plant the lavender near my pillow and go to sleep inhaling the cool, dry scent.

Meredith stood. “I’ll be back next week when you least expect me, and I want to see a thick stack of job applications in your backpack.” She paused at the door. “It’ll be hard for me to put you out on the street, but you should know that I’ll do it.”

I did not believe it would be hard.

I walked into the kitchen and opened the freezer, poking through egg rolls and frostbitten corn dogs until I heard the front door close.

I spent my final weeks at The Gathering House transplanting my bedroom garden into McKinley Square, a small city park at the top of Potrero Hill. I’d found it while pacing the streets for help-wanted signs, and been distracted by the park’s perfect combination of sun, shade, solitude, and safety. Potrero Hill was one of the warmest neighborhoods in the city, and the park was located at a peak, with a clear view in every direction. A small, sandy play structure sat in the middle of a manicured square of lawn, but behind the lawn the park became forested and steep, tumbling downhill in a tangle of shrubs overlooking San Francisco General Hospital and a brewery. Instead of continuing my job search, I’d transported my jugs one at a time to the secluded spot. I chose the location for each planting thoughtfully—shade-loving plants under tall trees, those desiring sun a dozen yards down the hill, out of the shadows.

The morning of my eviction I awoke before dawn. My room was empty, the floor still damp and dirty in patches where the milk jugs had been. My imminent homelessness had not been a conscious decision; yet, rising to dress on the morning I was to be turned out onto the street, I was surprised to find that I was not afraid. Where I had expected fear, or anger, I was filled with nervous anticipation, the feeling similar to what I’d experienced as a young girl, on the eve of each new adoptive placement. Now, as an adult, my hopes for the future were simple: I wanted to be alone, and to be surrounded by flowers. It seemed, finally, that I might get exactly what I wanted.

My room was empty except for three sets of clothes, my backpack, a toothbrush, hair gel, and the books Elizabeth had given me. Lying in bed the night before, I’d listened to my housemates picking through the rest of my belongings like hungry animals devouring the fallen. It was standard procedure in foster and group homes, the scouring of things left behind by rushed, weepy children. My housemates, emancipated, carried on the tradition.

It’d been years—nearly ten—since I’d participated in the scavenging, but I could still remember the thrill of finding something edible, something I could sell at school for a nickel, something mysterious or personal. In elementary school I began to collect these small, forgotten things like treasures—a silver charm with an engraved M, a watchband of fake turquoise snakeskin, a quarter-sized pillbox containing a blood-encrusted molar—stuffing them into a mesh zippered bag I’d stolen from someone’s laundry room. The objects pressed through the tiny holes of the fabric as the bag grew full and heavy.

For a short time I told myself I was saving these objects for their rightful owners—not to give them back but to use as bribes for food or favors if we landed again in the same home. But as it grew I began to covet my collection, telling myself the stories of each object over and over again: the time I lived with Molly, the girl who loved cats; the bunk-mate whose watch had been ripped off and arm broken; the basement apartment where Sarah learned the truth about the Tooth Fairy. My attachment to the objects was not based on any connection with the individuals. More often than not I had avoided them, ignoring their names, their circumstances, the hopes they had for their futures. But over time the objects came to read like a string of clues to my past, a path of bread crumbs, and I had a vague sense of wanting to follow them back to the place before my memories began. Then, in a rushed, chaotic placement change, I’d been forced to leave the bag behind. For years afterward I’d refused to pack up my belongings, arriving at each new foster home stubbornly empty-handed.

Quickly, I began to dress: two tank tops followed by three T-shirts and a hooded sweatshirt, brown stretch pants, socks, and shoes. My brown wool blanket would not fit in my backpack, so I folded it in half, wrapped it around my waist, and secured a pleat with a safety pin at each inch. The bottom I gathered and pinned in bunches like a formal petticoat, covering the whole thing with two skirts of varying lengths, the first long and lacy orange, the second A-line and burgundy. I studied myself in the bathroom mirror as I brushed my teeth and washed my face, satisfied to see that I was neither attractive nor repulsive. My curves were well hidden beneath my clothing, and the extra-short haircut I’d given myself the night before made my bright blue eyes—the only remarkable feature on an otherwise ordinary face—look uncannily large, almost frightening in their dominance of my face. I smiled into the mirror. I didn’t look homeless. Not yet, at least.

I paused in the doorway of my empty room. Sunlight shone off the white walls. I wondered who would come next, and what they’d think of the weeds sprouting from the carpet near the foot of the bed. If I had thought of it, I would have left the new girl a milk jug full of fennel. The feathery plant and licorice-sweet smell would have been a comfort. But it was too late. I nodded goodbye to the room that would no longer be mine, feeling a sudden gratitude for the angle of the sun, the locking door, the brief offering of time and space.

I hurried into the living room. Through the window I saw Meredith’s car already in the driveway, the engine off. She studied her reflection in the rearview mirror, her hands clutching the steering wheel. Spinning around, I snuck out the back door and onto the first bus that passed.

I never saw Meredith again.

4.

From the brewery at the bottom of the hill, steam rose smokelike into the sky day and night. I watched the spread of white while I weeded, the image infusing my contentment with an edge of despair.

November in San Francisco was mild, McKinley Square quiet. My garden, except for a sensitive matilija poppy, survived the transplant, and for the first twenty-four hours I imagined I could be satisfied with an anonymous life, hidden in the safety of the trees. I listened as I worked, prepared to run at the sound of footsteps, but no one wandered off the manicured lawn, no one poked a curious face into the forest where I crouched. Even the playground was empty except for a fifteen-minute window before school, when closely monitored children swung (one, two, three times) before continuing down the hill. By the third day, I could match the children’s voices with their names. I knew who listened to their mother (Genna), who was loved by their teacher (Chloe), and who would rather be buried alive in the sandbox than sit through another day of class (Greta, little Greta; if my asters had been in bloom, I would have left her a bucketful in the sandbox, so desolate was the voice that begged her mother to let her stay). The families couldn’t see me, and I couldn’t see them, but as the days passed I began to look forward to their visits. I spent the early mornings thinking about which child I would have been most like, had I had a mother to walk me to school every morning. I imagined myself obedient instead of defiant, quick to smile instead of sullen. I wondered if I would still love flowers, if I would still crave solitude. Questions, unanswerable, swirled like water at the roots of my wild geraniums, which I soaked deeply and often.

When my hunger grew to the point of distraction, I climbed onto buses and rode to the Marina, Fillmore Street, or Pacific Heights. I toured high-end delis, lingering at polished marble countertops and sampling an olive, a slice of Canadian bacon, or a sliver of Havarti. I asked the questions Elizabeth would have asked: which olive oils were unfiltered; exactly how “fresh” was the albacore, the salmon, the sole; how sweet were the season’s first blood oranges? I accepted additional samples, feigned indecision. Then, when the attendant turned to another customer, I walked out the door.

Afterward, my hunger barely appeased, I wandered the hills, looking for plants to add to my growing garden. I searched private yards as often as public parks, slipping beneath canopies of morning glory and passionflower. On the rare occasion I settled near a plant I could not identify, I pinched a stem and carried it quickly to a crowded restaurant, where I waited for a customer to leave before taking my place at her table. Sitting before abandoned plates of half-eaten lasagna or risotto, I placed the distressed bud in a sweating water glass, its weakened green neck drooping against the lip of the glass. As I ate small, saucy bites, I thumbed through my field guide, studying the parts of the plant and answering questions methodically: Petals numerous or not apparent? Leaves swordlike, emerging from one another, or heart-shaped? Plant with copious milky juice, ovary hanging to one side of flower, or without milky juice, ovary erect? When I had deduced the plant family and memorized its common and scientific name, I pressed the flower between the pages and looked around, hoping to find another half-empty plate.

The third night, sleep evaded me. My empty stomach churned, and for the first time, my flowers offered no reassurance. Instead, the dark floral silhouettes were reminders of the time I’d had to look for a job, the time I’d been given to start a new life. I pulled my blanket tighter around my head and closed my eyes, drifting in and out of consciousness, refusing to think about what I would do when the next day arrived, or the day after that.

In the middle of the night, I was startled awake by the sharp smell of tequila. My eyes snapped open. The heath bush I’d transplanted from an alley off Divisadero stretched its needled arms over my head. Between the new growth and glowing bell-shaped blossoms, I saw the outline of a man bend over and snap a stem of my helenium. His tequila bottle leaned over as he did, alcohol splashing out of the top and landing on the shrub concealing my body. A girl behind him reached for the bottle. She sat down on the ground with her back to me and tilted her face to the sky.

The man held out the flower, and in the moonlight I could tell he was young: too young to be drinking, too young even to be out after dark. He ran the petals along the top of the girl’s head and down the side of her face. “A daisy for my darling,” he said with an attempted southern drawl. He was drunk.

“That’s a sunflower, dumb ass,” the girl said, laughing. Her ponytail, tied with a ribbon that matched her shirt and pleated skirt, swung back and forth. She plucked the flower from between his fingers and smelled it. The small orange blossom was missing half its petals; she scattered the remaining few until the center bobbed, abandoned in the night air, and then flicked it into the forest.

The boy sat down close to her. He smelled of sweat masked by drugstore cologne. She threw the empty bottle into the bushes and turned to him.

Without pause, the boy began to devour the girl’s face with sloppy smacking sounds, his hands underneath her shirt. His tongue pushed open her mouth, and I thought she would gag, but instead she feigned a moan and grasped at his greasy hair. My own stomach lurched, a slice of salami high in my throat. I held one hand over my mouth and the other over my eyes, but still I heard them. Their kissing sounds were wet and aggressive, traveling to where I lay with such precision that they felt like ravenous fingertips, gouging my lips, my neck, my breasts.

I curled up into a tight ball, the bed of leaves crackling beneath my body. The couple kept kissing.* * *

From the bus stop the next morning, I watched a tall woman with a bucketful of white tulips slip a key into the lock of the neighborhood flower shop. She flipped on the light and the word BLOOM, created with bundled sticks, emerged backlit from the large picture window. Crossing the street, I approached her.

“Out of season,” I said, nodding to the tulips.

The woman raised her eyebrows. “Brides.” She set the bucket down and looked at me as if waiting for me to speak.

I thought of the lovers tangled under my heath. They had collapsed even closer to me than I’d thought, and I’d stepped on the boy’s shoulder blade before I could locate them in the shrubs. Neither one had moved. The girl’s lips rested on the boy’s neck as if she’d passed out in the middle of a kiss; the boy’s chin pointed up, his head pressed back into tangles of helenium as if he’d been enjoying it. In an instant, my illusion of safety and solitude had vanished.

“Can I help you?” the woman asked. She ran impatient fingers through spiky gray hair.

It occurred to me that I had forgotten to apply my hair gel, and I hoped I didn’t have leaves stuck in my hair. I shook my head self-consciously before I spoke. “Are you hiring?”

She looked me up and down. “Do you have experience?”

Running my toe along a deep line in the concrete, I considered my experience. Jam jars full of thistle and duct-taped spikes of aloe didn’t count for much in the world of flower arranging. I could spew scientific names and recite histories of plant families, but I doubted either of these would impress her. I shook my head. “No.”

“Then no.” She looked at me again, and her gaze was as unwavering as Elizabeth’s had once been. My throat tightened, and I clutched at my brown blanket petticoat, afraid it would come loose and pool at my feet.

“I’ll give you five dollars to unload my truck,” she said. I bit my lip and nodded.

It must be the leaves in my hair, I thought.

5.

The bath was already drawn. It made me feel uneasy to think that Elizabeth knew I would arrive dirty.

“Do you need my help?” she asked.

“No.” The bathtub was sparkling white, the soap nestled among seashells in a reflective metal dish.

“Come down when you’re dressed, then, and be quick.” A clean outfit was arranged for me on a white wood vanity.

I waited until she left, tried to lock the door behind her, and saw that the lock had been removed. I pulled the small chair from the vanity and propped it under the doorknob, so at the very least I would hear her coming. Taking my clothes off as fast as I could, I submerged myself in the hot water.

When I came back downstairs, Elizabeth was sitting at the kitchen table, her food untouched and her napkin on her lap. I was dressed in the clothes she had purchased, a white blouse and yellow pants. Elizabeth looked me over, undoubtedly taking in their enormity. I had rolled the pants down at the waist and up at the legs, and still they hung low enough to show my underwear, if my shirt hadn’t been so long. I was a head shorter than most of the girls in my third-grade class, and I had lost five pounds earlier in the summer.

