The Language of Flowers

1.

Message grew exponentially in the months that followed. I accepted only cash, up front, and the underground quality attracted a cultlike following. I did not advertise. After the first few buckets of tagged iris, my phone number spread faster than it would have if I’d purchased a blinking billboard on the entrance to the Bay Bridge. Natalya did not return from her tour, and I took over the apartment, sending an envelope full of hundred-dollar bills to the landlord on the first of June. Marlena continued to work as my assistant, organizing the calendar, answering calls, filling purchase orders, and making deliveries. I supervised the flower arranging and met with clients on the folding flea-market chairs in the empty office space, the shoeboxes open under the harsh fluorescent lights.

My pre-wedding consultations were as in demand as my arrangements. Couples treated their appointments like visits to a fortune-teller or a priest; they told me, often for hours, the many hopes they held for their relationships, and also the challenges they faced. I recorded only a couple’s own words, taking notes on a sheet of transparent rice paper, and when they finished speaking, I handed them the paper, rolled into a scroll with a ribbon. Yet as the couples referenced the scroll to choose their flowers and craft their wedding vows, they credited me with forecasting their life together. Bethany and Ray were happily married. Countless other couples sent me cards from their honeymoons, describing their relationships with words like peace, passion, fulfillment, and an infinite number of flower-inspired qualities.

The rapid growth of Message—combined with an outpouring of florists offering consultations in the language of flowers to the streams of brides Marlena and I turned away—caused a subtle but concrete shift in the Bay Area flower industry. Marlena reported that peony, marigold, and lavender lingered in their plastic buckets at the flower market while tulips, lilac, and passionflower sold out before the sun rose. For the first time anyone could remember, jonquil became available long after its natural bloom season had ended. By the end of July, bold brides carried ceramic bowls of strawberries or fragrant clusters of fennel, and no one questioned their aesthetics but rather marveled at the simplicity of their desire.

If the trajectory continued, I realized, Message would alter the quantities of anger, grief, and mistrust growing in the earth on a massive scale. Farmers would uproot fields of foxglove to plant yarrow, the soft clusters of pink, yellow, and cream the cure to a broken heart. The prices of sage, ranunculus, and stock would steadily increase. Plum trees would be planted for the sole purpose of harvesting their delicate, clustered blossoms, and sunflowers would fall permanently out of fashion, disappearing from flower stands, craft stores, and country kitchens. Thistle would be cleared compulsively from empty lots and overgrown gardens.

Summer afternoons, as I worked in the rooftop greenhouse I’d constructed with PVC pipes and plastic sheeting, tending hundreds of small ceramic pots on wire racks, I tried to take solace in this small, intangible contribution to the world. I told myself that someone, somewhere, would be less angry, less grief-stricken, because of the rampant success of Message. Friendships would be stronger; marriages would last. But I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t take credit for an abstract contribution to the world when in every tangible human interaction I’d ever had I’d caused only pain: with Elizabeth, through arson and a false accusation; with Grant, through abandonment and an unnamed, unsupported child.

And then there was my daughter. That I had abandoned her did not leave my mind, not even for a moment. I could have moved in to Natalya’s old bedroom, but instead I still slept in the blue room, curled up alone in the space we’d once occupied together. Every morning upon waking, I counted her age to the month and day. Sitting across from chatty brides, I tried to remember her nearly hairless eyebrows, curved up at me in question, her lips opening and closing in rhythm. Her absence in the empty apartment began to feel as real as she’d once been, rattling the plastic sheeting of the greenhouse, seeping like light under the crack of the blue room’s door. In the tap of the rain on the flat roof, I heard her ravenous suck. Every twenty-nine days the moonlight traveled in a slow square across the futon where we sat on our last night together, and each month I half expected it to bring her back to me. Instead, the moonlight illuminated my solitude, and I sat upright in its pale glow, remembering her as she had been, imagining her as she had become. Miles and miles away, I felt my daughter changing, each day growing and developing, without me. I longed to be with her, to witness her transformation.

But as much as I wanted to be reunited, I would not go to her. My desire for my daughter felt selfish. Leaving her with Grant had been the most loving act I had ever accomplished, and I did not regret it. Without me, my daughter would be safe. Grant would love her like he had loved me, with unearned devotion and tender care. It was everything I wanted for her.

I had only one regret, and it had nothing to do with my daughter. In a life of trespasses, many violent and most undeserved, I regretted only the fire. A collection of jam jars, a fistful of matches, and an absence of judgment had created an inferno that blazed well past the extinguishing of the final flame. It burst forth into the lie that had taken me away from Elizabeth, ignited fights throughout eight years of institutional placements, and smoldered in my mistrust of Grant. I had refused to believe that he loved me, or that he would continue to love me if he knew the truth.

Grant believed his mother had lit the fire that ruined both our lives; though he didn’t talk about it, I knew he had not forgiven her. But she wasn’t the one to blame. It was my fault the vines went up in flames, my fault Elizabeth did not go to Catherine, my fault Grant spent the following year alone, caring for his sick mother. I didn’t know the details of Catherine’s unraveling, but they were clear in the way Grant loved me, delicately and in isolation. He had needed Elizabeth as much as I had.

Now it was too late. The vineyard had ignited. Grant spent his entire life (with the exception of the six months with me) alone. I’d lost the only woman who had ever tried to mother me, and it was too late to go back, too late to salvage my own childhood. But even though it was too late, it was this thought that plagued me: I wanted to go back to Elizabeth. I wanted, more than anything, to be Elizabeth’s daughter.

Mid-August, exhausted from an unrelenting summer wedding schedule and equally unrelenting thoughts of my daughter, Elizabeth, and Grant, I retreated to the blue room. For the first time since starting Message, I locked all six locks and slept through every appointment on our calendar. Marlena covered for me. The whistle of the kettle drifted into my dreams as she prepared tea for our clients, but I didn’t emerge. The locks kept me from climbing into my car and driving straight to the water tower, racing to the third floor, and taking my baby back. In my fantasies, she still lay helpless in her basket, staring up at the ceiling. In reality, she would be six months old, sitting up, reaching out, and maybe even crawling across the floor.

I stayed in the blue room for nearly a week. Marlena did not disturb me, but each morning she slid a photocopied sheet of paper through the crack under my door. It was our September calendar, the squares growing increasingly crowded as the days passed. I had expected business to taper off as the weather cooled, but if anything, we seemed to be getting busier, and my anxiety over the mounting work finally surpassed my depression. I grabbed a banana from a fruit bowl Marlena had filled and walked downstairs.

Marlena sat at the table, chewing the end of a pen. She smiled when she saw me.

“I was about to go to The Gathering House,” she said, “and hire another assistant.”

I shook my head. “I’m here. What’s first?”

She scanned the calendar. “Nothing major until Friday. But then we have to work sixteen days straight.”

I groaned, but in reality I felt relieved. Flowers were my escape. With flowers in my hands, perhaps I could survive the fall. And maybe, as the months passed, things would get easier. It was what I had expected, but so far it hadn’t proven to be true. In fact, the opposite seemed to be occurring; with each passing day, I felt more desolate, the consequences of my decisions less bearable. I turned to walk back upstairs.

“Going back to your cave?” Marlena asked. She sounded disappointed.

“What else would I do?”

Marlena exhaled. “I don’t know.” She paused, and I turned back around. It seemed she did know but was having trouble finding the words. “There’s a new sandwich shop next to Bloom,” she said finally. “I thought maybe we could grab some lunch and then go for a drive.”

“A drive?”

“You know.” She looked out the front windows to the street. “To see her.”

Marlena meant my daughter. But for a split second before I realized this, I thought she meant Elizabeth, and it seemed to me to be exactly the thing I needed to do. I knew where she lived, and I knew how to get there. It might be too late to be a child in her home, but it wasn’t too late to apologize for what I had done.

When I didn’t respond right away, Marlena looked to me, her expression hopeful.

