The Language of Flowers

“I took a class at a community college. After my mother died, I thought briefly of selling the farm and going to college. But I dropped out of the class halfway through. I didn’t like the lecture halls. Too many people, and not enough flowers.”

A thick blue vein curved out of the heart. I traced it with my finger and looked up at Grant. “What’re you reading?”

“Gertrude Stein.”

I shook my head. I’d never heard of her.

“The poet?” he asked. “You know, ‘A rose is a rose is a rose’?”

I shook my head again.

“During the last year of her life, my mother became obsessed with her,” Grant said. “She’d spent most of her life reading the Victorian poets, and when she found Gertrude Stein, she told me she was a comfort.”

“What does she mean, ‘A rose is a rose is a rose’?” I asked. Snapping the biology book shut, I was confronted with the skeleton of a human body. I tapped the empty eye socket.

“That things just are what they are,” he said.

“ ‘A rose is a rose.’ ”

“ ‘Is a rose,’ ” he finished, smiling faintly.

I thought about all the roses in the garden below, their varying shades of color and youth. “Except when it’s yellow,” I said. “Or red, or pink, or unopened, or dying.”

“That’s what I’ve always thought,” said Grant. “But I’m giving Ms. Stein the opportunity to convince me.” He turned back to his book.

I pulled another book off the shelf, higher up. It was a thin volume of poetry. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I had read most of her work in my early teens, when I’d discovered the Romantic poets often referenced the language of flowers, and read everything I could get my hands on. The pages of the book were earmarked with notes scribbled in the margins. The poem I opened to was eleven verses, all beginning with the words Love me. I was surprised. I had read the poem, I was sure, but didn’t remember the dozens of references to love, only the references to flowers. I replaced the book and withdrew another, and then another. All the while, Grant sat, silently turning pages. I looked at my watch. Ten past ten.

Grant looked up. He checked his own watch and then looked out the window. It was still raining. “You want to go home?”

The roads were wet; the drive would be slow. I would get soaked in the two blocks between Bloom and the blue room, and Natalya’s band would be practicing. Renata did not expect me at work the following day. No, I realized, I did not particularly want to go home.

“Do I have another choice?” I asked. “I’m not sleeping here with you.”

“I won’t stay here. You can have my bed. Or sleep on the couch. Or wherever.”

“How do I know you won’t come back in the middle of the night?”

Grant pulled his keys out of his pocket and detached the key to the water tower. He handed it to me and walked down the stairs. I followed him out.

In the kitchen he grabbed a flashlight out of a drawer and a flannel jacket off a hook. I opened the door, and he walked out, lingering under the cover of the stoop. Rain ran in sheets around the protected step. “Good night,” he said.

“Spare key?” I asked.

Grant sighed and shook his head, but he was smiling. He leaned over and picked up a rusted watering can, half full of rainwater. He poured the water through the spout as if he was watering the sodden gravel. In the bottom was a key. “It’s probably rusted beyond use. But here you go, just in case.” He handed me the key, and our hands clasped around the wet metal.

“Thanks,” I said. “Good night.” He stood still as I inched the door closed and turned the lock.

I breathed in the emptiness of the water tower and climbed the stairs. On the third floor, I pulled the blanket off Grant’s bed and returned to the kitchen, curling up underneath the picnic table. If the door opened, I would hear it.

But all I heard, all night, was the rain.

Grant knocked on the door at half past ten the next morning. I was still asleep under the table. It had been twelve hours, and my body was stiff and slow to rise. At the door I paused, leaning against the solid wood and rubbing my eyes, my cheekbones, and the back of my neck. I opened the door.

Grant stood in the clothes he’d worn the night before and looked only slightly more awake than I felt. Stumbling into the kitchen, he sat down at the table.

The storm had passed. Outside the window, under the cloudless sky, flowers glistened. It was a perfect day for photography.

“Farmers’ market?” he asked. “On Sundays I sell down the road instead of in the city. You want to come?”

December was a bad time of year for fruit and vegetables, I remembered. Oranges, apples, broccoli, kale. But even if it had been midsummer, I wouldn’t have wanted to go to the farmers’ market. I didn’t want to risk seeing Elizabeth. “Not really. I need film, though.”

“Come with me, then. You can wait in the truck while I sell what I have left over from yesterday. Then I’ll take you to the drugstore.”