When I told Meredith the reason for my weight loss she’d called me a liar, but she pulled me from the home anyway, launching a formal investigation. The judge listened to my story and then to Ms. Tapley’s. I will not be made a criminal for refusing to cater to the demands of a picky eater, she had written in her testimony. The judge proclaimed the truth to lie somewhere in the middle, his eyes on me stern and accusing. But he was wrong. Ms. Tapley was lying. I had more faults than Meredith could list on a court report, but I was not a picky eater.

For the entire month of June, Ms. Tapley had made me prove my hunger. It started on my first day in her home, the day after school let out. She helped me unpack my things in my new room and asked, in a voice kind enough to arouse my suspicion, to know my favorite and least favorite foods. But I answered anyway, hungry: pizza, I said, and frozen peas. For dinner that night, she served me a bowl of peas, still frozen. If I was truly hungry, she said, I would eat it. I walked away. Ms. Tapley locked the refrigerator and all the kitchen cabinets.

For two days I left my room only to use the bathroom. Cooking smells pushed under my door at regular intervals, the phone rang, and the TV grew louder and softer. Ms. Tapley did not come to me. After twenty-four hours I called Meredith, but my reports of starvation were so common that she did not return my call. I was sweating, shaking, when I returned to the kitchen table on the third night. Ms. Tapley watched my weak arms attempt to pull the heavy chair away from the table. Giving up, I slid my paper-thin body into the crack between the table and the back of the chair. The peas in the bowl were shriveled and hard. Ms. Tapley glared at me over the top of a dish towel as grease popped on the stove, lecturing me about foster kids eating because they were traumatized. Food is not for comfort, she said as I placed the first pea in my mouth. It rolled down my tongue and stuck in my throat like a pebble. Swallowing hard, I ate another, counting each pea as it went down. The smell of grease and something frying kept me going. Thirty-six. Thirty-seven. After the thirty-eighth pea, I vomited them back into the bowl. Try again, she said, gesturing to the half-digested peas. She sat down on a bar stool in the kitchen and pulled steaming meat out of the pan, taking hot bites and watching me. I tried again. The weeks continued this way until Meredith came for her monthly visit; by then the weight was already lost.

Elizabeth smiled as I entered the kitchen.

“You are beautiful,” she said, not attempting to conceal the surprise in her voice. “It was hard to tell underneath all that ketchup. Do you feel better?”

“No,” I said, though it was not the truth. I couldn’t remember the last home that allowed me to use the bathtub; Jackie may have had one upstairs, but kids were not permitted on the second floor. Before that was a long series of small apartments, the narrow shower stalls crowded with beauty products and layers of mold. The hot bath had felt good, but now, looking at Elizabeth, I wondered what it would cost me.

Climbing up onto a chair, I sat at the kitchen table. Set out was enough food for a family of six. Big bowls of pasta, thick slices of ham, cherry tomatoes, green apples, American cheese stacked in clear plastic sleeves, even a spoon full of peanut butter on a white cloth napkin. It was too much to count. My heart beat audibly; my lips curled into my mouth, and I bit my upper and lower lip together. Elizabeth would force me to eat everything on the table. And for the first time in months, I wasn’t hungry. I looked up at her, waiting for the command.

“Kid food,” she said, gesturing to the table shyly. “How did I do?”

I didn’t say anything.

“I can’t imagine you’re hungry,” she said, when she could see that I wasn’t going to respond. “Not if your nightgown was evidence of your afternoon.”

I shook my head.

“Eat only what you want, then,” she said. “But sit at the table with me until I’ve finished.”

I exhaled, momentarily relieved. Dropping my eyes to the table, I noticed a small bouquet of white flowers. It was tied with a lavender ribbon and placed on top of my bowl of pasta. I studied the delicate petals before flicking it off my food. My mind filled with stories I’d heard from other children, tales of poisoning and hospitalizations. I glanced around the room to see if the windows were open, in case I needed to run. There was only one window in the room of white wood cabinets and antique appliances: a small square above the kitchen sink, with miniature blue glass bottles lining the windowsill. It was shut tight.

I pointed to the flowers. “You can’t poison me, or give me medicine I don’t want, or hit me—even if I deserve it. Those are the rules.” I glared across the table when I said it and hoped she felt my threat. I had reported more than one person for spanking.

“If I were trying to poison you, I would give you foxglove or hydrangea, maybe anemone, depending on how much pain I wanted you to feel, and what message I was trying to communicate.”

Curiosity overcame my dislike of conversation. “What’re you talking about?”

“These flowers are starwort,” she said. “Starwort means welcome. By giving you a bouquet of starwort, I’m welcoming you to my home, to my life.” She twirled buttery pasta on her fork and looked into my eyes without a glimmer of humor.

“They look like daisies to me,” I said. “And I still think they’re poisonous.”

“They aren’t poisonous, and they aren’t daisies. See how they only have five petals but it looks like they have ten? Each pair of petals is connected in the center.” Picking up the small bouquet of flowers, I examined the little white bundle. The petals grew together before attaching to the stem, so that each petal was the shape of a heart.

“That’s a characteristic of the genus Stellaria,” Elizabeth went on, when she could see that I understood. “Daisy is a common name, and spans many different families, but the flowers we call daisies typically have more petals, and each petal grows separate from the others. It’s important to know the difference or you may confuse the meaning. Daisy means innocence, which is a very different sentiment than welcome.”

“I still don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

“Are you done eating?” Elizabeth asked, setting down her fork. I had only picked at the slabs of ham, but I nodded. “Then come with me and I’ll explain.”

Elizabeth stood and turned to cross the kitchen. I stuffed a fistful of pasta into one pocket and dumped the bowl of small tomatoes into the other. Elizabeth paused at the back door but did not turn around. I pulled up my kneesocks and lined the American cheese between my socks and calves. Before jumping down from the chair, I grabbed the spoon of peanut butter, licking it slowly as I followed Elizabeth. Four wooden steps brought us down into a large flower garden.

“I’m talking about the language of flowers,” Elizabeth said. “It’s from the Victorian era, like your name. If a man gave a young lady a bouquet of flowers, she would race home and try to decode it like a secret message. Red roses mean love; yellow roses infidelity. So a man would have to choose his flowers carefully.”

“What’s infidelity?” I asked as we turned down a path and yellow roses surrounded us on all sides.

Elizabeth paused. When I looked up, I saw that her expression had turned sad. For a moment I thought something I said had disturbed her, but then I realized her eyes were directed at the roses, not at me. I wondered who had planted them. “It means to have friends … secret friends,” she said finally. “Friends you aren’t supposed to have.”

I didn’t understand her definition, but Elizabeth had already moved along the path, reaching out for my peanut-butter spoon to drag me with her. I snatched my spoon back and followed her around another bend.

“There’s rosemary; that’s for remembrance. I’m quoting Shakespeare; you’ll read him in high school. And there’s columbine, desertion; holly, foresight; lavender, mistrust.” We took a fork in the path, and Elizabeth ducked under a low-hanging branch. I finished the last of the peanut butter with one slow lick, threw the spoon into the bushes, and jumped up to swing on the branch. The tree did not sway.

“That’s an almond tree. Its spring blossoms are the symbol of indiscretion—nothing you need to know about. A beautiful tree, though,” she added, “and I’ve long thought it would be a great place for a tree house. I’ll ask Carlos about building one.”

“Who’s Carlos?” I asked, jumping down. Elizabeth was ahead of me on the path, and I skipped to catch up.

“The foreman. He lives in the trailer between the tool sheds, but you won’t meet him this week—he took his daughter camping. Perla’s nine, like you are. She’ll look out for you when you start school.”

“I’m not going to school,” I said, struggling to keep up. Elizabeth had reached the center of the garden and was making her way back to the house. She was still pointing out plants and reciting meanings, but she walked too fast for me to keep up. I started to jog and caught up with her just as she reached the back porch steps. She crouched down so that we were eye to eye.

“You’ll start school a week from Monday,” she said. “Fourth grade. And you aren’t coming inside until you bring me my spoon.”

She turned then and went inside, locking the door behind her.

6.

Tucking the florist’s five-dollar bill into the empty space beneath the cup of my bra, I paced the neighborhood. It was still early, and there were more bars than coffee shops open as I walked through the Mission District. On the corner of 24th and Alabama, I slid into a pink plastic booth and spent two hours eating donuts and waiting for the small shops on Valencia Street to open. At ten o’clock I counted my remaining money—one dollar and eighty-seven cents—and walked until I found a fabric shop. I purchased half a yard of white satin ribbon and a single pearl-topped pin.

When I returned to McKinley Square it was late morning, and I crept toward my garden on silent grass. I was afraid the couple would still be sprawled across my flowers, but they were gone. The imprint of the boy’s back in my helenium and the tequila bottle protruding from a dense shrub were all that remained.

I had only one chance. It was clear to me that the florist needed help; her face had been as pale and lined as Elizabeth’s in the weeks before the harvest. If I could convince her I was capable, she would hire me. With the money I earned I would rent a room with a locking door and tend my garden only in daylight, when I could see strangers as they approached.

Sitting under a tree, I studied my options. The fall flowers were in full bloom: verbena, goldenrod, chrysanthemum, and a late-blooming rose. The carefully tended city beds around the park held layers of textured evergreen but little color.

I set to work, considering height, density, texture, and layers of scent, removing touch-damaged petals with careful pinches. When I had finished, spiraling white mums emerged from a cushion of snow-colored verbena, and clusters of pale climbing roses circled and dripped over the edge of a tightly wrapped nosegay. I removed every thorn. The bouquet was white as a wedding and spoke of prayers, truth, and an unacquainted heart. No one would know.

The woman was locking up when I arrived. It was not yet noon.

“If you’re looking for another five dollars, you’re too late,” she said, gesturing to the truck with her head. It was full of heavy arrangements. “I could have used your help.”

I held out my bouquet.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“Experience,” I said, handing her the flowers.

She smelled the mums and roses, and then poked the verbena, examining the tip of her finger. It was clean. Starting up the hill to her truck, she motioned for me to follow.

From within the truck she withdrew a nosegay of stiff white roses, packed close and tied with pink satin. She held the two bouquets side by side. There was no comparison. She tossed me the white roses, and I caught them with one hand.

“Take those to Spitari’s, up the hill. Ask for Andrew, and tell him I sent you. He’ll let you trade the flowers for your lunch.”

I nodded, and she climbed inside the truck. “I’m Renata.” She started the engine. “If you want to work next Saturday, be here by five a.m. If you’re even a minute late, I’ll leave you behind.”

I felt like sprinting down the hill, overcome with relief. It didn’t matter that I’d been promised only a single day’s work, or that the money would probably only be enough to rent a room for a handful of nights. It was something. And if I proved myself, she would invite me back. I smiled at the sidewalk, my toes jittering in my shoes.

Renata pulled away from the curb, then slowed to a stop and rolled down her window. “Name?” she asked.

“Victoria,” I said, looking up and suppressing a smile. “Victoria Jones.”

She nodded once and drove away.

The following Saturday, I arrived at Bloom just after midnight. I had fallen asleep in my garden with my back against a redwood, keeping watch, and I bolted awake at the sound of approaching laughter. It was a band of drunken young men this time. The nearest, an overgrown boy with hair past his chin, smiled at me as if we were lovers meeting at a prearranged location. I avoided his eyes and walked quickly to the nearest streetlamp, then down the hill to the flower shop.

While I waited I applied deodorant and gel, then paced the block, forcing myself to stay awake. By the time Renata’s truck turned up the street, I had checked my reflection in parked car mirrors twice and reordered my clothing three times. Even with all of this, I knew I was beginning to look and smell like a street person.

Renata pulled up, unlocked the passenger door, and motioned for me to get inside. I sat as far away from her as possible, and when I slammed the door it rattled against my fleshless hip.

“Good morning,” said Renata. “You’re on time.” She U-turned and drove down the empty street the way she had come.

“Too early to wish me a good morning?” she asked. I nodded, rubbing my eyes, pretending I’d just awakened. We drove in silence around a roundabout. Renata missed her turn and went around twice. “It’s a little early for me, too, I guess.”

She drove up and down the one-way streets south of Market until she pulled in to a crowded parking lot.

“Follow close,” she said, getting out of the truck and handing me a stack of empty buckets. “It’s crowded in there, and I don’t have time to waste looking for you. I have a two o’clock wedding today; the flowers have to be delivered by ten. Luckily, they’re just sunflowers—won’t take long to arrange.”