I shook my head. I’d asked her never to speak of my daughter, and until now, she’d done as I’d asked. “Please don’t,” I said.

Her chin dropped to her chest, and she looked for a moment as neckless as a newborn.

“I’ll see you on Friday,” I said, turning to walk up the stairs.

All night I imagined driving to see Elizabeth. I pictured the long, dusty driveway, the late-summer grapes heavy on the vines. The afternoon sun would cast a rectangular shadow from the peeling white farmhouse, and the porch steps would squeak as I climbed them. At the kitchen table, Elizabeth would sit with her arms folded, her eyes on the door, as if she’d been waiting for me.

The vision shattered with the realization that all this could be gone. Not only the acres of vines but also the kitchen table, the screen door, the entire house. In all the time I’d spent with Grant, I’d never once asked him how much damage the fire had caused, and I’d never driven down the road past the entrance to the flower farm. I hadn’t wanted to know.

I couldn’t go. I couldn’t bear to see it, not even to apologize to Elizabeth.

But once sparked, I couldn’t let go of the idea. If I could apologize, then maybe, finally, I could forget. Maybe my dreams would cease and I could settle into a quiet, if lonely, life, knowing Elizabeth understood my remorse. Huddled in the blue room, I thought about how to accomplish the task. It would be simple enough to write a letter. Once I’d learned the address, I’d never forgotten it. But I couldn’t write my return address on the envelope without fear of Elizabeth showing up at my door, and without a return address, Elizabeth couldn’t answer my letter. Though I didn’t think I could live looking constantly out the window, half expecting her old gray truck to pull up to the curb, I wanted desperately to know her response. Written, I could handle her anger, her disappointment. It might even bring some relief from the years of guilt.

When the sun rose I knew what I had to do: I would write Elizabeth a letter and use Bloom as the return address. Renata would bring me a letter if one arrived. Inching open the door of the blue room, I listened for sounds of Marlena. The apartment was quiet. Walking downstairs, I sat at the table as I would during a flower consultation, reaching for a sheet of rice paper and a blue felt-tip pen. My hand shook as the pen hovered above the paper.

I wrote the date first in the upper-right-hand corner, as Elizabeth had taught me to do. Still trembling, I scrawled her name. I couldn’t remember if a colon or a comma should follow; after a pause, I put both. I looked down at what I had written. My script was sloppy from nerves, a far cry from the perfection Elizabeth had always demanded. I crumpled the paper and threw it to the floor, starting again.

An hour later I reached for my last piece of paper. Balled attempts littered the room all around me. This one, no matter what, would have to do. The pressure of the final sheet made my hand shake even more, and my handwriting looked like that of a young child, unsure of the shape of each letter. Elizabeth would be disappointed. Still, I continued, slowly, purposefully. Finally, I succeeded in inking out a single line:I lit the fire. I’m sorry. I’ve never stopped being sorry.

I signed my name. The letter was short, and I worried Elizabeth would think it rude or insincere, but there was nothing else to say. I folded the paper into an envelope, and sealed, addressed, and stamped it. The stamps I had purchased the previous spring held a drawing of a daffodil—new beginnings—yellow and white on a red background, gold letters celebrating the Chinese New Year. Elizabeth would notice.

Walking quickly to the end of the block, I pulled the heavy metal handle of the mailbox, dropping the letter through the slot before I had time to change my mind.

2.

On an afternoon in September I sat in the cavernous office space, checking the alphabetization of my cards out of habit and waiting for a couple to arrive. The couple would not marry until the following April but had insisted on meeting with me now. The bride wanted to coordinate everything—from the color of the place settings to the words in the song of their first dance—to her flower choices. Over the summer I had worked with countless brides, but coordinating music and flowers was new even to me. I was not looking forward to the meeting.

I checked my watch. Four forty-five. Fifteen minutes until my clients were set to arrive. It was time to make tea. I drank only a strong chrysanthemum tea I bought in Chinatown, the blossoms uncurling and suspending in the dark liquid. It was a nice touch for my sessions, and something my clients had come to expect.

In the kitchen, I brewed a pot and drank a cup before descending the stairs. The bride had arrived, sitting on the stoop in front of the glass doors. She sat alone, looking up and down the street. In the straight line of her back I could see her impatience. Her fiancé was late or absent. It was a bad sign for a marriage, and brides knew it. The long-term success of my business, I had decided months before, was dependent on the fact of arranging flowers only for couples whose marriages would last; I’d refused more than one couple for tardiness or spiteful conversations over the cards.

I set down the tray and walked to the door. Pressing my palms against the glass, I stopped suddenly. Outside, brakes squealed. Then, in front of my door, an old gray pickup truck lurched past, Elizabeth behind the wheel. At the stop sign on the steep corner, the truck rolled back before peeling into the intersection and disappearing up the hill. Turning, I raced up the stairs and into Natalya’s old bedroom, where I crouched down below the window to wait for the truck to return.

In less than five minutes, it did. Elizabeth drove more easily down the hill than she had up, and in a moment she’d turned the corner and was out of sight. I took the stairs two at a time and walked outside. The bride on the curb stood up when she saw me.

“I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “He’ll be here any minute.”

He wouldn’t, though. There was something rehearsed about her apology, as if she’d used the same words to excuse her fiancé for months or years.

“No,” I said, “he won’t.” Maybe it was the chrysanthemum tea, but I suddenly wanted this woman to know the truth. She opened her mouth as if to protest, but the expression on my face stopped her.

“You won’t do our flowers, will you?” She turned away from me, knowing the answer to her question. She would try Renata next; they always did. Renata had the only other flower dictionary identical to mine. I’d asked Marlena to make her a copy a few months before, when we began to have more business than we could handle. Daily, we directed clients to Bloom.

I started up the hill, and from the top I saw Renata descending. We met in the middle, as Grant and I had once done, the afternoon he brought the jonquil. In her hand was a pale pink envelope. My fingers trembled as I took it. I sat down on the curb and placed the envelope in my lap. Renata sat down next to me.

“Who is she?” Renata asked.

The envelope felt hot, and I moved it onto the sidewalk between us. I studied the lines of my empty palms as if looking for the answer to her question.

“Elizabeth,” I said quietly.

We were silent. Renata did not ask more, but when I glanced up, her face was still pinched in question, as if I had not responded at all. I looked back down at my hands. “She wanted to be my mother once, when I was ten years old.”

Renata made a clicking sound with her tongue. With a short fingernail, she picked at a glint of metal trapped in the concrete, but it did not come loose. “So?” she asked. “What did you do?”

It was a question Meredith would have asked, but coming from Renata, it sounded less accusatory than interested.

“I lit a fire.”

It was the first time I had said the words aloud, and a lump rose in my throat at the image they produced. I squeezed my eyes shut.

“My little fire starter,” Renata said. She placed a gentle arm around my shoulders, pulling me to her. “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

I turned to study her. She did not smile, but her eyes were warm. “So?” I asked. “Why doesn’t it?”

Renata pushed a clump of hair away from my eyes, her fingertips brushing my forehead. Her skin was soft. I leaned into her, my ear pressed against her shoulder so that her words, when she spoke, were muffled. “Do you remember the morning we met?” she asked. “When you stood on my stoop, looking for work, and then came back hours later with proof of what you could do? You handed me those flowers like an apology, even though you hadn’t done anything wrong, even though your bouquet was as close to perfection as I’d ever seen. I knew right then that you felt unworthy, that you believed yourself to be unforgivably flawed.”

I remembered the morning well. Remembered worrying that she’d know the truth about my homelessness, the truth about my history. “Then why did you hire me?” I asked.

Renata ran her hand along the line of my cheekbone. When she reached my chin, she tilted my face up. I looked into her eyes.

“Do you really think you’re the only human being alive who is unforgivably flawed? Who’s been hurt almost to the point of breaking?”

