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At the downtown bus station, there are a lot of homeless men shuffling along, but Katie finds an older woman and sticks close by her, as if the woman is her mother or aunt, a trick her dad taught her. She has also learned that grandma women are the ones to ask for directions, and if a bus is crowded, she can sit beside them. Race doesn’t matter—a white old woman or a black old woman or a Navajo old woman each offers the same protection.

Now she climbs onto the second bus and thinks about Lily, far away in Texas with her dad. It makes her feel a ripple of sadness. Why does everybody get to be with her father except her? She brushes the feeling away and shows the bus driver the ad for the flower show. “Where do I get off for this?”

He’s a middle-aged man with a crew cut, and he’s chewing gum, like a cop. “Sit right behind me and I’ll tell you.”

She rides to a ritzy part of town and admires the mansions on big plots of grass, and then they drive around a big hotel with the mountains very close behind it. The driver says, “This is it, kid. Go right—”

But Katie has spied the signs. “I see it!” She leaps up. “Thank you!”

Adjusting her backpack, she hurries toward the door, and even from twenty feet away she can see flowers through the door. Her heart begins to sing, and she can’t stop smiling. The woman at the door sells her a ticket and says, “That is one happy face. We don’t usually get a lot of young people on their own.”

Katie can’t stop looking into the room. “I’ve been looking forward to this for weeks,” she says, and takes her ticket, putting it carefully into a pocket of the backpack.

And then it’s as if her heart is filled with helium, because she practically floats around the show. There are little tickets and giant ribbons on the award winners. Typed cards tell the genus and species and—thank heavens—common names. She writes the names of the most beautiful ones in her notebook, which Lily said would help her remember things about gardens from year to year. She falls in love with a rose that looks like a fairy collapsed in a pile of silky red and yellow and silvery skirts, and with a spray of tiny green chrysanthemums, and she loves the orchids, which look like butterflies about to take off and fly around the room.

But it is the dahlias she has come to see, and when she finds the award winner—a pale peach-and-pink beauty that is bigger than her head, she starts to cry. A white-haired lady next to her says, “It’s really something, isn’t it?”

Katie can only nod, riveted. And in that instant she doesn’t care if she gets in gigantic trouble. It’s worth it.

For the rest of the afternoon, she takes notes and makes drawings. She asks questions and discovers that everyone wants to tell her their theories of growing. It’s like a tribe with a special language, and she feels a creeping sense of excitement. Maybe this is where she belongs. Can people have jobs growing flowers?

All the money Ramona paid her for cleaning the bakery—which is sixty dollars, because they were at it for most of the day Friday and Saturday—isn’t a ton of money in a place like this, where she can buy tiny potted plants and special bulbs and even some books. She’s very hungry and has to buy a hot dog and a Coke, which uses up five dollars. The rest she spends all on dahlias.

And then, because there is no way to get the box of potted plants home on the bus without hurting them, she asks a middle-aged woman close by if she has a cell phone and could dial a number for her.

“You go ahead, sweetie.”

Katie takes a breath and dials the phone. When Ramona picks up, she can tell she’s been hurrying. “Hello?” she says in an anxious voice.

“Hi, Ramona. This is Katie. I came to the flower show and I know you’re really going to be mad at me, but I need a ride home. Can you come get me?”

“You are in so much trouble.”

“I know.”

“I’ll be there in about a half hour. Are you okay? Is everything all right?”

Katie feels like she might cry over that. “Yes.” Then, “Ramona?”

“Yes?”

“I’m really sorry. It