“Sunflowers?” I asked, surprised. False riches. It wouldn’t be my wedding flower of choice, I thought, and then rolled my eyes at the absurdity of the words my wedding.

“Out of season, I know,” she said. “You can get anything—anytime—at the flower market, and when couples throw money at me, I don’t complain.” She shoved her way through the crowded entry. I followed close behind, cringing as buckets and elbows and shoulders brushed my body.

The inside of the flower market was like a cave, hollow and windowless, with a metal ceiling and cement floor. The unnaturalness of the sea of flowers within, far from soil and light, set me on edge. Booths overflowed with seasonal flowers, everything blooming in my own garden but cut and displayed in bunches. Other vendors sold tropical flowers, orchids and hibiscus and exotic plants I couldn’t name, from hothouses hundreds of miles away. I plucked a passionflower and tucked it in my waistband as we rushed past.

Renata flipped through sunflowers as if they were pages of a book. She argued over prices, walked away, and returned. I wondered if she had always been an American, or if she had been raised in a place in which bargaining was a way of life. She had a trace of an accent I couldn’t place. Other people walked up, handed wads of cash and credit cards, and left with their buckets of flowers. But Renata kept arguing. The vendors appeared to be used to her, and argued only halfheartedly. They seemed to know that in the end she would win, and in the end she did. She stuffed bundles of orange sunflowers with two-foot stems in my buckets and raced to the next booth.

When I caught up with her, she held dozens of dripping calla lilies, tightly rolled petals of pink and orange. The water from the stems soaked though the thin sleeves of her cotton blouse, and she threw the flowers in my direction as I approached. Only half landed in the empty bucket; I folded over slowly to gather the fallen flowers.

“This is her first day,” Renata said to the vendor. “She doesn’t yet understand the urgency. Your lilies will be gone in another fifteen minutes.”

I slid the last flower into the bucket and stood up. The vendor was selling dozens of varieties of lilies: tiger, stargazer, imperial, and pure white Casablancas. I brushed a bead of pollen from where it had fallen on the petal of an open stargazer, listening as Renata negotiated the price of her purchases. She was spewing numbers far below what the surrounding customers had paid, barely pausing for a response, and stopped suddenly when the vendor agreed. I looked up.

Renata pulled out her purse and waved a thin stack of bills in front of the vendor’s face, but he didn’t reach for them. He was looking at me. His eyes traveled from the top of my stiff hair down my face, flitting around my collarbone and heating my covered arms before resting on the sticky brown pollen on my fingertips. His gaze felt like an invasion. I squeezed the lip of the bucket I held, my knuckles white.

Renata’s hand jutted into the still quiet, her cash flapping impatiently. “Excuse me?”

He reached out to grab the money but did not pause in his bold exploration of my body. Continuing down my layers of skirt, he studied the stripe of leg visible between my socks and stretch pants.

“This is Victoria,” Renata said, flicking her fingertips in my direction. She paused, as if waiting for the flower farmer to introduce himself, but he didn’t.

His eyes snapped back to my face. Our eyes met. There was something unsettling in them—a flicker of recognition—that captured my attention. Looking him over, my first impression was of a man that had struggled as much as, if differently than, I had. He was older than me, I decided—five years, at least. His face had the dusty, lined look of a manual laborer. I imagined he had planted, tended, and harvested his flowers himself. His body was lean and muscular as a result, and he neither flinched nor smiled as I examined him. His olive skin would be salty. The thought caused my heart to race from something besides anger, an emotion I didn’t recognize but which made the core of my body warm. I bit the inside of my lip and pulled my eyes back to his face.

He withdrew a single orange tiger lily from a bucket.

“Take one,” he said, handing it to me.

“No,” I said. “I don’t like lilies.” And I’m no queen, I thought.

“You should,” he said. “They suit you.”

“How do you know what suits me?” Without thinking, I snapped the head of the lily he held. Six pointed petals fell, the flower’s face examining the hard floor. Renata sucked in her breath.

“I don’t,” he said.

“I didn’t think so.” I rocked the full bucket of flowers I carried, dispersing the heat radiating from my body. The motion drew attention to my shaking arms.

I turned to Renata. “Outside,” she said, motioning toward the front of the building. I waited for her to say more, sinking with dread at the thought of being fired on the spot less than an hour after starting my first job. But Renata’s eyes were fixed on the growing line at the next booth. When she glanced back and saw me unmoving, her eyebrows pinched together in confusion.

“What?” she asked. “Go wait by the truck.”

Pushing through a thick crowd, I made my way toward the exit. My arms strained under the weight of the full bucket, but I carried it through the parking lot without stopping to rest. At Renata’s truck I set the bucket down, sinking, exhausted, onto the hard concrete.

7.

From behind the dark windows, Elizabeth watched. I was sure of it, even though I couldn’t see the outline of her body behind the glass. The back door remained locked. Shivering, I watched the sun drop out of sight. I would have ten minutes, no more, before I was left to root for the spoon in darkness.

I’d been locked out before. The first time I was five years old, my protruding stomach empty in a house with too many children and too many bottles of beer. Sitting on the kitchen floor, I had watched a tiny white Chihuahua eat her dinner from a ceramic bowl. I inched closer, overcome by jealousy. It was not my intention to eat the dog’s food, but when my foster father saw me, my face only centimeters from the bowl, he picked me up by the back of my turtleneck and threw me out. Act like an animal, be treated like an animal, he’d said. Pressing my body against the sliding glass door, I’d absorbed the heat of the house and watched the family prepare for bed, never imagining they’d leave me there all night. But they did. My body quivered, cold and afraid, and I kept thinking about the way the little dog shook when she was scared, her triangular ears vibrating. My foster mother sneaked downstairs in the middle of the night and tossed a blanket through a high kitchen window, but she did not open the door until morning.

Sitting on Elizabeth’s steps, I ate the pasta and tomatoes from my pockets and thought about whether I would look for the spoon. If I found it and gave it to Elizabeth, she might still make me sleep outside. Doing as I was told had never been a guarantee that I would get what I was promised. But I had glimpsed my room on the way downstairs, and it looked more comfortable than the splintering wood steps. I decided to try.

Slowly, I meandered through the garden until I came to the place I’d tossed the spoon. Kneeling under the almond tree, I felt around with my hands, thorns cutting my fingers as I reached through the thick brush. I parted tall stalks and pulled petals off thick shrubs. I tore leaves, broke branches. Still, I didn’t see it.

“Elizabeth!” I screamed, growing frustrated. The house was quiet.

The darkness was becoming thick, heavy. The vineyard seemed to stretch in all directions, an inescapable sea, and all at once I was terrified. With both hands I reached for the trunk of a dense bush, thorns piercing my soft palms as I pulled as hard as I could. The plant uprooted. I continued, pulling up everything I could grab, until the earth was bare. In the overturned soil the spoon lay alone, reflecting moonlight.

Wiping my bloody hands on my pants, I grabbed the spoon and ran toward the house, tripping and falling and picking myself up without ever letting go of my prize. I bounded up the steps, pounding the heavy metal spoon against the wooden door relentlessly. The lock turned, and Elizabeth stood before me.

For just a moment we looked at each other in silence—two pairs of wide, unblinking eyes—then I launched the spoon into the house with as much strength as I could gather in my thin arm. I aimed for the window over the kitchen sink. The spoon flew just inches past Elizabeth’s ear, arched high toward the ceiling, and bounced off the window before clattering into the porcelain sink. One of the small blue bottles teetered on the edge of the windowsill before it fell and shattered.

“There’s your spoon,” I said.

Elizabeth took a barely controlled breath before lunging at me. Her fingers dug into my lower rib cage, and she transported me to the kitchen sink, all but throwing me inside. My hip bones pressed against the tile countertop, and my face hovered so close to the shattered glass that for a moment the whole world was blue.

“That,” Elizabeth said, lowering my face even closer to the glass, “belonged to my mother.” She held me completely still, but I could feel the anger filling her fingertips, threatening my descent into the glass.

With a jerk she pulled me out of the sink and set me down, letting go before my feet touched the ground. I fell backward. She stood above me, and I waited for her hand to fall on my face. All it would take was one slap. Meredith would return before the mark could fade, and this final experiment would be over. I would be declared unadoptable, and Meredith would stop trying to find me a family; I was ready—past ready.

But Elizabeth dropped her hand and stood up straight. She took a step away from me.

“My mother,” she said, “would not have liked you.” She nudged me with her toe until I stood up. “Now get yourself upstairs and into bed.”

So, I thought, disappointed, this is not the end. My body filled with a palpable dread, heavy and overwhelming. It would end. I did not believe there to be even the slightest possibility that my placement at Elizabeth’s would be anything but short, and I wanted to have it over right then, before spending a single night in her home. I took a step toward her with my chin pushed forward in defiance, hoping my proximity would push her over the edge.

But the moment had passed. Elizabeth looked over my head, her breathing even.

With heavy steps I turned away. Pulling a slice of ham off the table, I climbed the stairs. The door to my room was open. I leaned for a moment in the empty frame, taking in all that would be temporarily mine: the dark wood furniture, the circular pink rag rug, and the desk lamp with a pearly stained-glass shade. Everything looked new: the puffy white eyelet comforter and matching curtains, the clothes hung in neat rows in the closet and folded into stacks in each dresser drawer. Crawling into bed, I nibbled the ham, salty and metallic-tasting from where my bleeding hands gripped. Between bites I paused to listen.

I had lived in thirty-two homes that I could remember, and the one thing they all had in common was noise: buses, brakes, the rumbling of a freight train passing. Inside: the warring of multiple televisions, the beeping of microwaves and bottle warmers, the doorbell ringing, a curse uttered, the snap of deadbolts turning. Then there were the sounds of the other children: babies crying, siblings screaming upon separation, the yelp of a too-cold shower, and the whimper of a roommate’s nightmare. But Elizabeth’s house was different. Like the vineyard settling in the dusk, inside the house was silent. Only a faint, high-pitched buzz traveled through the open window. It reminded me of the squeal of electricity on wires, but in the country I imagined it to come from something natural, a waterfall, maybe, or a band of bees.

Finally, I heard Elizabeth on the stairs. I pulled the covers over my head and around my ears so that I couldn’t hear her footsteps. Startling, I felt her sit lightly on the edge of my bed. I peeled the blanket an inch away from my ears but did not uncover my face.

“My mother didn’t like me, either,” Elizabeth whispered. Her tone was gentle, apologetic. I had an urge to peek out from underneath the covers; the voice that burrowed through the down was so different from the one that had held me over the sink that for a moment I didn’t think it belonged to Elizabeth.

“We have that much in common, at least.” Her hand rested on the small of my back when she said this, and I arched away from her, pushing my body into the wall that lined the side of the bed. My face pressed into the slab of ham. Elizabeth kept talking, telling me about the birth of her older sister, Catherine, and the seven years of stillbirths that followed: four babies total, all boys.

“When I was born, my mother asked the doctors to take me away. I don’t remember this, but my father told me it was my sister, only seven years old, who fed, bathed, and changed me, until I was old enough to do it myself.” Elizabeth continued to talk, describing her mother’s depression and her father’s devotion to her care. Even before she had learned to speak, Elizabeth told me, she had learned exactly where to place her feet as she tiptoed the hallways, to avoid the squeak of the old wood floors. Her mother didn’t like noise, any noise.

I listened as Elizabeth spoke. The emotion in her voice interested me—I had rarely been spoken to as if I was capable of understanding another’s experience. I swallowed a bite of meat. “It was my fault,” Elizabeth continued. “My mother’s illness. No one kept that a secret from me. My parents didn’t want a second daughter—girls weren’t believed to have the taste buds required to discern a ripe wine grape. But I proved them wrong.”

Elizabeth patted my back, and I could tell she had finished speaking. I took my last bite of ham. “How was that for a bedtime story?” she asked. Her voice was too loud in the quiet house, pretending an optimism I knew she did not feel.

Poking my nose out from underneath the covers, I took a breath. “Not great,” I said.

Elizabeth laughed once, a sharp exhale. “I believe you can prove everyone wrong, too, Victoria. Your behavior is a choice; it isn’t who you are.”

If Elizabeth really believed this, I thought, there was nothing but disappointment in her future.

8.

Renata and I worked most of the morning in silence. Bloom had a tiny storefront with a bigger work space in back, a long wooden table, and a walk-in refrigerator. There were six chairs around the table. I chose the one closest to the door.