She looked at me deeply. When she looked away, I knew she understood that yes, I did believe I was the only one. “I could have hired someone else. Someone less flawed, perhaps, or at least better at hiding it. But none of them would have had the talent you have with flowers, Victoria. It’s truly a gift. When you work with flowers, everything about you changes. The set of your jaw loosens. Your eyes glaze with focus. Your fingers manipulate the flowers with a gentle respect that makes it impossible to believe you are capable of violence. I’ll never forget the first day I saw it. Watching you arranging sunflowers at the back table, I felt like I was looking at a completely different girl.”

I knew the girl of whom she was speaking. It was the same one I’d glimpsed in the dressing room mirror with Elizabeth, after nearly a year in her home. Perhaps that girl had survived somewhere within me after all, preserved like a dried flower, fragile and sweet.

Renata picked up the envelope and flapped it in the air between us.

“Shall I?” she asked.

3.

At the sound of the gavel, I blew the white, cottony buds I’d arranged in a line off the table. They scattered to the floor of the courtroom. Elizabeth stood up.

The flowers had been at my seat when I’d arrived, the tangle of baby’s breath—everlasting love—reflecting on the polished tabletop, soft, round orbs bobbing deep within the glossy wood. They were stiff and dry against my fingertips, as if Elizabeth had purchased them for our first court date, before the hearing had been continued, and continued again. Baby’s breath did not wither or mold. With time it grew increasingly brittle, but otherwise it did not change. There had been no reason for Elizabeth to purchase a fresh bunch.

As she stood before the judge, systematically denying a long list of accusations, I snapped the brown, budless stems into inch-long pieces, arranging them like a bird’s nest in the center of the table. There was a pause, and the courtroom fell silent. Elizabeth’s request echoed in my ears: I would ask that you return Victoria to my custody, effective immediately. I didn’t dare look up, afraid my eyes would betray my desire. But when the judge spoke again, it was only to ask Elizabeth to return to her seat. Her request, it seemed, did not deserve a response. She sat back down.

Meredith sat between Elizabeth and me at the long table, flanked by attorneys. My attorney was a short, heavy man. He looked uncomfortable in his suit, leaning forward as the judge spoke and pulling his shirt away from the back of his neck. His notepad was blank, and he did not appear to be carrying a pen. Under the table, he checked the time on his watch. He was ready to leave.

I was ready to leave, too. Only half listening as Meredith and the judge debated my level of need, I manipulated the collection of broken stems on the tabletop, arranging them into the shape of a three-finned fish, a pointed crown, and then a lopsided heart. The brittle pile distracted me from the proximity of Elizabeth, less than five arm lengths away. A level-ten group home, the judge ordered, pending availability. Meredith wrote the decision on my case plan, crossing the courtroom to the bench with a thick stack of papers in her hand. The judge paused, told Meredith to add my name to all the waiting lists for transitional housing, and then signed the top sheet. When I emancipated in eight years, I would still be alone. Without stating it in precise terms, the judge’s words defined my future.

The judge cleared her throat. Meredith returned to her seat. In the silence that followed, I understood that the judge was waiting for me to look up, but I did not. With my finger, I poked a hole in the twiggy heart I’d created from the stems, pulling it open until I saw my own face reflected in the tabletop within. I was surprised by how old I looked, and also how angry. Still, I did not look up.

“Victoria,” the judge said finally. “Do you have anything to say?”

I didn’t respond. On the other side of my attorney, the county prosecutor tapped her long, polished fingernails against the table, red ovals pressed onto wrinkled hands. She wanted me to testify against Elizabeth in criminal court, but I’d refused.

I stood up slowly. From my pockets I pulled handfuls of red carnations, browning heads I’d plucked from a holiday bouquet in the hospital gift shop. Over two months after the night of the fire, I was still in the hospital, moved from the burn unit to the psychiatric ward until Meredith could find a placement for me.

I ducked under the table and crossed the courtroom.

“I want you to think about the consequences of refusing to testify,” the judge said as I stood before her. “This is more than just about standing up for yourself, and standing up for justice. This is about protecting other children.”

The adults in the room believed Elizabeth to be a threat. I almost laughed, the idea was so absurd. But I knew if I laughed I would start to cry, and if I started to cry, I might never stop.

Instead, I piled the red carnations on the bench. My heart breaks. It was the first time I’d ever given a flower to someone who didn’t understand the meaning. The gift felt subversive and strangely powerful. As I turned to go, Elizabeth stood, taking in the meaning of the flowers. Our bodies faced each other, and in the brief, quiet moment, the energy between us was as hot as the fire that had torn us apart.

I started to run. The judge pounded the gavel; Meredith called me back. Throwing open the doors of the courtroom, I raced down six flights of stairs, pushing open an emergency exit and walking outside. I stopped in the bright afternoon light. It didn’t matter which way I ran. Meredith would catch me. She would drive me back to the hospital, place me in a group home, or lock me in a detention center. For eight years, I would move from one placement to the next, whenever she came for me. Then, on my eighteenth birthday, I would emancipate, and I would be alone.

I shivered. It was a cold December day, the bright blue sky deceptive. I lay down on the ground where I stood, pressing my cheek against the warm cement.

I wanted to go home.

4.

Ten years had passed, and still, Elizabeth wanted me.

Her letter, folded into a small square and tucked inside my bra, pressed into my skin as I worked beside Marlena that evening. I let you down, she’d written. I’ve never stopped being sorry, either. And then, at the very bottom, just above her name: Please, please, come home. Two or three times an hour I removed and reread the short sentences, until I’d memorized not only the words on the page but the exact shape of every letter. Marlena didn’t ask, just worked harder to make up for my distraction.

I would go to Elizabeth. I had decided this the moment I read her letter, sitting on the curb beside Renata. Standing up, I’d meant to walk straight to my car, drive immediately over the bridge and through the countryside to her vineyard. But instead I’d seen Marlena working through the window, stopped in to rearrange a bouquet, then paused and reached for another. Hours passed. We had an anniversary party the following day, followed by two weddings, back-to-back. The fall had officially become as busy as the summer months had been, full of demanding, superstitious brides who would rather marry on a Sunday in late autumn than use another florist. They were my least favorite. Not wealthy enough to have simply outbid other brides for the summer months and planned extravagant weddings with grace and gratitude but wealthy enough to run in the same circles and feel the grief of constant comparison. Fall brides were insecure, and the men they were marrying overindulgent. In the past month, Marlena and I had been called in for last-minute consultations for three different brides, in which everything we had planned was scrapped and we started over the day before a wedding.

But it was more than just the demands of our schedule that kept me idling beside Marlena. The thrill of knowing that Elizabeth still wanted me had dulled the pain of the past decade, dulled even my constant aching for my daughter. As long as I did not go to her, the promise of Elizabeth’s letter remained intact. If I knocked on her door, I risked coming face-to-face with a woman different from the one I remembered—older, without a doubt, but perhaps also sadder or angrier—and this felt like too great of a risk to take.

That night I slept fitfully, waking every few hours with the urge to drive to Elizabeth’s. But by morning, the pull of the vineyard had weakened. I would wait a week, I decided, two at the most, and then I would go to her, fully prepared for whatever I would find.

I had showered and dressed when the phone rang. Caroline. I’d been expecting her call. During our consultation, she hadn’t known what she wanted from a florist or from a relationship, and got weepy every time I asked a question she couldn’t answer, which was anytime I asked anything more complicated than her name or the date of her wedding. I should have turned her away, but I liked her fiancé, Mark, which I suppose was why I kept the job; he teased her in a way that somehow sounded encouraging instead of belittling.

I answered her call on the first ring. Just as I was trying to decide whether to tell her to come over or lie and say I was busy, I walked through the bedroom and saw her sitting on the curb across the street. She looked up at me, Mark at her side. Her fists were clenched, but she opened one hand slowly to wave. I slid open the window and hung up the phone.

