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.
Sitti
ng 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 kn
ow.
“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.
The Language of Flowers Page 27