Renata placed a book in front of me, titled Sunflower Weddings. I thought of an appropriate subtitle: How to Begin a Marriage Steeped in the Values of Deceit and Materialism. Ignoring the book, I created sixteen matching table arrangements with the sunflowers, lilies, and a tangle of wispy asparagus fern. Renata worked on the bridal-party bouquets, and when she finished those, she began a floral sculpture in a corrugated metal bucket longer than her legs. Every time the front door squeaked open, Renata ducked into the showroom. She knew her customers by name and chose flowers for each without direction.

When I was done, I stood in front of Renata and waited for her to look up. She glanced at the table where the full vases sat in a straight line.

“Good,” she said, nodding her approval. “Better than good, actually. Surprising. It’s hard to believe you haven’t been taught.”

“I haven’t,” I said.

“I know.” She looked me up and down in a way I disliked. “Load up the truck. I’ll be done here in a minute.”

I carried the vases up the hill two at a time. When Renata had finished, we carried the tall vase together, laying it down gently on the already-full truck bed. Walking back into the shop, she removed all the cash from the register, closing and locking the drawer. I expected her to pay me, but instead she handed me paper and a pencil.

“I’ll pay you when I get back,” she said. “The wedding is just over the hill. Keep the shop open, and tell my customers they can pay next time.” Renata waited until I nodded, and then walked out the door.

Alone in the flower shop, I was unsure of what to do. I stood behind the manual cash register for a few moments, studying the peeling green paint. The street outside was quiet. A family walked by without pausing, without looking in the window. I thought about opening the door and dragging out a few buckets of orchids but remembered the years I’d spent stealing from outdoor displays. Renata would not approve.

Instead I walked into the workroom, picked stray stems off the table, and tossed them in the waste bin. I wiped down the table with a damp cloth, swept the floor. When I could think of nothing else, I opened the heavy metal door of the walk-in, peering inside. It was dark and cool, with flowers lining the walls. The space drew me in, and I wanted nothing more than to unpin my brown blanket petticoat and fall asleep between the buckets. I was tired. For an entire week I’d slept in half-hour stretches, pulled out of sleep by voices, nightmares, or both. Always, the sky was white, steam from the brewery billowing above me. Each morning, minutes passed before I pulled myself from panic, smoke-filled dreams dispersing into the night sky like the steam. Lying still, I reminded myself I was eighteen and alone: no longer a child, with nothing more to lose.

Now, in the safety of the empty flower shop, I wanted to sleep. The door clicked shut behind me, and I slunk onto the floor, leaning my temple against the lip of a bucket.

I had just found a comfortable position when a voice came muted through the walk-in. “Renata?”

I jumped to my feet. Running my fingers quickly through my hair, I stepped out of the walk-in, squinting into the bright light.

A white-haired man leaned against the counter, tapping his fingers impatiently.

“Renata?” he asked again when he saw me.

I shook my head. “She’s delivering flowers to a wedding. Can I help you with something?”

“I need flowers. Why else would I be here?” He waved his arm around the room as if to remind me of my occupation. “Renata never asks me what I want. I wouldn’t know a rose from a radish.”

“What’s the occasion?” I asked.

“My granddaughter’s sixteenth birthday. She doesn’t want to spend it with us, I’m sure, but her mother is insisting.” He pulled a white rose from a blue bucket and inhaled. “I’m not looking forward to it. She’s turned into a sulky one, that girl.”

Mentally, I scanned the flower choices in the walk-in, surveyed the showroom. A birthday present for a sulky teenager: The old man’s words were a puzzle, a challenge.

“White roses are a good choice,” I said, “for a teenage girl. And maybe some lily of the valley?” I withdrew a long stem, ivory bells dangling.

“Whatever you think,” he said.

Arranging the flowers and wrapping them in brown paper as I had seen Renata do, I felt a buoyancy similar to what I’d felt slipping the dahlias under the bedroom doors of my housemates the morning I turned eighteen. It was a strange feeling—the excitement of a secret combined with the satisfaction of being useful. It was so foreign—and decidedly pleasant—that I had a sudden urge to tell him about the flowers, to explain the hidden meanings.

“You know,” I said, attempting a casual, friendly tone, but feeling the words catch in my throat with emotion, “some believe lily of the valley brings a return of happiness.”

The old man wrinkled his nose, the expression a combination of impatience and disbelief. “That would be a miracle,” he said, shaking his head. I handed him the flowers. “I don’t think I’ve heard that girl laugh since she was twelve years old, and let me tell you, I miss it.”

He reached for his wallet, but I held up my hand. “Renata said to pay later.”

“Okay,” he said, turning to go. “Tell her Earl came in. She knows where to find me.” The flowers jolted in their buckets as he slammed the door.

When Renata returned an hour later, I had assisted a half-dozen people. On the piece of paper she’d given me was a complete record of transactions: customer names, flowers, and quantities. Renata scanned the list quickly and nodded, as if she’d known exactly who would come into the shop and what they would request. She slipped the piece of paper into the cash register and extracted a wad of twenty-dollar bills, counting out three.

“Sixty dollars,” she said. “Six hours. Good?”

I nodded but didn’t move. Renata looked into my eyes as if waiting for me to speak. “Are you going to ask if I need you next Saturday?”

“Do you?”

“Yes, five a.m.,” she said. “And Sunday, too. I don’t know why anyone would want to get married on a Sunday in November, but I don’t ask. It’s usually a slow time of year, and I’ve been busier than ever.”

“Next week, then,” I said, closing the door gently as I walked outside.

With money in my backpack, the city felt new. I headed down the hill, looking into shop windows with interest, reading menus and scanning room prices at cheap motels south of Market. As I walked, I thought about my first day of work: a quiet walk-in full of flowers, a mostly empty storefront, and a boss with a direct, unemotional style. It was the perfect job for me. Only one exchange had made me uncomfortable: my brief conversation with the flower vendor. The thought of seeing him again the following Saturday made me nervous. I decided I would have to arrive prepared.

In North Beach I stepped off a bus. It was early evening, the fog just beginning to spill over Russian Hill, transforming headlights and taillights into soft orbs of yellow and red. I walked until I found a youth hostel, dirty and cheap. Presenting my money to a woman behind a desk, I waited.

“How many nights?” she asked.

I nodded to the bills on the counter. “How many can I have?”

“I’ll give you four,” she said, “but only because it’s off-season.” She wrote up a receipt and pointed down the hall. “The girls’ dorm is to the right.”

For the next four days I slept, showered, and ate the remains of tourists’ lunches on Columbus Avenue. When my nights ended at the hostel, I moved back to the park, worried about the overgrown boy and the dozens of others like him but aware that I had few other options. I tended my garden and waited for the weekend.

On Friday I stayed awake, worried I might sleep late and miss Renata. I wandered the streets all night, pacing outside the club at the bottom of the hill when I got tired, the music vibrating against my falling eyelids. When Renata’s car pulled up, I was leaning against the locked glass door of Bloom, waiting.

She barely slowed enough for me to jump into the truck, and started her U-turn before I closed the door.

“I should have told you four,” she said. “I didn’t check my book. We need flowers for forty tables today, and the wedding party is over twenty-five people. Who has a wedding with twelve bridesmaids?” I couldn’t tell if she was asking me or if it was a rhetorical question. I stayed silent. “If I married, I wouldn’t even have twelve guests,” she added, “at least not in this country.”

I wouldn’t have one guest, I thought, in this country or any other. She slowed at the roundabout and remembered her turn.

“Earl came in,” she said. “He wanted me to tell you his granddaughter was happy—he said it was important that I said ‘happy’ and not some other word. He said you did something with the flowers to bring it out of her.”

I smiled and looked out the window, away from Renata. So he had remembered. Surprisingly, I did not regret the decision to divulge my secret. But I didn’t want to tell Renata. “I don’t know what he’s talking about,” I said.

She glanced from the road to my face and back again, one eyebrow raised in question. After a stretch of silence, she continued. “Well, Earl is a funny old man. Angry, mostly, but occasionally soft in ways you wouldn’t expect. He told me yesterday he’s old enough to have given up on God and come back around.”

“What did he mean by that?”

“I’m guessing he thinks you consulted with Him before choosing the flowers last weekend.”

I snorted. “Ha.”

“Yeah, I know. But he told me he’s coming back today, and he wants you to pick out something for his wife.”

I felt a quick thrill at having been given a new assignment.

“What’s she like?” I asked.

“Quiet,” Renata said, shaking her head. “I don’t know much more than that. Earl told me once that she was a poet, but she rarely speaks and never writes anymore. He brings her flowers nearly every week—I think he misses the way she used to be.”

Periwinkle, I thought, tender recollections. It would be hard to make into a bouquet but not impossible. I would wrap it with something tall and sturdy-stemmed.

The flower market was not as crowded as it had been the week before, but Renata still burst through as if the last bouquet of roses was on the auction block. We needed fifteen dozen orange roses and more stargazer lilies than would fit in the buckets I carried. I walked the flowers outside and came back for a second load. When everything was locked in the truck, I returned to the bustling building, looking for Renata.

She was at the booth I had been avoiding, arguing the price of a bunch of pink ranunculus. The wholesale price, scrawled on a small black chalkboard in nearly unreadable print, was four dollars. She flapped a single dollar bill above the tubs of flowers. The vendor neither responded nor glanced in her direction. He watched me walk down the aisle until I stood before him.

Our interaction the week before had plagued me, and I’d scoured McKinley Square until I found the right flower to defuse his unwarranted interest. I took off my backpack and withdrew a leafy stem.

“Rhododendron,” I said, placing the clipping on the plywood counter before him. The cluster of purple blossoms was not yet open, and the buds pointed in his direction, tightly coiled and toxic. Beware.

He studied the plant, then the warning in my eyes. When he looked away, I knew he understood the flower was not a gift. He picked it up with his thumb and index finger, and tossed it into a trash bucket.

Renata was still bargaining, and with a quick motion of his hand the vendor stopped her. She could have the flowers, he said with an impatient gesture, waving her away.

Renata turned to go, and I followed.

“What was that, Victoria?” Renata asked when we were out of earshot. I shrugged and kept walking. Renata glanced back at the booth, then at me, then again at the booth, her eyes puzzled.

“I need periwinkle,” I said, changing the subject. “They won’t sell it cut. It’s a groundcover.”

“I know periwinkle,” she said, nodding to a back wall, where plants sat in buckets, their roots intact. She handed me a wad of cash and didn’t ask any more questions.

Renata and I worked frantically throughout the morning. The wedding was in Palo Alto, a wealthy suburb thirty-five miles south of the city, and Renata had to take two trips to deliver all the flowers. She took the first half of the arrangements while I worked on the second. While she was gone I kept the door closed and locked, the light off in the showroom. Customers lined up outside, awaiting her return. I was content in the dark solitude.

When she returned I was busy examining my work—pinching pollen and trimming an occasional awkward leaf with sharp scissors. Renata glanced at my bouquets and nodded to the stream of people behind her.

“I’ll start the bridal party; you take over the shop.” She handed me a laminated price list and a small gold key to the cash register. “And don’t think for a second I don’t know how much is in there.”

Earl was already at the counter, waving to me. I walked over to where he stood.

“For my wife,” he said. “Didn’t Renata tell you? I only have a few minutes, and I want you to pick out something that will make her happy.”

“Happy?” I asked, looking around the room at the available flowers. I felt disappointed. “Is that as specific as you can be?”

Earl tilted his head and was thoughtful for a moment. “You know, now that I think about it, she’s never really been a happy woman.” He laughed to himself. “But she was passionate. And smart. And interested. She always had an opinion, even about things she knew nothing about. I miss that.”

It was the request for which I had prepared. “I understand,” I said, setting to work. I pinched tendrils of periwinkle at the roots until they hung in long, limp strands, and grabbed a dozen bright white spider mums. I wrapped the periwinkle tightly around the base of the mums like a ribbon and used florist’s wire to create loose curlicues of the leafy groundcover around a multilayered explosion of mums. The effect was like fireworks, dizzying and grand.

“Well, that will deserve a response of some kind,” Earl said as I handed over the flowers. He passed me a flat twenty. “Keep the change, sweetheart.” I consulted the price list Renata had given me and put the twenty in the drawer, withdrawing a five-dollar bill for myself.

“Thanks,” I said.

“See you next week,” called Earl.

“Maybe,” I said, but he had already gone out the door, slamming it closed behind him.