“Okay, give me a minute,” I said, just as Natalya had the first time I knocked on the door, and, like Natalya, I took my time. I went into the kitchen and made a cup of tea, poached eggs, and toast. If we were going to start over on the bouquets—and I knew we were—I would likely be working the next twenty-four hours straight. I took my time eating and drank two glasses of milk before descending the stairs.

Caroline hugged me when I opened the door. She was probably almost thirty but wore her hair in two long braids, and the hairstyle made her appear much younger. When she sat down at the table across from me, I saw that her blue eyes were watery.

“The wedding’s tomorrow,” she said, as if this fact had somehow escaped me. “And I think I got it all wrong.” She gasped and pounded her heart with a flat palm.

Mark sat down next to her and patted her on the back with a fist. She laughed and hiccupped. “She’s trying not to cry,” he said. “If she cries this close to the wedding, it will definitely show in the photographs.”

Caroline laughed again, and a tear escaped. She swatted at it with a manicured fingernail and kissed Mark. “He doesn’t understand the significance,” she said. “He’s never met Alejandra and Luis, and doesn’t know about what happened on their honeymoon.”

I nodded as if I remembered this couple and the flowers I had chosen for them. “So, what can I do for you?” I asked as patiently as I could manage.

“You know that old question, if you could eat only five foods for the rest of your life, what would they be?” I nodded, even though no one had ever asked me that question. “Well, I keep thinking about that. Choosing flowers for a wedding is like picking the five qualities you want in a relationship for the rest of your life. How can you possibly choose?”

“She says for the rest of your life like marriage is a terminal disease,” said Mark.

“You know what I mean,” she said, examining her hands.

I was only half listening to their conversation, thinking about the five foods I would choose. Donuts, definitely. Did I have to specify a type, or could I just say assorted? Assorted, I decided, with an emphasis on maple.

Caroline and Mark were debating red roses and white tulips, love versus the declaration of love. “But if you love me and don’t tell me, how will I know?” she asked.

“Oh, you’ll know,” Mark said, raising his eyebrows and running his fingers from her knee to the top of her thigh.

I looked out the window. Donuts, roasted chicken, cheesecake, and butternut squash soup, extra hot. One more. It should be a fruit or a vegetable if I was to survive more than a year on this imaginary diet, but I couldn’t think of any I liked enough to eat every day. I drummed my fingers on the card table and looked out the window at the unseasonably blue sky.

And just then I knew exactly what it would be, and I knew I had to leave, right then, to see Elizabeth. The grapes were ripe. I’d been counting the warm fall days, twelve in a row, and just now, the sun shining in sharp, dust-filled angles through the dark room, I knew the grapes were ready for harvest. I also knew that Elizabeth had not yet discovered them. I don’t know how I knew this, but I did, in the way that I had heard some mothers and daughters, once connected by an umbilical cord, know before being told when the other was sick or in danger. I stood up. Caroline and Mark had moved on to heliotrope versus wild geranium, but I had missed who had won the tulip-rose debate.

“Why are you limiting yourself?” I asked, more harshly than I had intended. “I never told you to limit yourself to a certain number of flowers for your bouquet.”

“But who ever saw a bride carrying a bouquet with fifty different types of flowers?” she asked.

“So, start a trend,” I said. Caroline was the type who would like the possibility of starting a trend. I pulled out my spiral notebook and a pen. “Go through the boxes one card at a time and write down every single quality you want in your relationship. We’ll get together everything we can at the last minute,” I said. “But give up on matching your bridesmaids’ dresses.”

“The dresses are chartreuse,” Caroline said sheepishly, as if she had purchased them in anticipation of this exact moment. “They’ll match anything.”

I was already halfway up the stairs. I needed to call Marlena. She was capable of filling the order without me, and would do it quickly and professionally. Her arrangements were not beautiful—she had improved little over time—but she knew the flowers and definitions by heart and would not confuse oak-leaf with pencil-leaf geranium. The reputation of Message depended on the content of the bouquet, not on the artistic merit of the arrangements, and in the area of content Marlena was flawless.

She answered after one ring, and I knew she’d been awaiting this call, too.

“Come over,” I said. Marlena groaned. I hung up without telling her that I wouldn’t be here when she arrived, or that Caroline and Mark were in the midst of compiling quite possibly the most complex bouquet in the history of San Francisco weddings. No reason to alarm her.

I grabbed my keys and took the stairs two at a time.

“Marlena is on her way,” I said to Caroline and Mark as I walked past the table and out the door.

I drove the country roads as I had so many times before, with Grant, alone, and then with the baby, the last time I had come. Passing the flower farm, I pressed my palm into my left temple to block my peripheral vision. I didn’t see the farmhouse, the water tower, or the flowers. I had mustered up the courage to see Elizabeth but could not bear the thought of glimpsing Grant or my daughter on the same day.

Across from Elizabeth’s driveway, I pulled onto the shoulder of the road. A school bus passed, and then a crowded brown station wagon. When the road was empty, I stepped out into the quiet countryside and looked across the road.

On first glance, the vineyard was exactly how I remembered it. The long driveway, the farmhouse in the center, the vines running in stripes parallel to the road. I leaned back against my car, looking for signs of the damage I had caused. The vineyard had been replanted, the charred earth turned, and the ashes were long gone; even the thistle had returned to the ditch, as tall and dry as it had been the night I lit the fire. Only the thickness of the vines revealed the history of the blaze: On the southeastern quadrant of the property, the trunks of the grapevines were half as thick as those on the opposite side of the driveway. The leaves of the younger plants were a brighter shade of green, and noticeably more fruit hung on the vines. I wondered if the quality of the fruit on the new vines had yet reached Elizabeth’s standards.

I walked across the road. The house looked unchanged, but the row of sheds had disappeared—burned, I imagined, to the ground. Carlos’s trailer was gone, too, but I doubted the metal had melted; it was more likely he’d found another job or moved away, and Elizabeth had disposed of the trailer. Without the dilapidated outbuildings, the house looked more like a bed-and-breakfast than a working vineyard. The white paint was bright and spotless, and a pair of red wooden rocking chairs sat on the front porch. Inside the lace-covered window, the kitchen light was on.

Pausing on the bottom step, I heard a soft sound like a rush of wind, followed by a quiet splash. Elizabeth was in the garden. My back pressed against the white clapboard, I crept around the side of the house. Elizabeth squatted barefoot in the dirt just paces from where I stood, her back to me. Mud oozed into the wrinkles on the backs of her heels, and when she leaned forward, I saw that the arches of her feet were clean and pink.

“Again?” she asked, holding up a round wire ring with a worn wooden handle.

I moved away from the wall to get a better view of the garden. On a path in front of the roses sat a galvanized washbasin half-full of bubble solution, iridescent swirls reflecting in the thick liquid. With one hand squeezing the edge of the basin, a round-eyed baby reached for the metal ring. She sat on the ground in only a cloth diaper, and her naked body swayed, her full belly teetering on her unstable bottom. With her free hand, Elizabeth reached behind the baby’s back to steady her, and in the moment of distraction, the baby succeeded in grabbing the ring and pulling it, still soapy, into her mouth. She gummed it fiercely.

“Excuse me, little one,” Elizabeth said, tugging unsuccessfully on the wooden handle. “This is a bubble wand, not a teething ring.”

The baby did not react to the admonition. After a pause, Elizabeth tickled her bare belly until she giggled, releasing her clamped jaw from the metal ring. Elizabeth wiped the soapy residue from the baby’s mouth with her thumb.

“Now watch,” Elizabeth said. She dipped the wand and blew through the ring. Bubbles rained down on the baby, leaving wet circles as they popped on her shoulders and forehead.

Her hair had grown; dark ringlets covered the top half of her ears and curled up at the back of her neck. From hours in the garden, I imagined, her skin had browned to a darker shade of cream, and she’d sprouted two bottom teeth where months before I’d run my finger along her slick gums. I may not have recognized her at all except for her eyes—her round, deep, gray-blue eyes—which turned and fixed on my face in question, as they had the morning I’d left her in the moss-lined basket.

