The Language of Flowers

by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

Elizabeth laughed once, a sharp exhale. “I believe you can prove everyone wrong, too, Victoria. Your behavior is a choice; it isn’t who you are.” If Elizabeth really believed this, I thought, there was nothing but disappointment in her future.

It wasn’t as if the flowers themselves held within them the ability to bring an abstract definition into physical reality. Instead, it seemed that Earl, and then Bethany, walked home with a bouquet of flowers expecting change, and the very belief in the possibility instigated a transformation.

I had been loyal to nothing except the language of flowers. If I started lying about it, there would be nothing left in my life that was beautiful or true.

There was only one way to the other side, and that was through the pain.

“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.”

“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?”

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.

Over time, we would learn each other, and I would learn to love her like a mother loves a daughter, imperfectly and without roots.