The store was abuzz, and I turned my attention to the next person in line. I wrapped roses, orchids, mums of every color, and handed bouquets to couples, elderly women, and teens sent on errands. While I worked I thought about Earl’s wife, tried to bring forth an image of the once-passionate woman: her tired, withdrawn, unsuspecting face. Would she react to the wild bouquet of mums and periwinkle, truth and tender recollections? I felt sure she would, and imagined the relief and gratitude on Earl’s face as he boiled water for tea, provoking the opinionated woman he had missed into a discussion of politics or poetry. The image quickened my fingers and lightened my steps as I worked.

Just as the shop emptied, Renata finished the bridal party.

“Load up the truck,” she ordered. I transported armfuls as quickly as I could. It was almost two. Renata climbed behind the wheel, directing me to keep the shop open until she returned in an hour.

The delivery took much longer than Renata had expected. At half past five she stormed into Bloom, spewing anger over boutonnieres and bow ties. I kept quiet, waiting for her to pay me so that I could leave. I’d worked twelve and a half hours without a break, and I was looking forward to a locked room and possibly even a bath. But Renata didn’t reach into her purse.

When her frustrated monologue ended, she opened the cash register, thumbing through wrinkled bills, checks, and receipts. “I don’t have enough cash,” she said. “I’ll stop at the bank on the way to dinner. Come with me. We’ll talk business.”

I would rather have taken her money and fled into the night, but I followed her outside anyway, aware of the precariousness of my position.

“Mexican food?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She turned toward the Mission. “You aren’t much of a talker, are you?” Renata asked.

I shook my head.

“At first I thought you just weren’t a morning person,” she said. “My nieces and nephews, don’t try before noon, but after that just pray for a moment of silence.”

She glanced at me as if she was waiting for a response.

“Oh,” I said.

She laughed. “I have twelve nieces and nephews, but I rarely see them. I know I’m supposed to make an effort, but I don’t.”

“No?”

“No,” she said. “I love them, but I can only handle them in small doses. My mother always jokes that I didn’t inherit her maternal gene.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“You know, that bit of biology that makes women coo when they see a baby on the street. I’ve never had that.”

Renata parked in front of a taqueria, and two women fussed over a stroller by the door as if to prove her point. “Go order anything you want,” she said. “I’ll pay when I get back from the bank.”

Renata and I ate until eight p.m. It was enough time for her to eat a taco and drink three large Diet Cokes, and for me to eat a chicken burrito, two cheese enchiladas, a side of guacamole, and three baskets of chips. Renata watched me eat, a satisfied smile flicking across her face. She filled the silence between us with stories of her childhood in Russia, describing a flock of siblings traveling across the ocean to America.

When I finished eating, I leaned back, feeling the heaviness of the food in my body. I had forgotten how much I could consume, and also the complete paralysis that accompanied my overeating.

“So, what’s your secret?” Renata asked.

I squinted my eyes in question, tightened my shoulders.

“To staying thin?” she asked. “When you eat like that?”

It’s simple, I thought. Be broke, friendless, and homeless. Spend weeks eating other people’s leftovers, or nothing at all.

“Diet Coke,” she said, filling the silence as if she didn’t want to hear my answer, or already knew it. “That’s my secret. Caffeine and empty calories. Another reason I never wanted children. What kind of baby would develop on that?”

“A hungry one,” I said.

Renata smiled. “I saw you out there today, working with Earl. He left pleased. And he’ll come back, I imagine, week after week, looking for you.” Would I be there? I wondered. Is this Renata’s way of offering me a permanent job?

“That’s how I built my business,” she said. “Knowing what my customers wanted even before they did. Anticipating it. Wrapping up flowers before they came in, guessing the days they’d be in a hurry, the days they’d want to browse, talk. I think you have it in you, that kind of intuition, if you want it.”

“I do,” I said quickly. “Want it.”

I remembered Meredith’s words then—“You have to want it”—at The Gathering House and hundreds of times before. You have to want to be a daughter, a sister, a friend, a student, she had told me, again and again. I hadn’t wanted any of those things, and none of Meredith’s promises, threats, or bribes had altered my conviction. But suddenly I knew I wanted to be a florist. I wanted to spend my life choosing flowers for perfect strangers, my days steadily alternating between the chill of the walk-in and the snap of the register.

“I’ll pay you under the table, then,” Renata said. “Every Sunday. Two hundred dollars for twenty hours of work, and you work whenever I tell you. Deal?”

I nodded. Renata stretched out her hand, and I shook it.

The next morning, Renata leaned against the glass doors of the flower market, waiting for me. I checked my watch. We were both early. The wedding that day was small, no bridal party and less than fifty guests at two long tables. We wandered around, looking for shades of yellow. That had been the bride’s only request, Renata told me. She wanted sunlight in flowers, just in case it rained. The sky was dry but gray; she should have married in June.

“His booth’s closed Sundays,” Renata said as we walked, gesturing in the direction of the mysterious vendor.

But as we approached his empty stall, a hooded silhouette appeared, perched on a stool and leaning against the wall. He stood when he saw me, bending over the flowerless buckets, his image reflected in the still circles of water. From the pocket of his sweatshirt he withdrew something green and spindly. He held it up.

Renata greeted him as we passed. I acknowledged his presence only by reaching out to grasp what he had brought me, keeping my eyes on the ground. When I was safely around a corner, out of view, I looked into my hand.

Oval, gray-green leaves grew from a tangle of lime-colored twigs, translucent balls clinging to the branches like drops of rain. The clipping fit exactly in the palm of my hand, and the soft leaves stung where they touched.

Mistletoe.

I surmount all obstacles.

9.

My puncture wounds scabbed in the night and attached themselves to the thin cotton sheets. Emerging from sleep, it took me a moment to locate the burning in my body and even longer to remember the source of the injury. I squeezed my eyes shut, waiting, and it hit me all at once: the thorns, the spoon, the long drive, and Elizabeth. I yanked my hands out from underneath the covers with one fast tug and studied my palms. The cuts had reopened; fresh blood seeped out.

It was early, and still dark. I felt my way down the hall to the bathroom, my hands leaving bloody streaks on the walls where I touched. In the bathroom, Elizabeth was already up and dressed. She sat at the vanity and looked in the mirror as if she would apply makeup, but there was no makeup on the counter, only a half-empty jar of cream. She dipped her ring finger, the nail flat and short, into the cream and smoothed it under her brown eyes, along her defined cheekbones, and down the bridge of her straight nose. Elizabeth’s skin was unwrinkled and glowed with the dark warmth of summer, and I guessed she was much younger than her high-collared shirt and middle-parted, tightly wrapped hair made her look.

She turned when she saw me, her profile sharp in the mirror.

“How did you sleep?” she asked.

I stepped forward, holding my hands so close to her face she had to lean back to focus.

She inhaled sharply. “Why didn’t you tell me last night?”

I shrugged.

Elizabeth sighed. “Well, give me your hands. I don’t want them getting infected.”

She patted her lap for me to sit down, but I took a step backward. Retrieving a small bowl from underneath the sink, Elizabeth filled it with peroxide and reached for my hands, dipping them one at a time. She watched my expression for pain, but I clenched my teeth and held my face perfectly still. My wounds turned white and frothy. Elizabeth emptied the basin, refilled it, and submerged my hands again.

“I’m not going to let you get away with anything here,” Elizabeth said. “But if you couldn’t find the spoon after a true attempt, I would have accepted a genuine apology.” Her voice was stern and direct. In the sleepy haze of early morning, I wondered if I had imagined her gentle tone of the night before.

She dipped my hands in again, watching the tiny white bubbles form for the third time. Running my hands under cold water, she patted them dry with a clean white towel. The small punctures looked deep and empty, as if the peroxide had eaten away perfect circles of flesh. With white gauze, she began wrapping my wrist, working her way slowly toward my fingers.

“You know,” Elizabeth said, “when I was six, I learned the only way to get my mother out of bed was to act out. I behaved atrociously, just so that she would get up and punish me. When I was ten, she tired of it and sent me to boarding school. The same won’t happen with you. Nothing you could do would make me send you away. Nothing. So you can go on testing me—hurling my mother’s silver around the kitchen, if that’s what you have to do—but know that my response will always be the same: I will love you, and I will keep you. Okay?”

I looked at Elizabeth, my body tight with suspicion, my breath lost in the steamy bathroom. I didn’t understand her. Shoulders tense, her sentences sharp and clipped, she spoke with a formality I’d never encountered. Yet behind her words was an inexplicable softness. Her touch, too, was different; the thorough way she cleaned my hands, without the heavy, silent burden in the actions of all my other foster mothers. I didn’t trust it.

Silence stretched between us. Elizabeth tucked a strand of hair behind my ear and looked deeply into my eyes for an answer.

“Okay,” I said finally, because I knew it was the fastest way to end the conversation and leave the heat of the small bathroom.

The corners of Elizabeth’s mouth turned up. “Come on, then,” she said. “It’s Sunday. On Sunday we go to the farmers’ market.”

She turned my body and led me back to my bedroom, where she slipped my gauze-wrapped hands out of my nightgown and into a white smocked sundress. Downstairs, she made scrambled eggs and fed me small bites on a spoon that looked identical to the one I’d launched across the room the night before. I chewed and swallowed, following directions, still trying to reconcile Elizabeth’s contrasting tones and unpredictable actions. She did not try to start a conversation over breakfast, just watched the eggs travel from the spoon into my mouth and down my throat. When she finished feeding me, she ate a small plate of eggs herself, washed and dried the dishes, and put them away.

“Ready?” she asked.

I shrugged.

Outside, we crossed the gravel, and she helped me into her ancient gray pickup. The aqua plastic upholstery peeled away from the piped edging, and there were no seat belts. The truck lurched down the driveway, dust and wind and exhaust whipping through the cab. Elizabeth drove less than a minute before turning in to what had been an empty parking lot when I had passed in Meredith’s car. It was now full of trucks and fruit stands, families wandering up and down the aisles.

Elizabeth went from stand to stand as if I wasn’t there, exchanging cash for heavy bags of produce: pink-and-white-striped beans, tan-colored pumpkins with long necks, purple potatoes mixed with yellow and red. When she was busy paying for a bag of nectarines, I stole a green grape off an overflowing table with my teeth.

“Please!” exclaimed a short, bearded man I hadn’t noticed. “Sample! They’re delicious, perfectly ripe.” He tore off a bunch of grapes and placed them in my wrapped hands.

“Say thank you,” Elizabeth said, but my mouth was full of grapes.

Elizabeth bought three pounds of grapes, six nectarines, and a bag of dried apricots. On a bench facing a long, grassy field we sat together, and she held out a yellow plum a few inches from my lips. I leaned forward and ate it out of her hand, the juice dripping down my chin and onto my dress.

When only the pit was left, Elizabeth threw it into the field and gazed to the far side of the market.

“See the flower stand over there, the last one in line?” she asked me. I nodded. A teenager sat on the open bed of a pickup truck, his feet in heavy boots hanging above the blacktop. At a table in front of him, roses lay wrapped in tight clusters.

Elizabeth continued. “That’s my sister’s stand. See the boy? Almost a young man now, it seems. That’s my nephew, Grant. We’ve never met.”

“What?” I said, surprised. From Elizabeth’s bedtime story, I’d assumed the sisters were close. “Why not?”

“It’s a long story. We haven’t spoken in fifteen years, except to divide up the properties after my parents died. Catherine took the flower farm; I kept the vineyard.” The teenager jumped off the back of the truck and made change for a customer. Long brown hair fell in front of his face, and he pushed it away from his eyes before shaking hands with an old man. His pants were slightly too short, his long, thin limbs the only feature I could find to resemble Elizabeth from the distance at which we sat. He seemed to be alone running the flower stand, and I wondered why Catherine wasn’t there.

“The strange thing,” Elizabeth said, following the boy’s movements with her eyes, “is that today, for the first time in fifteen years, I miss her.”

The boy threw the last bunch of roses to a couple passing by, and Elizabeth turned to me, snaking her arm around my back and pulling me closer to her on the bench. I leaned away, but she dug her fingers into my side, holding me still.

10.

On my chest bone, the mistletoe rested. I studied its irregular rise and fall. Neither my heartbeat nor my breath had returned to normal since reading the stranger’s response in my palm.

