The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

Author:Vanessa Diffenbaugh
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Romance, Young Adult, Fiction.Contemporary, fiction
ISBN: 9781445870281
Publisher: Audiogo Limited
Published: 2011-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

14.

Sitting on the front porch, I sifted through the pile of tiny white chamomile blossoms at my feet. A five-foot string connected Elizabeth and me, a needle on each end. We worked quickly, spearing spongy yellow centers and pushing flowers into the middle. Every few minutes I stopped, distracted by an insect or a splinter of wood, but Elizabeth did not pause in her movements. After an hour the task was complete, a delicate, petaled ribbon connecting us.

“Definition?” I asked. Elizabeth was folded over, stringing a square of paper onto the end of the ribbon. I glimpsed August and the number 2, along with a repetition of the word please, and a line that struck me as a lie: I can’t do this without you.

Elizabeth coiled the flowered rope. “Energy in adversity.”

Nothing could have more succinctly captured her mind-set. Since deciding to communicate with her sister through flowers, Elizabeth had been constantly in motion, planting seeds, watering, checking the progress of half-open buds, and waiting—a waiting that was like an action itself, dynamic and pacing—for a response.

“Come with me,” Elizabeth said, climbing into her truck and setting the coiled chamomile between us.

We drove to Catherine’s. Elizabeth left the engine running as she hopped out, wound the flowered string around the wooden post of Catherine’s mailbox, and tucked the note inside. Climbing back into the truck, she continued driving down the road, away from the vineyard.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Shopping,” Elizabeth said. Her hair flapped around her face in the wind, and she pulled it back into a rubber band quickly, steering with her knees. She shot a mischievous smile in my direction.

“Where?” I asked. There was a general store less than a mile away, where Elizabeth had purchased my rain parka and gardening shoes, but it was in the opposite direction.

“Chestnut Street,” she said. “San Francisco. They have a whole row of children’s boutiques, the kind with two-hundred-dollar velour sweat suits for newborns, toddler dresses made out of silk organza—that sort of thing. One dress for your adoption will cost me more than what I can get for two tons of grapes—but if not now, when? You’re ten, you know? Next week you’ll be my little girl, but you won’t be a little girl much longer. I have to dress you up while I can.” She smiled at me again, her smile an invitation.

I inched closer to her, pressing my head into her shoulder as we drove. She’d taught me to sit up straight and away from her in the truck, so that we wouldn’t get pulled over for a seat belt violation, but today, her smile said, was an exception. She drove with one arm on the steering wheel, the other around my shoulders, squeezing me to her. I’d never been taken shopping for new clothes, not once, and it seemed to me the perfect way to start my life as someone’s daughter. I hummed along with the oldies on the radio as we drove over the bridge

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