Backing silently away, I spun around and ran to the road.

5.

Sitting among the decades-old plants, I surveyed the scarce blooms. Grant had pruned the roses. A quarter-inch below each sliced end, a fat red bud pushed out of the stem, the point from which a new flower would emerge. Grant would have roses, as he did every year, for Thanksgiving.

Twenty-five years alone, and Grant had reconnected with Elizabeth. Stunned, I’d driven immediately to the flower farm, ditching my car on the road and—having long before thrown away the key—climbing over Grant’s locked gate. But instead of knocking on the water tower’s door, I’d retreated into the rose garden. My daughter’s shy smile played behind my eyelids; her joy, swirling like the soapy water in the basin, filled me. She was with Elizabeth, and she was happy. The ease of their interaction made me think her home was permanently on the vineyard, and the thought caused me to feel Grant’s loneliness as acutely as I’d experienced my daughter’s joy.

An hour passed. Still swooning from the unexpected glimpse of my baby girl, I heard Grant’s boots approach from behind me. My heart echoed as it had in the flower market the first time we met, and I pulled my knees to my chest as if to muffle the sound. Grant lined his boots up with my own and sat down next to me, his shoulders touching mine. He tucked something behind my ear, and I withdrew it. A white rose. I held it up to the sun, and its shadow fell upon us. We sat in silence for a long time.

Finally, I slid away and turned to him. It had been more than a year since I’d seen Grant, and he seemed to have aged more than the time should have allowed. Thin lines etched across his serious brow, but his strong soil scent was as I remembered. I inched myself back until our shoulders touched again.

“What’s she like?” I asked.

“Beautiful,” he said. His voice was quiet, thoughtful. “Shy at first, usually. But when she’s ready, when she reaches for you and holds both your ears with her fat little hands, there’s nothing like it in the world.” He paused for a moment, pulling a petal from the rose I held and holding it to his lips. “She loves flowers, too, picks them, smells them, will eat them if you don’t watch her closely enough.”

“Really?” I asked. “Loves them like we do?”

Grant nodded. “You should see the way she smiles when I rattle off the names of the orchids in the greenhouse: oncidium, dendrobium, bulbophyllum, and epidendrum, tickling her face with each blossom. I wouldn’t be surprised if ‘Orchidaceae’ was her first word.”

I pictured her round face, cheeks flushed from the heat of the greenhouse, pressed into Grant’s chest to avoid the tickling flowers.

“I’m trying to teach her the science behind the plants, too,” Grant said. The smile that stretched his lips was full of memory. “But so far it’s not going so well. She falls asleep when I start to ramble on about the history of the Betulaceae family or the way moss grows without roots.”

Moss grows without roots. His words took my breath away. Throughout a lifetime studying the biology of plants, this simple fact had eluded me, and it seemed now to be the one fact I needed, desperately, to have known.

“What’s her name?” I asked.

“Hazel.” Reconciliation. Grant pulled at a stubborn root of crabgrass, avoiding my eyes. “I thought, someday, she’d bring you back to me.”

She had, in this moment, brought us back together. The root of the crabgrass popped loose. Grant followed the dry shoot to the point of its next engagement with the earth.

“Are you mad?” I asked.

Grant didn’t answer for a long time. Another root broke free, and he pulled up the entire plant, twisting the long strand of grass around his thick index finger. “I should be.”

He was quiet again, looking out over his property. “I’ve rehearsed my anger a hundred times since discovering Hazel. You deserve to hear me out.”

“I know I do,” I said. “Go ahead.” I looked at him, but he didn’t meet my gaze. He would not deliver the words he’d practiced. Though he had every right to be, he wasn’t angry, and didn’t want to make me suffer. It wasn’t in him.

After a time, Grant shook his head, exhaling. “You did what you had to do,” he said. “And I did what I had to do.”

I understood his words to mean that I was right when I’d guessed my daughter lived on the vineyard; Grant had given her to Elizabeth.

“Dinner?” Grant asked suddenly, turning back to me.

“Are you cooking?” I asked.

He nodded, and I stood up.

I started toward the water tower, but Grant took my hand and led me to the front porch of the main house. I let him guide me, noticing for the first time that the house had been repainted and the windows replaced.

The dining room table was set, the long, polished wood exposed except for two placemats on one end, folded cloth napkins, polished silver, and thin white china plates with indistinguishable blue flowers ringing the edge. I sat down, and Grant poured water into a crystal glass from a pitcher before disappearing through the swinging door that led to the kitchen. He came back with a whole roasted chicken on a silver platter.

“You cook this much for yourself?” I asked.

“Sometimes,” he said. “When I can’t get you out of my head. But today I cooked it for you. When I saw you jump the fence, I turned on the oven.”

He removed both drumsticks with a knife and placed them on my empty plate before slicing the breast. From the kitchen, he retrieved a boat of gravy and a long tray of roasted vegetables: beets, potatoes, and peppers in vibrant colors. While he served me vegetables, I finished sucking the meat off the bones of the first drumstick. I set the clean bone down in a pool of gravy, and Grant took his seat in the chair opposite mine.

I had so many questions. I wanted him to describe every day that had passed since he discovered the baby in the moss-lined basket. I wanted to know how he felt when he looked into his daughter’s eyes for the first time, if he felt love or terror, and how she came to live with Elizabeth.

I wanted to ask, but instead I ate the chicken, ferociously, as if I had not had a meal since the last time Grant cooked for me. I ate both drumsticks and both wings and started on the breast. The taste of the meat was entwined in my memory with the taste of Grant, his kisses after cooking, the way he touched me, only when I asked, in the studio and in all three stories of the water tower. I had left him, and his touch, and his cooking, and nothing, ever, had replaced it. When I looked up, he was watching me eat, as he had done so many times before, and I could tell by the look in his eyes that nothing had replaced me, either.

When I finished eating, the chicken on the silver platter was a statue of bones. I looked at Grant’s plate. It was hard to tell if he’d eaten anything. I hoped so. I hoped I hadn’t devoured the entire bird. But when he asked me if I wanted to see Hazel’s room, and I tried to stand up, I felt the weight of the meat inside me. I let Grant half-carry me up the stairs. He opened the last door in the long hallway and helped me to the edge of a twin bed. I lay down. Grant picked up my head and placed a pillow beneath my neck. He crossed in front of a rocking chair and pulled a pink leather scrapbook off a bookshelf.

“Elizabeth made this for her,” he said, opening the book. The first page held a picture of a hazel blossom that Catherine had drawn. It had been pulled from its file, laminated with clear plastic, and secured to the album with gold photo corners. Below the drawing was my daughter’s name, Hazel Jones-Hastings, in Elizabeth’s elegant script, and her birthday, March 1, which wasn’t her birthday at all. He turned the page.

In a mounted photograph, Hazel lay in her moss-lined basket, exactly as I had left her. It made my stomach churn, my eyes well, to remember my love for her in that moment, overwhelming and incapacitating. On the next page, Hazel’s head pressed against Grant’s chest in a baby carrier, a floppy white hat tied under her chin. She was asleep. There were two or three photos from each month of her life, her first smile and first teeth and first food all captured with loving attention.

I closed the book and handed it back to Grant. It was everything I had wanted to know.

“This is her room?” I asked.

“When she visits,” he said. “Saturday afternoons, usually, or after the farmers’ market on Sundays.” He ran his hand along the railing of an empty crib as he returned the photo album to its shelf. When he lay down next to me, his body was hot where it touched my arm.

I looked around the room. Catherine’s floral drawings, one-foot graphite squares, hung in thick white mats with pink wooden frames. The frames matched the pink furniture: the crib, a rocking chair, a nightstand, and a bookshelf, all stenciled with white daisies.

“The house looks good,” I said. “You’ve done so much in a year.”