I didn’t remember what I’d done with the buckets of yellow flowers. I must have done something, though, because by noon they were settled in the back of Renata’s truck, bouquets of sunshine rolling down the freeway to brighten someone’s near-winter wedding, and I had stretched out alone on top of the worktable. Renata had asked me to keep the shop open, but no one came in. It was usually closed on Sundays, and I kept the door unlocked but the light off. I wasn’t technically disobeying Renata, but I wasn’t exactly inviting business, either.

My forehead was wet with sweat even though the morning had been cold, and I was frozen in a state of fascination resembling terror. For years my message-laden flowers had been faithfully ignored, an aspect of my communication style that gave me comfort. Passion, connection, disagreement, or rejection: None of these was possible in a language that did not elicit a response. But the single sprig of mistletoe, if the giver did indeed understand its meaning, changed everything.

I tried to sedate myself with rationalizations of coincidence. Mistletoe was thought to be a romantic plant. He had visions of me tying it with a red ribbon to the wooden frame of his stall and positioning myself underneath it for a kiss. He didn’t know me well enough to know I would never permit such closeness. But even though we had exchanged only a handful of words, I couldn’t shake the feeling that he somehow did know me well enough to understand that a kiss was out of the question.

I would have to respond. If he presented me with a second flower, the meaning again perfectly matched, I would no longer be able to explain away his understanding.

My legs trembled as I climbed off the table and wobbled into the walk-in. Settling among the cool flowers, I debated my reply.

Renata returned and began ordering me around the walk-in. There was another job, a small one, to be delivered down the hill. She retrieved a blue ceramic vase while I gathered the leftover yellow flowers.

“How much?” I asked, because price guided our arrangements.

“It doesn’t matter. But tell her she can’t keep the vase. I’ll stop by for it next week.” Renata slid a scrap of paper toward me as I finished the arrangement, an address scrawled in the center. “You take it,” she said.

On my way out the door, my arms around the heavy vase, I felt Renata slip something into my backpack. I turned. She had locked the door behind me and was heading toward her truck.

“I don’t need you again until next Saturday, four a.m.,” she said, waving goodbye. “Be prepared for a long day, no breaks.”

I nodded, watching her get in her truck and drive away. When she turned the corner, I set down the vase and opened my backpack. Inside was an envelope with four pressed hundred-dollar bills. A note read: Payment for your first two weeks. Don’t disappoint me. I folded the cash and put it in my bra.

The address led me to what looked like an office building, only two blocks down the hill from Bloom. The glass windows of the storefront were dark. I couldn’t tell whether there was a business inside, closed on Sundays, or whether there was no business at all. When I knocked, the doors rattled on metal hinges.

A window opened on the second floor, and a disembodied voice floated down. “I’ll be a minute. Don’t go anywhere.” I sat down on the curb, the flowers at my feet.

Ten minutes later, the door opened slowly, and the woman who opened it was not out of breath. She reached for the flowers.

“Victoria,” she said. “I’m Natalya.” She resembled Renata with her light milky skin and water-colored eyes, but her hair was acetaminophen-pink and dripping wet.

I handed her the flowers and turned to go.

“Change your mind?” she asked.

“Excuse me?”

Natalya stepped back as if to let me through the door. “About the room. I told Renata to tell you it’s literally a closet, but she seemed to think you wouldn’t mind.”

A room. The cash in my backpack. Renata had staged an intervention, and all without letting on that she understood. My instinct was to walk away from the open door, but the reality of having nowhere to walk to was insurmountable.

“How much?” I asked, stepping backward.

“Two hundred a month. You’ll see why.”

I looked up and down the street, unsure what to say. When I turned back, Natalya had already walked through the empty storefront and was climbing steep stairs.

“Come or don’t,” she called, “but either way, close the door.”

I took a deep breath, exhaling through floppy lips, and stepped inside.

The one-bedroom apartment above the empty storefront looked as if it was designed to be office space, with thin commercial carpet over cement floors and a kitchen with a long bar and short refrigerator. The window over the kitchen was open and framed a view of a flat roof.

“I can’t legally rent this room,” Natalya said, pointing to a half-door positioned on the wall near the living room couch. It looked as if it would open to a crawl space or a small water heater. Natalya handed me a key chain with six keys, all numbered. “Number one,” she said.

Kneeling, I opened the low door and crawled inside. The room was too dark to examine. “Stand up,” Natalya said. “There’s a string hanging down from the light.” I grasped around in the darkness until I felt the string on my face. I pulled.

A bare lightbulb illuminated an empty blue room, blue as a painter’s palette on a boat in the middle of the sea, bright as illuminated water. The carpet was white fur and almost looked alive. There were no windows. The room was big enough to lie down in but not big enough for a bed or a dresser, even if I could have found one that fit through the small door. One of the walls held a row of brass locks, and when I looked closer, I saw that the locks bridged the space between the wall and a full-size door. Light seeped through the seam. Natalya was right; the room was literally a closet.

“My last roommate was a paranoid schizophrenic,” Natalya said, gesturing to the deadbolts. “The door opens into my room. Those are the keys to all the locks.” She pointed to the key ring in my hand.

“I’ll take it,” I said. I reached out into the living room and set two hundred-dollar bills on the arm of the couch. Then I closed the half-door, turned the lock, and lay down in the center of the blue.

11.

The sky felt bigger at Elizabeth’s. It curved from one low horizon line to the other, the blue seeping into the dry hills and dulling the yellow of summer. In the corrugated roof of the garden shed it reflected, and in the round metal trailer, and in the pupils of Elizabeth’s eyes. The color felt inescapable and as heavy as her sudden silence.

I sat in a lawn chair on a garden path, waiting for Elizabeth to return from the kitchen. Earlier that morning, she’d made peach-banana pancakes, and I’d eaten until I’d folded onto the kitchen table, unable to move. But rather than her usual stream of questions, some of which I answered, some of which I ignored, she’d been eerily quiet. She’d only picked at her food, pulling out the grilled peaches and leaving the rest of her pancake in a pool of syrup.

My eyes closed, I’d listened to the squeak of Elizabeth’s chair pushing back, her socked feet crossing the wood floor, and our stacked plates settling into the kitchen sink. But instead of the sound of running water that usually followed, I’d heard an unexpected clicking noise, and when I looked up, Elizabeth was leaning against the kitchen cabinets, her attention on an old-fashioned telephone. She twirled the spiraling cord that attached the receiver to the base and then stared at the dial as if she’d forgotten the number. After a time, she began to spin the dial again, but when she reached the sixth number she paused, curled in her lips, and hung up forcefully. The sound aggravated my full stomach, and I’d sighed.

Elizabeth startled, and when she turned, she looked surprised to see me sitting there, as if in her focus on the phone call she couldn’t make, she’d forgotten my very existence. Exhaling, she pulled me off the kitchen chair and into the garden, where I waited.

Now she emerged from the back door, clutching a muddy shovel in one hand, a steaming mug in the other.

“Drink it,” she said, handing me the cup. “It’ll help your digestion.”

I grasped the mug between my gauze-wrapped hands. It had been a week since Elizabeth cleaned and wrapped my puncture wounds, and I’d grown accustomed to the helplessness of the gauze. Elizabeth cooked and cleaned while I lay around day after day, doing nothing; when she asked me how my hands were healing, I told her they felt worse.

Blowing on the tea, I took a careful sip and then spit it out.

“I don’t like it,” I said, tipping the cup forward and letting the liquid spill onto the path in front of my chair.

“Try again,” Elizabeth said. “You’ll get used to it. Peppermint blossoms mean warmth of feeling.”

I took another sip. This time I held it in my mouth a little longer before spitting it over my armrest. “You mean warmth of bad taste.”

“No, warmth of feeling,” Elizabeth corrected me. “You know, the tingling feeling you get when you see a person you like.”

I didn’t know that feeling. “Warmth of vomit,” I said.

“The language of flowers is nonnegotiable, Victoria,” Elizabeth said, turning away and putting on her gardening gloves. She picked up the shovel and worked the soil where I had uprooted a dozen plants in my search for the spoon.

“What do you mean, ‘nonnegotiable’?” I asked. I took a sip of peppermint tea, swallowed it, and grimaced, waiting for my stomach to settle.

“It means there’s only one definition, one meaning, for every flower. Like rosemary, which means—”

“Remembrance,” I said. “From Shakespeare, whoever that is.”

“Yes,” said Elizabeth, looking surprised. “And columbine—”

“Desertion.”

“Holly?”

“Foresight.”

“Lavender?”

“Mistrust.”

Elizabeth put down her gardening tools, took off her gloves, and knelt down next to me. Her eyes were so penetrating, I leaned back until my lawn chair started to tip backward, and Elizabeth’s hand flew out to clutch my ankle.

“Why did Meredith tell me you couldn’t learn?” she asked.

“Because I can’t,” I said. She took hold of my chin and turned my face until she could look directly into my eyes.

“Not true,” she said simply. “Four years of elementary school and you haven’t learned simple phonics, Meredith warned me. She said you’d be put in special education, if you could make it at a public school at all.”

In four years I’d done kindergarten twice and second grade twice. I wasn’t faking inability; I’d just never been asked. After the first year, my reputation of silent volatility was such that I was isolated from every class I entered. Stacks of photocopied worksheets taught me letters, numbers, simple math. I learned to read from whatever picture books slipped out of my classmates’ backpacks or I stole from classroom shelves.

There had been a time when I believed school might be different. My first day, sitting at a miniature desk in a neat row, I realized the chasm between me and the other children was not visible. My kindergarten teacher, Ms. Ellis, spoke my name softly, with emphasis on the middle syllable, and treated me like everyone else. She partnered me with a girl who was tinier than I was, her thin wrists brushing mine as we walked in line from the classroom to the playground and back again. Ms. Ellis believed in feeding the brain, and every day after recess she placed a paper cup with a sardine on top of each desk. After we ate our sardine, we were to flip the cup upside down to see the letter written on the bottom. If we could say the letter’s name and sound, and think of a word that started with the letter, we could have a second sardine. I memorized all the letters and sounds the first week and always got a second sardine.

But five weeks into school Meredith placed me with a new family, in a different suburb, and every time I thought of the slippery fish, I angered. My anger flipped desks, cut curtains, and stole lunch boxes. I was suspended, moved, and suspended again. By the end of that first year, my violence was expected, my education forgotten.

Elizabeth squeezed my face, her eyes demanding a response.

“I can read,” I said.

Elizabeth continued to search my face, as if she was determined to dig out every lie I had ever told. I shut my eyes until she released me.

“Well, that’s good to know,” she said. She shook her head and went back to gardening, slipping on her gloves before dropping into shallow holes the plants I’d uprooted. I watched her work, replacing the topsoil and patting gently around each trunk. She looked up when she finished. “I’ve asked Perla to come over to play. I need a rest, and it would be good for you to make a friend before school starts tomorrow.”

“Perla won’t be my friend,” I said.

“You haven’t even met her!” Elizabeth said, exasperated. “How do you know if she’ll be your friend or not?”

I knew Perla would not be my friend because I had never, in nine years, had a friend. Meredith must have told Elizabeth this. She’d told all my other foster mothers, and they warned the children in their homes to eat quickly and sleep with their Halloween candy tucked deep inside their pillowcases.

“Now come with me. She’s probably already waiting by the gate.”

Elizabeth led me through the garden, to the low white picket fence at the far edge. Perla leaned against it, waiting. She was close enough to have heard every word we said, but she didn’t look upset, just hopeful. She was only an inch or two taller than I was, and her body was soft and round. Her T-shirt was too tight and too short. Lime-colored fabric stretched across her stomach and ended before the waistline of her pants began. Deep red lines circled her arms where the elastic bands of her cap sleeves had been, before they inched up and got lost in her armpits. She dug out the elastic bands and pulled down her sleeves one at a time.

“Good morning,” Elizabeth said. “This is my daughter, Victoria. Victoria, this is Perla.” The sound of the word daughter made my stomach hurt again. I kicked dust at Elizabeth until she stepped on both my feet with her right shoe, her fingers clamping down on the back of my neck. My skin burned under her touch.

“Hi, Victoria,” said Perla shyly. She picked up a heavy black braid from where it rested on her shoulder and chewed on the already-wet ends.

“Good,” said Elizabeth, as if Perla’s quiet words and my stubborn silence had established something. “I’m going inside to rest. Victoria, stay out here and play with Perla until I call you.”

Without waiting for a response, she walked into the house. Perla and I, alone, stared at the ground. After a time, she reached out hesitantly and touched the tip of my wrapped hands with a thick finger. “What happened?”

I pulled at the gauze with my teeth, all at once desperate to use my hands again. “Thorns,” I said. “Unwrap them.”

