The Language of Flowers

“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.