Grant shook his head. “A year and a half,” he said. “I started the day after I showed you my mother’s art studio. Afternoons you worked late, I’d rush home to peel wallpaper, refinish the floors. I wanted it to be a surprise. I hoped someday we’d live here together.”

I’d left without saying goodbye, without even telling Grant I was pregnant. And all the while, he’d been building me a home, never knowing if or when I would return.

“I’m sorry,” I said. In the silence that followed, I remembered the early months of my pregnancy, sleeping for the second time in McKinley Square, nauseated, dirty, and disheveled. The image made me uncomfortable. I’d been in shock to the point of fearlessness, all sense of self-preservation gone.

“I’m sorry, too,” Grant said.

I peeled away from him and looked into his eyes. He was talking about our daughter, her room, empty, surrounding us.

“You gave her away?” I asked. It wasn’t an accusation, and for once the tone of my voice communicated what I wanted to say, that my curiosity was blameless and all-consuming.

Grant nodded. “I didn’t want to. I loved her the moment I saw her. I loved her so much I forgot to eat and sleep and tend my flowers for the entire month of March.” So it had been the same for Grant, I thought: too much.

He turned toward me, his thick body wedged between the wall and my side. “I wanted so much to make her happy,” he said. “But I kept making mistakes. I’d feed her too much or forget her diapers or leave her too long in the sun while I worked. She never cried, but the guilt kept me up at night. I thought I was letting her down, and you, too. I couldn’t be the father I wanted to be, not alone, not without you. And I was afraid, even as I named her, that you weren’t ever coming back.”

Grant lifted a heavy hand and ran it through my hair. He pressed his cheek into my scalp, and I felt his unshaven jawbone tickle my skin. “I took her to Elizabeth,” he said. “It was the only thing I could think of to do. When I showed up on her front porch with the baby in the basket, she cried and took us into her kitchen. I didn’t leave her home for two weeks, and when I did, I didn’t take the baby with me. Hazel smiled for the first time in Elizabeth’s arms; I couldn’t bear the thought of separating them.”

Grant wrapped his arms around me and leaned his face into my ear. “Maybe it was just my excuse for leaving her,” he whispered. “But I couldn’t do it.”

I slipped my arm under his chest. When he squeezed me to him, I squeezed back.

“I know,” I said. I couldn’t do it, either, and he knew it without me having to say it. We held on to each other as if we were drowning, neither looking for shore, and we stayed that way a long time, not talking, barely breathing.

“You told Elizabeth about me?” I asked.

Grant nodded. “She wanted to know everything. She thought I should be able to recite every moment of every day you’d lived since the last time she saw you in court, and kept getting frustrated when I couldn’t.” Grant told me about sitting at Elizabeth’s table, a pot roast in the oven, Hazel asleep in his arms. Why didn’t you ask? she would say, when Grant didn’t know what I’d done for my sixteenth birthday, if I’d gone to high school, or what I liked best for breakfast. “She laughed when I told her you don’t like lilies, and she told me you don’t much care for cactus, either.” I pulled my face out of Grant’s chest to look at him. The corner of his mouth turned up, and I knew he had heard the whole story.

“She told you everything?” I asked. Grant nodded. I dropped my head back down, speaking my next words into his chest. “Even about the fire?”

He nodded again, his chin pressing into my forehead. We were quiet for a long time. Finally, I asked the question I had long held. “How could you have not known the truth?”

Grant didn’t answer right away. When he did, the words came out with a long sigh. “My mother’s dead.”

I believed his statement to signal an end to my questioning, and did not press. But after a pause, he continued.

“It’s too late to ask her. But I think she thought she lit the fire. By that time, she didn’t recognize me most days. She was forgetting to eat, refusing her medicine. The night of the fire, I found her in her studio, watching. Tears streamed down her face. She began to cough spastically, and then choke, as if she had smoke in her lungs. I went to her, put my arms around her shoulders. She felt so small. I’d probably grown a foot since the last time I’d been in her arms. Between sobs, she muttered the same sentence, over and over again: I didn’t mean to do it.”

I imagined the purple sky, Catherine and Grant’s silhouette in the window, felt the return of the despair I’d experienced in the heat of the fire. Catherine had felt it, too. In that moment, we were the same, each of us destroyed by our limited understanding of reality.

“And after?” I asked.

“She spent a year drawing hyacinth; in pencil, charcoal, ink, pastel. Finally, she began to paint, on everything from huge canvases to tiny postage stamps, tall purple stalks with hundreds of small blossoms. All for me, she said. Not one was good enough for Elizabeth. Every day, she tried again.”

Hyacinth. Please forgive me. I remembered the jars of purple paint on the top shelf of Catherine’s studio.

“It was a good year,” Grant said. “One of the best we had. She took her medicine, tried to eat. Every time I crossed the grounds below her broken window, she called down that she loved me. I still look up sometimes when I cross the front of the house, expecting to see her.”

Catherine had never, not even in illness, left Grant. Unsupported and alone, she had managed what neither Grant nor I had been able to do: keep and raise a child. The respect that hit me was deep and unexpected. I looked at Grant, to see if he felt it, too. His eyes, glassy and full, were fixed on his mother’s drawings.

“She loved you,” I said.

His tongue curled out of his mouth, pressed against his upper lip. “I know.”

There was a hint of surprise in his voice, and I didn’t know if he was surprised that his mother had loved him so much or surprised that he finally understood the depth of her feeling. Her mothering had been far from perfect. But Grant, grown now, was strong, loving, and a successful farmer. Sometimes he was even happy. No one could say she hadn’t raised him well, or at least well enough. I felt a wave of gratitude for the woman I would never meet, the woman who had created the man I loved.

“How did she die?” I asked.

“One day she didn’t get out of bed. When I went to her, she wasn’t breathing. Alcohol and her prescriptions, the doctors said. She knew she wasn’t supposed to drink, but she often snuck a bottle to bed. In the end, it was too much.”

“I’m sorry.”

I was. I was sorry for Grant, and sorry I wouldn’t meet her. Sorry Hazel would never know her grandmother.

I squeezed Grant a final time. Inching my arm out from underneath him, I kissed his forehead.

“You’ve been good to Hazel,” I said, my voice unsteady. “So good. Thank you.” I crawled over his body and stood up.

“Don’t go,” he said. “Stay here with me. Please. I’ll cook you dinner every night.”

I scanned the drawings on the wall: crocus, primrose, and daisy, flowers for a young girl. I could not look at Grant, could not think about his cooking. If I looked into his eyes even one more time or smelled anything in the oven, it would be impossible for me to leave.

“I have to go,” I said. “Please don’t ask me to stay. I care too much about my daughter to interrupt her life now, when she’s happy, cared for, and loved.”

Grant stood up. He wrapped his arms around my waist and pulled me to him. “But she doesn’t have her mother,” he said. “Nothing makes up for that.”

I sighed. His words were not guilt-ridden, forceful, or said to be persuasive.

They were true.

I walked down the stairs, and Grant followed close behind. He passed me in the dining room and swept open the front door. I walked through the passageway quickly.

“Come for Thanksgiving,” he said. “There’ll be roses.”

I started walking toward the road, my steps slow and heavy. Though I’d refused Grant’s invitation to stay, I didn’t, in fact, want to leave. Having heard my daughter’s giggle, having witnessed Elizabeth as a mother, again—her voice as firm and gentle as I remembered—I couldn’t bring myself to walk away. I didn’t want to drive back across the bridge and retreat into my blue room. More than anything, I realized with surprise, I didn’t want to be alone.

I waited for the front door to click shut. When it did, I turned and ducked into the first greenhouse.

I needed flowers.

6.

The bouquet I had assembled at Grant’s bobbed between my knees as I drove the short distance back to Elizabeth’s.

I parked at the entrance to the property, jogging up the long driveway. From the kitchen window, soft orange light glowed. This late in October, I had expected to find Elizabeth already on her nightly tasting tour, Hazel in tow, but it looked as if they were still finishing dinner. I wondered how she had managed the vineyard with a baby, and whether the quality of the harvest would suffer as a result. I couldn’t imagine her allowing it.