Perla pulled at the edges of the tape, and I shook loose of the material. The skin, uncovered, was pale and wrinkled, the scabs small, dry circles. I picked at the edge of a scab with a fingernail, and it flaked off easily, fluttering to the ground.

“We’ll be in the same class at school tomorrow,” Perla said. “There’s only one fourth grade.”

I didn’t respond. Elizabeth thought I would start school. But she also thought I would be her daughter, and thought she could force me to have a friend. About all of this, she was wrong. I walked toward the garden shed. Perla’s heavy footsteps followed. I didn’t know what I would do, but suddenly I wanted Elizabeth to understand exactly how wrong she’d been about me. Snatching a knife and a pair of clippers from a shelf by the shed, I crept around the side of the garden.

On the other side of the almond tree, I followed a pattern of gray-and-green succulents until they faded into gravel. There, at the place the dusty dirt road collided with the lush garden, was an enormous, tangled cactus. It was bigger than Meredith’s county car, and the trunk was brown and scabby-looking, as if it had been cut over and over again by its own spines. Each branch was built like a collection of flat hands growing one out of the other, right, then left, then right again, so that each branch was balanced enough to stand straight and tall.

I knew what I would do.

“Nopales,” Perla said, when I pointed to the cactus. “Prickly pear.”

“What?”

“It’s a prickly pear; see the fruit on top? In Mexico, they sell them at the market. They’re good, as long as you peel them well.”

“Cut it down,” I ordered.

Perla stood still. “What? The whole thing?”

I shook my head no. “Just that branch, the one with all the fruit. I want it, to give to Elizabeth. But you have to do it, or I’ll hurt my hands.” Perla still didn’t move but looked up at the cactus, twice as tall as she was. Flaming red fruit grew like swollen fingers on top of each flat palm. I shoved the knife in her direction, its dull blade pointed low toward her abdomen.

Perla reached out, tested the point of the blade with her soft finger, then stepped closer to me and took the knife by its handle.

“Where?” she asked quietly. I pointed to a place just above the brown trunk where a long green arm began. Perla rested the blade against the cactus and closed her eyes before leaning forward with the weight of her whole body. The skin was tough, but once she broke through the outer layer, the knife slipped through easily and the branch fell to the ground. I pointed to the fruit, and Perla cut off each one. They lay on the ground, bleeding red juice.

“Wait here,” I commanded, running through the garden to where I had discarded the dirty gauze.

When I returned, Perla was right where I’d left her. I held the fruit with the gauze, picking up the knife and carefully removing the spines from each prickly pear as if I was skinning a dead animal. I held the ripe, edible fruit out for Perla.

“Here,” I said. She looked at me with confusion.

“I thought you wanted these?” she asked. “For Elizabeth?”

“So take them to her, if you want,” I said. “This is the part I need.” I wrapped the strips of spiny skin in the gauze.

“Now go home,” I said.

Perla cupped the fruit in her hands and walked away slowly, sighing, as if she expected something more from me for her act of loyalty.

I had nothing to give her.

12.

Natalya was Renata’s youngest sister. There were six siblings, all girls. Renata was second in the birth order, Natalya last. It took me all week to gather this information, and for this I was grateful. Most days Natalya slept until late afternoon, and when she was awake she was quiet. She told me once she didn’t like to waste her voice, and the fact that she considered conversation with me a waste did not offend me at all.

Natalya was the vocalist for a punk band that, as she put it, had “made it” only within a twenty-block radius of the apartment. The band had a spirited following in the Mission and a few scattered fans around Dolores Park, and were unknown in every other neighborhood and every other city. They practiced downstairs. The rest of the block comprised offices, some leased and some empty, but all closed after five. Natalya provided me with a box of earplugs and a pile of pillows. Between the two I could reduce the music to only the vibration of the sound on the fur carpet, making it feel even more alive. Most nights her band didn’t start practicing until after midnight, so I had only a few hours of attempted oblivion before I rose.

I didn’t work until the following Saturday, but every morning that week I found myself wandering the streets around the flower market, watching wholesalers back overflowing trucks into the crowded parking lot. I wasn’t looking for the mysterious flower vendor; at least, I told myself I wasn’t. When I did see him, I slipped down an alley and ran until I was out of breath.

By Saturday I had settled on a response. Snapdragon. Presumption. I got to the flower market at four a.m., an hour before Renata, with a five-dollar bill and a new mustard-colored knit hat pulled low over my brow.

The flower vendor was bent over, unloading bushels of lilies, roses, and ranunculus into white plastic tubs. He didn’t see me approach. I took advantage of the time to return the unabashed stare he had released on my body the first day we met, scanning from the back of his neck down to his muddy work boots. He wore the same black hooded sweatshirt he had the first day we met, dirtier this time, with white-speckled work pants. They were the kind with the loop to hold a hammer, but the loop was empty. When he stood up I was standing directly in front of him, my arms overflowing with snapdragons. I had spent five dollars on the flowers, and at wholesale prices that bought me six bunches, mixed bouquets of purple and pink and yellow. I held the flowers high so that the tip of my hat ended where the snapdragons began, hiding my face completely.

I felt his hands close around the bottoms of the stems; his fingers, where they touched my own, were the temperature of the early-morning November sky. Fleetingly, I had the desire to warm them: not with my own hands, which weren’t any warmer, but with my hat or socks, something I could leave behind. He withdrew the flowers, and I stood exposed in front of him, heat rising in pink patches to my face. Turning quickly, I walked away.

Renata was waiting for me at the door, flustered and frantic. She had another big wedding, and the bride was straight out of a Hollywood blockbuster, demanding and irrational. She’d provided Renata with a pages-long list of flowers she liked and disliked, specifying color with paint swatches and size in centimeters. Renata tore the list in two and handed half to me with an envelope of cash.

“Don’t pay full price!” she called after me as I hurried away. “Tell them it’s for me!”* * *

The next morning, Renata sent me to the flower market alone. We had arranged flowers and tied nosegays until five for a six-o’clock wedding, and the stress had launched her into bed rest. Her shop was to be open every Sunday from now on; she’d created a new sign and told all her regulars I would be there. She gave me cash, her wholesale card, and a key. Taping her home phone number to the cash register, she told me not to bother her for any reason.

When I arrived at the flower market, the sky was still dark, and I almost didn’t see him standing to the right of the entrance. He was still, and flowerless, his head bent to the ground but his eyes up, waiting. I walked to the door with a purposeful step, eyes on the metal handle. The market would be busy and loud, but outside it was nearly silent. As I passed he raised a hand, holding up a rolled paper tied with a yellow ribbon. I took the scroll like a runner taking a baton, never breaking stride, and opened the door. The noise greeted me like the roar of a crowd. When I peeked back over my shoulder, he was gone.

Inside, his booth was empty. I crouched inside the white wood, untied the ribbon, and unwrapped the scroll. The paper was visibly old, yellowed and flaking at the corners. It resisted straightening. I held the two bottom corners down with my big toes, the top corners with my thumbs.

The paper held a drawing in faded graphite, not of a flower but of the trunk of a tree, its bark textured and peeling. I ran my fingertip along the bark; although the paper was flat, the drawing was so realistic I could almost feel the rough knobs. In the bottom right-hand corner were the words White Poplar in a curving script.

White poplar. It was not a plant I knew by heart. Taking off my backpack, I withdrew my flower dictionary. I scanned the W’s first, then the P’s, but neither white poplar nor poplar, white was listed. If there was a meaning, I wouldn’t be able to glean it from my dictionary. I rerolled and tied the scroll with the ribbon, but stopped midway through the bow.

On the underside of the ribbon, in a scratchy hand I recognized from flower prices on a chalkboard, were the words Monday, 5 p.m., 16th and Mission. Donuts for dinner. The black ink had spread into the silk so that the words were almost unreadable, but the time and place were clear.

I bought flowers that morning without thinking, without bargaining, and when I opened the shop an hour later, I was surprised by the things I carried.

The morning was slow, and I was grateful. I sat on a tall stool behind the register and flipped through a heavy phone book. The number listed for the San Francisco Public Library had a long recorded message. I listened to it twice, jotting down hours and locations on the back of my hand. Main Library closed at five p.m. on Sundays, as did Bloom. I would have to wait until Monday. Then, based on the meaning I uncovered, I would decide whether or not to meet for donuts.

At the end of the day, just as I had transferred the display flowers from the window to the walk-in, the front door opened. A woman stood alone, looking confused in the empty space.

“Can I help you?” I asked, feeling impatient and ready to leave.

“Are you Victoria?”

I nodded.

“Earl sent me. He asked me to tell you he needs more of the same, exactly the same.” She handed me thirty dollars. “He said to keep the change.”

I placed the money on the counter and went into the walk-in, not sure if we had enough spider mums. I laughed aloud when I saw the giant bunch I had purchased that morning. What remained of the periwinkle sat forgotten on the floor, where I had left it the week before. Renata hadn’t watered the plant, and it was dry but not dead.

“Why didn’t Earl come?” I asked as I began the arrangement.

The woman’s eyes flitted between my work and the window. She had the energy of a trapped bird.

“He wanted me to meet you.”

I didn’t say anything, and didn’t look up. In my peripheral vision I could see her pull at the roots of her burgundy-brown hair, the color covering what was probably speckled gray.

“He thought you might be able to make me a bouquet—something special.”

“For what reason?” I asked.

She paused, looking out the window again. “I’m single but don’t want to be.”

I looked around. My success with Earl had made me confident. She needed red roses and lilac, I decided, neither of which I had purchased. I tended to avoid them. “Next Saturday,” I said. “Can you come back?”

She nodded. “Lord knows I can wait,” she said, rolling her eyes. She watched my fingers fly in circles around the mums in silence. When she walked out the door ten minutes later, she seemed lighter, jogging up the block toward Earl’s like a much younger woman.

I rode the bus to Main Library the next morning and waited on the steps until it opened. It didn’t take me long to find what I was looking for. Books on the language of flowers were on the top floor, wedged between the Victorian poets and an extensive gardening collection. There were more than I had expected. They ranged from ancient, crumbling hardcovers like the one I carried to illustrated paperbacks that seemed to have come from antique coffee tables. All the volumes had one thing in common—they looked as though they hadn’t been touched in years. Elizabeth had told me the language of flowers was once common knowledge, and it always amazed me that it had retreated into the virtual unknown. I stacked as many books as I could carry onto trembling arms.

At the nearest table I opened a leather-bound volume, its once-gilded title faded to a scattering of gold dust. The card in the inside pocket had last been stamped before I was born. The book contained a complete history of the language of flowers. It began with the original flower dictionary published in nineteenth-century France and included a long list of the royalty who had courted with the language, giving detailed descriptions of the bouquets they traded. I skimmed to the end of the book, which listed a brief dictionary of flowers. White poplar was not included.

I scanned a half-dozen more books, my anxiety growing with each volume. I was afraid to know the stranger’s response but even more afraid that I wouldn’t find the definition and would never know what he was trying to say. After twenty minutes of searching, I finally found what I was looking for, a single line between plum and poppy. Poplar, white. Time. I exhaled, relieved but also confused.

Closing the book, I pressed my head against its cool cover. Time, as a response to presumption, was more abstract than I had hoped. Time will tell? Give me time? His response was unspecific; he had clearly not learned from Elizabeth. I opened another book and then another, hoping for an extended definition of the white poplar, but a search of the entire collection did not yield a second reference. I was not surprised. It didn’t seem that poplar, a tree, would be a plant of choice for romantic communication. There was nothing wistful about the passing of sticks or long strips of bark.

I was about to re-shelve the books when a pocket-sized volume caught my eye. The cover was illustrated with drawings of flowers in a grid of small squares, the definition in tiny print below each image. In the bottom row were delicately rendered drawings of roses in every hue. Under the faded yellow rose was the word jealousy.

Had it been any other flower, I might not have noticed the discrepancy. But I had never forgotten the sorrow that passed over Elizabeth’s face when she gestured to her yellow rosebushes or the thoroughness with which she snipped every young bud in the spring, leaving them to shrivel in a pile by the garden fence. Replacing infidelity with jealousy—this changed the meaning entirely. One was an action, the other only an emotion. Opening the small book, I scanned the pages, then set it down and opened another.

Hours passed as I took in hundreds of pages of new information. I sat frozen, only the pages of the books turning. Looking up flowers one at a time, I cross-referenced everything I had memorized with the dictionaries stacked on the table.

