The Language of Flowers

She stepped on her cigarette and considered the print. “I think it’s a film-speed issue,” she said, motioning for me to follow her inside. She led me to the film display, pointing out numbers on the corners of the boxes I hadn’t even noticed. The shutter speed was too slow, she explained, and the film speed a poor match for the low light of late afternoon. I wrote everything she said down on the back of the prints and shoved the stack into my back pocket.

I was anxious to get off work the following Saturday. The store was empty; we didn’t have a wedding. Renata was doing paperwork and didn’t look up from her desk all morning. When I tired of waiting for her to release me, I stood close to her desk and tapped my foot on the concrete floor.

“All right, go,” she said, waving me away. I turned and was halfway out the door when I heard her add, “And don’t come back tomorrow, or next week, or the week after.”

I stopped. “What?”

“You’ve worked twice as many hours as I’ve paid you for, you must know that.” I hadn’t been keeping track. It wasn’t as if I could have gotten another job even if I’d wanted to. I had no high school diploma, no college degree, and no skills. I assumed Renata understood this and worked me as she wished. I didn’t feel resentful.

“So?”

“Take a few weeks off. Stop in the Sunday after next and I’ll pay you as if you’d worked—I owe you the money. I’ll need you again around Christmas, and I have two weddings on New Year’s Day.” She handed me an envelope of cash, the one she should have given me the following day. I put it in my backpack.

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks. I’ll see you in two weeks.”

Grant was in the parking lot of the market when I arrived, loading up a bucket of unsold flowers. I approached and held up the blurry photos, spread out like a fan. “Now you want a lesson?” he asked, amused.

“No.” I climbed inside his truck.

He shook his head. “Chinese or Thai?”

I was reading the notes I had scratched on the back of the embarrassing prints and didn’t answer. When he stopped for Thai, I waited in the car.

“Something spicy,” I called through the open window. “With shrimp.”

I had purchased ten rolls of color film, all different speeds. I would start with 100 in the bright afternoon light and work my way to 800 just after sunset. Grant sat on the picnic table with a book, glancing in my direction every few pages. I barely moved from a low crouch between two white rosebushes. All the flowers were open; in another week, the roses would be gone. As I had the week before, I numbered all my photographs and noted every angle and setting. I was determined to get it right.

When the darkness was nearly complete, I put away my camera. Grant no longer sat at the picnic table. Light shone from the windows of the water tower through a thick layer of steam. Grant was cooking, and I was starving. I gathered all ten rolls of film into my backpack and walked into the kitchen.

“Hungry?” He watched me zip up my backpack and inhale deeply.

“Are you really asking me that?”

Grant smiled. I walked to the refrigerator and opened the door. It was empty except for yogurt and a gallon of orange juice. I picked up the orange juice and drank it out of the container.

“Make yourself at home.”

“Thanks.” I took another swig and sat down at the table. “What’re you making?”

He pointed to six empty cans of beef ravioli. I made a face.

“You want to cook?” he asked.

“I don’t cook. Group homes have cooks, and since then, I’ve eaten out.”

“You’ve always lived in group homes?”

“Since Elizabeth’s. Before that I lived with lots of different people. Some were good cooks,” I said, “others weren’t.”

He studied me as if he wanted to know more, but I didn’t elaborate. We sat down with bowls of ravioli. Outside, it had started to rain again, a pounding rain that threatened to turn the dirt roads into rivers.

When we finished eating, Grant washed his dish and went upstairs. I sat at the kitchen table, waiting for him to come back down and drive me home, but he didn’t. I drank more orange juice and looked out the window. When I grew hungry again, I searched the cupboard until I found an unopened package of cookies and ate every one. Grant still did not return. I put on a pot of tea and stood over it, warming my hands on the open blue flame. The kettle began to whistle.

Filling two mugs, I pulled tea bags from a box on the counter and climbed the stairs.

Grant was sitting on the orange love seat on the second floor, a book open on his lap. I handed him a mug and sat down on the floor in front of the bookshelf. The room was so small that even though I sat as far away from him as possible, he could have touched my knee with his toes by stretching his legs. I turned to the bookshelf. On the bottom was a stack of oversized books: gardening manuals, mostly, interspersed with biology and botany textbooks.

“Biology?” I asked, picking one up and opening it to a scientific drawing of a heart.