On the porch, I paused, peering in the front window. Hazel sat at the kitchen table, buckled into a high chair. She’d been bathed and dressed since I’d glimpsed her in the garden. Her wet hair, darker and curlier, was parted on the side and pulled back with a clip. A glossy green bib fastened behind her neck was splattered with something white and creamy, and she licked the remains of what she’d eaten from her fingertips. Elizabeth’s back was to me, washing dishes at the sink. When I heard the water turn off, I stepped behind the closed front door.

Bowing my head, I dipped my nose into the bouquet I’d assembled. There was flax, and forget-me-not, and hazel. There were white roses and pink ones, helenium and periwinkle, primrose, and lots and lots of bellflower. Between the tightly wrapped stems I’d packed velvety moss, barely visible, and I had sprinkled the bouquet with the purple and white petals of Grant’s Mexican sage. The bouquet was enormous, and not nearly enough. Taking a deep breath, I knocked on the door.

Elizabeth crossed in front of the window and swung the door open. Hazel straddled her hip, her cheek against Elizabeth’s shoulder. I held out the flowers.

A smile spread across Elizabeth’s face. Her expression held recognition and joy but not the surprise I had expected. As she looked me up and down, I felt like a daughter returning from summer camp to a mother who had worried unnecessarily. Except instead of summer camp it had been my entire adolescence, emancipation, homelessness, and single parenthood, and I couldn’t rightly say that Elizabeth’s worry had been unwarranted. But now, the years that had passed since I’d left her home felt short and far away.

Pushing open the screen, she reached past the bouquet and wrapped her arm around the back of my neck. I fell against the shoulder Hazel hadn’t claimed, and we stood there, in an awkward embrace, until Hazel began to slip off Elizabeth’s hip. She jostled her back up, and I pulled away to look at them both. Hazel’s face was hidden; Elizabeth wiped tears away from the corners of her eyes.

“Victoria,” she said. She closed her hand around my fingers, and we clutched the bouquet together. Finally, she took it from me. “I’ve missed you.”

Elizabeth held the screen door open and motioned with her head for me to come inside. “Have you eaten? There’s leftover lentil soup, and I made vanilla ice cream this afternoon.”

“I just ate,” I said. “But I’ll have ice cream.”

Hazel lifted her head from Elizabeth’s shoulder and clapped her hands together.

“You had yours already, little one,” Elizabeth said, kissing the top of Hazel’s head and walking into the kitchen. She set her down on the floor, where the baby clung to the backs of Elizabeth’s legs. Leaning from the freezer to the cupboard without taking a step, Elizabeth succeeded in retrieving a metal tub of ice cream, a dish, and a spoon.

“Up you go,” she said when the bowl was full. Hazel reached up, and Elizabeth bent down to scoop her up with one arm. “Let’s sit at the table with your mother.”

My heart raced at Elizabeth’s casual reference to my motherhood, but Hazel, of course, did not flinch.

I washed my hands at the sink and sat down. Elizabeth slid the high chair to face me, but when she bent to put the baby inside, Hazel shrieked and held on to the back of Elizabeth’s neck.

“No thank you, Aunt Elizabeth,” she said calmly, cutting Hazel’s scream short. She pulled the high chair out of the way and slid a chair into its place, then sat down with Hazel pressed against her, chest to chest.

“She’ll get used to you,” Elizabeth said. “It takes her a minute to warm up.”

“Grant told me.”

“You saw Grant?”

I nodded. “Just now. I came here first, but when I saw you out in the garden, with Hazel, I was so surprised I turned and ran.”

“I’m glad you came back,” she said.

“Me, too.”

Elizabeth pushed the bowl of ice cream across the table, and our eyes met. I had come back. Maybe it wasn’t too late, after all.

I took a cold, creamy bite. When I looked up, Hazel had turned. She peered shyly at me, her thin lips parted. I refilled the spoon, lifted it in slow-motion to my lips, and just before taking a bite, turned the spoon to her waiting tongue. She swallowed, smiled, and hid her face in Elizabeth’s chest. Then, looking up, she opened her mouth again. I scooped up a second bite of ice cream and slipped it between her lips.

Elizabeth’s gaze flicked from the baby’s face to mine. “How’ve you been?” she asked.

“Fine,” I said, avoiding her stare.

She shook her head. “No way. I want to know exactly how you’ve been, since the moment I last saw you in court. I want to know everything, starting with where you went when you ran from the courthouse.”

“I didn’t get far. Meredith caught me and put me in a group home, as she’d promised.”

“Was it awful?” Elizabeth asked. There was dread in her eyes, and I knew she was waiting for me to confirm her worst nightmares of what my life had been like for the past decade.

“For the other girls in the home,” I said wryly, remembering the adolescent I’d been and all the harm I’d caused. “For me, it was only awful because I wasn’t here, with you.”

Elizabeth’s eyes welled. In her lap, Hazel banged impatient fists on the table. I fed her another bite, and she reached out, as if she wanted me to pick her up. I looked at Elizabeth.

She nodded, encouraging. “Go ahead.”

With trembling hands, I grasped Hazel underneath her armpits, lifting her up and pulling her to me. She was heavier than I expected. When I set her down in my lap, she wiggled her diapered bottom back against my abdomen and tucked her head under my chin. I dipped my face into the back of her hair. She smelled like Elizabeth: cooking oil, cinnamon, and citrus soap. I inhaled, wrapping my arms around her waist.

Hazel reached into the bowl, submerging her fingers in the melted cream. Elizabeth and I watched her eat, the ice cream dripping onto her bibless linen dress. Her brow, in concentration, was as serious as her father’s.

“Where do you live?” Elizabeth asked.

“I have an apartment. A business, too. I arrange flowers for weddings, anniversaries, that kind of thing.”

“Grant says you’re amazing. He told me women line up for blocks, wait months to buy flowers from you.”

I shrugged. “Everything I know,” I said, “I learned here.”

I looked around, remembering the afternoon Elizabeth sliced open a lily on a cutting board at this same kitchen table. Everything was exactly as I remembered—the table and chairs, the clean countertop, and the deep white porcelain sink. The only addition was a painting, a matchbox-sized rendering of purple hyacinth, floating in a blue glass frame and placed in the windowsill next to the row of blue bottles.

“From Catherine?” I asked, nodding to the painting.

Elizabeth shook her head. “From Grant. Catherine died before painting a hyacinth she liked well enough to give me. But this was Grant’s favorite, and he wanted me to have it.”

“It’s beautiful.”

Elizabeth nodded. “I love it.” She stood and brought it to the table, setting it between us. I studied the way the individual flowers clustered around the single stalk, their sharp points fitting together like pieces of a puzzle. Something about the configuration of the petals made me believe that forgiveness should come naturally, but in this family, it hadn’t. I thought about the decades of misunderstandings, from the yellow rose to the fire, the thwarted attempts at forgiving and being forgiven.

“Everything’s changed,” Elizabeth said, as if responding to my thoughts. “Grant and I, after so many years, are a family again. I hope you’ve come back to be a part of it. We’ve all missed you enough, haven’t we, Hazel?”

Hazel’s attention was on the bowl, empty now. She turned it upside down, picking it up again and studying the creamy ring on the table. With her fingers, she spread the cream around in circles, a wild, sugary abstraction on the wood.

Elizabeth’s hand inched toward mine on the table. She offered it to me, and in doing so it felt like she was offering me a path back into the family, the family in which I was loved, as a daughter, as a partner, as a mother. I reached for her hand. Hazel slipped hers, sticky and warm, between our palms.

But even with the clear forgiveness in Elizabeth’s words, I had one more question.

“What happened to the vineyard?” I asked. The dread I felt was the same as the dread in Elizabeth’s voice when she had asked me about my adolescence in group homes. We had both imagined the worst.