It wasn’t long before I knew. Elizabeth had been as wrong about the language of flowers as she had been about me.

13.

On the front steps, Elizabeth sat, soaking her foot in a pan of water. From where I stood at the bus stop, she looked small, her exposed ankles pale.

She looked up as I approached her, and I felt a rush of nerves—she wasn’t done with me, this I knew. That morning, Elizabeth’s shriek, followed by the loud thump of a wooden heel hitting the linoleum floor, had announced her discovery of the cactus spines. I’d risen, dressed, and raced downstairs, but by the time I entered the kitchen, she was already seated at the table, calmly eating her oatmeal. She didn’t look up when I walked into the room, didn’t say anything when I sat down at the table.

Her lack of reaction made me furious. What are you going to do with me? I’d screamed, and Elizabeth’s response had floored me. Cactus, she told me, her eyes taunting, meant ardent love, and though her shoes might never recover, she did appreciate the sentiment. I shook my head wildly, but Elizabeth reminded me of what she had explained in her garden, that each flower has only one meaning, to avoid confusion. I’d picked up my backpack and started to the door, but Elizabeth was behind me, a bouquet pressed to the back of my neck. Don’t you want to see my response? she asked. I spun around to face the tiny purple petals. Heliotrope, she said. Devoted affection.

I hadn’t paused for breath, and what came out next was a fiery whisper.

Cactus means I hate you, I’d said, slamming the door in her face.

Now a full day of school had passed, and my anger had faded into something close to regret. But Elizabeth smiled when she saw me, her expression welcoming, as if she had completely forgotten my declaration of hatred only hours earlier.

“How was your first day of school?” she asked.

“Awful,” I said. I took the stairs two at a time, my legs stretching their full length as I attempted to pass Elizabeth, but her bony fingers flew out and closed around my ankle.

“Sit,” she said. Her tight grasp thwarted my attempt at escape. I turned and sat on the step below her to avoid her eyes, but she pulled me up by the collar until I faced her.

“Better,” she said, then handed me a plate of sliced pear and a muffin. “Now eat. I have a job for you that may take all afternoon, so you’ll start as soon as you’ve finished this.”

I hated that Elizabeth was such a good cook. She kept me so well fed that I had yet to go back for the American cheese in my desk drawer. The pears on the plate were peeled and cored; the muffin was full of warm chunks of banana and melted peanut-butter chips. I ate every bite. When I finished, I traded the plate for a glass of milk.

“There,” she said. “Now you should be able to work for as long as it takes to remove every spine from the insides of my shoes.” She handed me two leather gloves that were much too big for my hands, a pair of tweezers, and a flashlight. “When you’re done, you’ll put them on your feet and walk up and down the steps three times, so that I can see you’ve been successful.”

I hurled the gloves down the stairs, and they landed like forgotten hands in the dirt. Thrusting my bare hands into the darkness of her shoe, my fingers searched the soft leather for spines. I found one and pinched it between my fingernails, drawing it out and flicking it onto the ground.

Elizabeth watched me work in quiet concentration: first the leather inside, then the sides, and ending with the point of the toe. The shoe that Elizabeth had stepped into was the hardest, her weight having hammered the spines all the way through the leather. I dug each one out with the tweezers like a sloppy surgeon.

“So, if not ardent love, what?” Elizabeth asked as I neared the end of my task. “If not your eternal devotion and passionate commitment to me, what?”

“I told you before school,” I said. “Cactus means I hate you.”

“It doesn’t,” Elizabeth said firmly. “I can teach you the flower for hate, if you like, but the word hate is unspecific. Hate can be passionate or disengaged; it can come from dislike but also from fear. If you’ll tell me exactly how you’re feeling, I’ll be able to help you find the right flower to convey your message.”

“I don’t like you,” I said. “I don’t like you locking me out of the house or throwing me into the kitchen sink. I don’t like you touching my back or grabbing my face or forcing me to play with Perla. I don’t like your flowers or your messages or your bony fingers. I don’t like anything about you, and I don’t like anything about the world, either.”

“Much better!” Elizabeth seemed genuinely impressed by my hate-filled monologue. “The flower you’re looking for is clearly the common thistle, which symbolizes misanthropy. Misanthropy means hatred or mistrust of humankind.”

“Does humankind mean everybody?”

“Yes.”

I thought about this. Misanthropy. No one had ever described my feelings in a single word. I repeated it to myself until I was sure I wouldn’t forget.

“Do you have any?”

“I do,” she said. “Finish your task, and we’ll look together. I have a phone call to make, and I’m not leaving the kitchen until I’ve made it. When we’re both done, we’ll go looking for thistle together.”

Elizabeth hobbled inside, and when the screen door banged closed, I scurried up the steps, crouching below the window. I rubbed my hand against the soft leather of the shoes, feeling for straggling spines. If Elizabeth was finally going to make the phone call she had been attempting for days, I wanted to listen. It was intriguing, the thought that Elizabeth, who never seemed to trip over a single word, had something she found hard to say. Peering in the window, I saw her sitting on the kitchen counter. She dialed seven numbers quickly, listened to perhaps the first ring, and then hung up. Slowly, she dialed again. This time she held the phone to her ear. From where I sat outside the window, I could see she was holding her breath. She listened for a long time.

Finally, she spoke. “Catherine.” She pressed her hand over the receiver and made a sound between a gasp and a sob. I watched her wipe at the corners of her eyes. She put the phone back to her mouth. “This is Elizabeth.” She paused again, and I listened intently, trying to hear the voice coming through the line, but couldn’t. Elizabeth continued, her voice fragile. “I know it’s been fifteen years, and I know you probably thought you’d never hear from me again. To tell you the truth, I thought you’d never hear from me again. But I have a daughter now, and I can’t stop thinking about you.”

I realized then that Elizabeth was talking to an answering machine, not a person. Picking up speed, her words tumbled forth. “You know,” she said, “all the women I’ve known who’ve had babies, the first thing they do is call their mothers; they want their mothers with them—even the women who hate their mothers.” Elizabeth laughed then, and relaxed her shoulders, which had been lifted almost all the way to her ears. She played with the spiraling cord with her finger. “So I understand that now, you know? In a completely different way. With our parents gone, all I have is you, and I think about you constantly—I almost can’t think of anything else.” Elizabeth paused, perhaps thinking about what she should say next, or how to say it. “I don’t have a baby—I was going to, adopt one, that is—but I ended up with a nine-year-old girl. I’ll tell you the whole story sometime, when I see you. I hope I’ll see you. Anyway, when you meet Victoria, you’ll understand—she has these wild animal eyes, like I had as a little girl, after I’d learned that the only way to get our mother out of her room was to start a grease fire on the stove or smash the entire season’s canned peaches.” Elizabeth laughed again, and wiped her eyes. I could see that she was crying, although she didn’t look sad. “Remember? So—I’m just calling to say that I forgive you for what happened. It was so long ago, a lifetime ago, really. I should have called years before now, and I’m sorry I didn’t. I hope you’ll call, or come to see me. I miss you. And I want to meet Grant. Please.” Elizabeth waited, listening, and then set the phone down gently, so that I could barely hear the click of the receiver.

Scrambling back down the stairs, I stared at Elizabeth’s shoes intently, hoping she wouldn’t know I’d been listening. Finally, she emerged from the kitchen and limped down the steps. Her eyes were wiped dry but still glistened, and she looked lighter—happier, even—than I’d ever seen her. “Well, let me see if you’ve been successful,” she said. “Try them on.”

I put on her shoes, took them off, extracted a spine I’d missed underneath my big toe, and put them on again. I walked up and down the stairs three times.

“Thank you,” she said, slipping a shoe on her uninjured foot and sighing with pleasure. “Much, much better.” She stood up slowly. “Now run into the kitchen and grab an empty jam jar from the cupboard with the glasses, a dish towel, and the pair of scissors on the kitchen table.”

I did as she asked, and when I returned she was standing on the bottom step, testing her weight on her hurt foot. She looked from the road to her garden and back again as if trying to decide where to go.

“Common thistle is everywhere,” she said. “Which is perhaps why human beings are so relentlessly unkind to one another.” She took her first step toward the road and grimaced. “You’ll have to help me or we’ll never make it,” she said, reaching for my shoulder.

“Don’t you have a cane or something?” I asked, shrinking away from her touch.

Elizabeth laughed. “No, do you? I’m not an old lady, despite what you may think.” She reached toward me, and this time I didn’t retract. She was so tall she had to bend at the waist to lean on my shoulder. We took slow steps toward the road. She stopped once to readjust her shoe, and we kept walking. My shoulder burned beneath her hand.

“Here,” Elizabeth said, when we reached the road. She sat down on the gravel and leaned against the wooden post of the mailbox. “See? Everywhere.” She gestured to the ditch separating the highway from the rows of vines. It was about as deep as I was tall, full of stiff, dry plants, without a flower anywhere.

“I don’t see anything.” I was disappointed.

“Climb down in there,” she said. I turned around and slid down the steep dirt wall. She handed me the jam jar and scissors. “Look for dime-sized flowers that were once purple, although this time of year they’ve likely faded to brown like everything else in Northern California. They’re sharp, though, so pick them carefully when you find them.”

I took the jar and scissors, and crouched down into the weeds. The brush was thick, golden, and smelled like the end of summer. I cut a dry plant at the root. It stood tall in its place, supported by weeds on all sides. Detangling it, I threw it onto Elizabeth’s lap.

“Is that it?”

“Yes, but this one doesn’t have flowers. Keep looking.”

I scrambled up the side of the ditch a few inches to get a better view but still didn’t see anything purple. I picked up a rock and threw it as hard as I could in frustration. It hit the opposite wall and flew back in my direction so that I had to jump out of the way. Elizabeth laughed.

Leaping back into the weeds, I parted the brush with my hands and examined every dry stalk. “Here!” I said finally, snatching a clover-sized bud and throwing it into the jar. The flower looked like a small golden puffer fish with a faded tuft of purple hair. I climbed back to Elizabeth to show her the flower, which was bouncing around inside the jar like a living thing. I clapped my hand over the top to keep it from escaping.

“Thistle!” I said, handing her the jar. “For you,” I added. I reached out awkwardly and patted her once on the shoulder. It was perhaps the first time in my entire life I had initiated contact with another human being—at least the first time in my memory. Meredith had told me I was a clingy baby, reaching out and clutching hair, ears, or fingers if I could find them—the straps of my infant car seat if I could not—with pulsing purple fists. But I didn’t remember any of this, and so my action—the quick connection of the palm of my hand to Elizabeth’s shoulder blade—surprised me. I stepped back, glaring at her as if she had made me do it.

But Elizabeth just smiled. “If I didn’t know the meaning, I would be thrilled,” she said. “I think this is the kindest you’ve been to me, and all to express your hatred and mistrust of humankind.” For the second time that afternoon her eyes filled, and, like before, she did not look sad.

She reached out to hug me, but before she could draw me in, I slipped out of her arms and back into the ditch.

14.

The solid form of the chair on which I sat began to liquefy. Without knowing how I got there, I lay on my stomach on the library floor, books spread in a semicircle around me. The more I read, the more I felt my understanding of the universe slip away from me. Columbine symbolized both desertion and folly; poppy, imagination and extravagance. The almond blossom, listed as indiscretion in Elizabeth’s dictionary, appeared in others as hope and occasionally thoughtlessness. The definitions were not only different, they were often contradictory. Even common thistle—the staple of my communication—appeared as misanthropy only when it wasn’t defined as austerity.

The temperature in the library rose with the sun. By mid-afternoon I was sweating, swiping at my forehead with a wet hand as if trying to wipe memories from a saturated mind. I had given Meredith peony, anger but also shame. Admitting shame was closer to an apology than I ever hoped to get with Meredith. If anything, she should be coming to me with bunches and bunches of peony, quilting peony-covered bedspreads, baking peony-covered cakes. If peony could be misinterpreted, how many times, to how many people, had I misspoken? The thought made my stomach turn.

My choices for the flower vendor hung as a threatening unknown. Rhododendron clung solidly to the definition of beware throughout every dictionary before me, but there were likely hundreds, if not thousands, more dictionaries in circulation. It was impossible to know how he had interpreted my messages or what he was thinking as he sat in the donut shop. It was past five o’clock. He would be waiting, his eyes on the door.

I had to go. Leaving books scattered on the library floor, I skipped down four flights of stairs and walked out into the darkening San Francisco sky.

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 there, 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.