“We replanted. The loss was substantial, but it was overshadowed completely by losing you. For years the new vines were thin, the weeds thick. I left the house only in the fall, to do the tasting, and only because Carlos practically broke down my door every evening.”

The trailer was gone now. Carlos, too.

“He moved back to Mexico a year ago, after Perla went to college,” Elizabeth explained. “His parents were old, and ill. I’d finally learned to manage my grief, and my vineyard, too. I didn’t need him anymore.”

The loss of my own daughter would have gotten easier, then, if I had waited long enough. But a decade is a long time to wait. I pressed my nose down into Hazel’s curly hair, inhaling again her sweet smell.

“The grapes must be close,” I said.

“Probably. I haven’t checked for three days. It’s harder now”—she nodded toward Hazel—“but worth it.”

“Do you want my help?” I asked, gesturing to the vineyard.

Elizabeth smiled. “Yes,” she said. “Let’s go.” She picked up a damp dishcloth from the drying rack and wiped Hazel’s hands and face as she squirmed.

Outside, we climbed onto the red tractor. Elizabeth first, then, after passing up Hazel, I followed. Hazel sat in Elizabeth’s lap, her arms reaching out to touch the steering wheel, but when the engine started, she turned and buried her face in Elizabeth’s chest, pressing one ear into her armpit to muffle the sound. We bumped up the road past the place the trailer had been, onto the hill where I’d found the ripe grape, the year I started the fire. Elizabeth cut the engine.

The vineyard was silent. Hazel pulled away from Elizabeth, looking out over the grapevines, to the house. Her sleepy eyes tracked the roofline to the upstairs windows. When she turned in my direction, she startled, as if she’d forgotten I was there, and then she smiled, a slow, shy, radiant smile. Reaching for me, she squealed in delight, and the high-pitched noise broke a fine line into my nut-covered heart as cleanly as it would have split a delicate crystal glass.

I pulled her to me. We slid down from the tractor and crouched in the vines. Hazel pressed her face into a cluster of grapes, and I joined her. Picking one, I pierced it open with my teeth and gave a tiny sliver to Hazel. She had already been taught. Together we chewed the skin, swished the soft middle from cheek to cheek.

I smiled. 75/7. The grapes were ripe.

7.

I placed my blue box on the bookshelf, in the empty space next to Grant’s orange one. The cloth-covered boxes fit snuggly between a botany textbook and a poetry anthology, in the space they’d occupied when Grant and I had lived in the water tower together the year before.

It was Thanksgiving Day. All morning I’d helped Grant, chopping vegetables and whipping potatoes and cutting roses for the table. Any moment, Elizabeth would arrive. Hazel, too. Grant wanted everything to be perfect. When I’d left him in the kitchen, he’d been pacing in front of the gravy, checking the temperature of the oven often enough to let out most of the hot air. The turkey wouldn’t be ready until late evening, but it didn’t matter to me. I wasn’t going anywhere.

I’d left the vineyard only twice since tasting the grapes with my daughter, once to help Marlena with a five-hundred-guest wedding—our biggest yet—and the second time, just the day before, to pack up my things. After emptying the apartment, I’d driven to The Gathering House and knocked on the front door, offering free rent in exchange for work as a floral assistant. Two girls volunteered, and I hired them on the spot, driving them back to the apartment. Marlena had been waiting, nervous, and I watched as she showed the girls around and then went over the calendar. They listened quietly as she described the many tasks for which they would be responsible. Afterward, I turned to leave, confident I would not be needed in the near future, but Marlena pulled me aside, desperation in her eyes. “But they don’t know the flowers,” she’d whispered.

“Neither did you,” I’d reminded her, but she didn’t look entirely reassured. I promised her I’d be back, soon. I just needed a little more time.

Pulling Grant’s heavy green duffel bag to the third floor, I thought about the promise I’d made to Marlena. I loved Message, loved the look on my brides’ faces when I handed over their wedding scrolls, loved the thank-you cards that poured in every day with the mail. We were building something, Marlena and I. Bethany and Ray had already booked Message for their first, fifth, and tenth wedding anniversaries. Bethany credited me for the fulfillment she’d found in her relationship; I credited her with the growing success of my business. I would not let her down, and I would not let Marlena down, either.

It would be possible, someday, to have a business and a family, both. I would commute back to San Francisco in the mornings and return in time for dinner like any other working mother. I would pick Hazel up from Elizabeth’s and buckle her into her car seat, drive her back to the flower farm, and sit with her at the long dining room table. Grant would have dinner made, and we would chop Hazel’s food into tiny pieces and talk about our day, marveling over the growth of our businesses, our daughter, our love. On days off we would take Hazel to the beach, Grant carrying her on his shoulders until she was old enough to run safely among the waves, her footprints in the sand growing with each passing month.

One day, I would be able to do it all.

But not yet.

Right now, I knew it would require all my strength and attention to rejoin my family. Though she was worried, Marlena understood. The task ahead of me was great. I needed to accept Grant’s love, and Elizabeth’s, and earn the love of my daughter. I needed to never, under any circumstance, leave any of them again.

The idea filled me with equal parts joy and terror.

I’d lived with Grant before, and failed. I’d lived with Elizabeth; I’d lived with Hazel. Each time, I had failed.

This time, I told myself, looking around Grant’s old bedroom, it would be different. This time, I would take smaller steps, and enter our unconventional family in a way that I knew I could handle. From breast-feeding I had learned the dangers of throwing myself fully into something and risking a complete collapse. It was why I had decided, for now, to live in the water tower alone. Hazel would remain with Elizabeth, visiting more and more often, and for longer periods of time. As my fear eventually turned to trust—in my family, but mostly in myself—I would move in to the main house with Grant, and we would bring Hazel to live with us. Less than a mile away, Elizabeth would be our support. And the water tower, Grant promised, would always be mine for a brief escape, a moment of solitude. It was everything I needed to stay.

I unzipped my bag and began to transfer my belongings, stacking jeans and T-shirts and shoes in the corners, hanging blouses and belts on a row of rusty nails on the wall. Outside, the front gate squeaked open. I went to the window and watched Elizabeth push a stroller through the opening, returning to latch the gate. Hazel’s patent-leather shoes peeked out from beneath a wide canvas hat, pulled low to shield the sun from her face.

I found my only dress inside the duffel bag and shook it out. Undressing quickly, I slipped it over my head. The dress was a black cotton shirtwaist with a thin, cloth-covered belt of the same fabric. I pushed my feet into my dark red flats and fastened a crystal necklace Elizabeth had given me around my neck, one Hazel liked to grab.

Combing my fingers through my short hair, I returned to the window. Elizabeth had reached the bottom porch step, where she braked the stroller and pushed up the shade. Hazel squinted into the sunlight. Her eyes traveled up the water tower, and I waved from behind the third-story window. She smiled and reached up, as if wanting me to pull her out of the stroller.

Elizabeth saw her outstretched arms and leaned over to pick her up. With the baby on her hip, she reached under the stroller and pulled something out of a storage area beneath the seat, holding it up for me to see.

A ladybug-shaped backpack. Inside, I knew, were Hazel’s pajamas, diapers, and a change of clothes. Elizabeth’s face was joyful and determinedly brave; mine, I knew, was the same. Looking at my daughter filled me with a love I once thought myself incapable of feeling, and I thought about what Grant had said the afternoon I reappeared in his rose garden. If it was true that moss did not have roots, and maternal love could grow spontaneously, as if from nothing, perhaps I had been wrong to believe myself unfit to raise my daughter. Perhaps the unattached, the unwanted, the unloved, could grow to give love as lushly as anyone else.

Tonight, my daughter would spend the night for the first time. We would read books and rock in her rocking chair. Afterward, we would try to sleep. Maybe she would be scared, and maybe I would feel overwhelmed, but we would try again the next week and the one after that. Over time, we would learn each other, and I would learn to love her like a mother loves a daughter, imperfectly and without roots.