Daisies

by Joshua Senter

  Darrel smiled. “I’ll get you a ring.”

  She kissed him.

  For the longest while, it seemed to Lonnie that things with Ryan would indeed go on forever and one day more. They could talk for hours and not run out of things to say. The sex they had was frequent and always great. Ryan loved to cook good food. Lonnie loved to eat good food. They slept in on Saturday mornings and enjoyed shopping for clothes and furniture because their tastes in both were almost identical. Lonnie watched college football with Ryan. Ryan watched theater with Lonnie. People who saw them together couldn’t have imagined a more ideal gay couple. But the more successful Lonnie became, and the more stress he came under trying to meet the demands of his curators and his collectors, the more his relationship with Ryan suffered. Once again, he found himself fighting with the person he had chosen to spend his life with. It wasn’t physical this time, but regardless it was happening. He couldn’t seem to help himself.

  “Jesus, babe, I never do anything right, do I? I feel like I’m walking on eggshells around you!” Ryan yelled at Lonnie after a fight had broken out over Ryan’s use of two remotes to work the television and DVD player during one of their movie nights. “What does it matter if I use both remotes?”

  “’Cause you don’t have to! You can just use the one like I showed you!” Lonnie yelled back.

  “But I don’t care if I have to use two remotes, see? It doesn’t bother me. And I don’t know why it bothers you!”

  “It’s the principle of the matter,” Lonnie countered. “I’ve showed you three times.”

  “The principle of the matter? The principle of the matter?” Ryan began to laugh. “You know how ridiculous that sounds? It’s a fucking remote. It. Doesn’t. Matter.”

  Lonnie broke up with Ryan a few times just to try to prove a point here and there about other things that he would later realize also didn’t matter. But he always came running back to him, wanting to work things out. In the end, it was Ryan who broke things off with Lonnie for good. When it happened, Lonnie was devastated. How could this be happening? This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go. He and Ryan were not supposed to end up like Sheila and Darrel. They were supposed to be like Gwen and Willie—forever and one day more.

  When Sheila heard about the wedding announcement for Darrel and Constance that ran in The Hartville Messenger, all she could think to do was pack her bags, go back to Darrel, and beg him to allow her to be a part of his life again. Somewhere in her emotional state she even rationalized how he could have her and keep Constance at the same time. But when her emotions settled down once again, the fact that Darrel had completely moved on gave her a certain kind of peace, freed her in a way. She’d often said that the death of Gwen and Willie was easier to deal with than the termination of her marriage because at least when Gwen and Willie left her, their relationship was truly over and irreversible. However, with Darrel alive and well, it was hard to feel like there was ever going to be closure between them or like she was ever really going to be able to move on from what they’d had. But with the exchange of Darrel’s vows to Constance imminent, there was a sort of period now at the end of Sheila and Darrel’s relationship that even their divorce had not been capable of rendering, and Sheila found the new lease on life she’d been looking for ever since she’d left Darrel.

  Sheila was offered a job working as the VP of sales for the Chamber of Commerce in Norman, Oklahoma. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a single and now older woman whose alimony would expire in a few years and who had never completed college or worked at anything outside of running a household and a church youth group. The director of the chamber, another single woman named Karen, had struck up a conversation with Sheila at the Wells Fargo branch off East Fifty-Fifth Street while Sheila was waiting to meet with the bank manager about her parents’ accounts. Karen decided to go out on a limb and offer Sheila the job, which Sheila happily accepted on the spot. However, as she made arrangements to sell Gwen and Willie’s house in Oklahoma City where she’d been living and buy a new place in a development on the outskirts of Norman, she fretted. Moving away from Squirrel Ridge felt like a baby step compared to this. She was leaving everything behind this time, and what if it didn’t work out? What if Karen fired her after only a few weeks? Was she really capable of selling enough chamber memberships to be worth the salary Karen was offering—fifty thousand dollars a year plus benefits and a commission for each new membership she sold? Sheila’s children encouraged her to go for it. What did she have to lose? Nothing. Not anymore. She did have everything to gain, however. And so she went.

  No one attended Darrel’s wedding to Constance partly because it took place in the county courthouse without any pomp or fanfare and partly because it didn’t seem like something to celebrate even to Darrel, just more of a necessity to keep Constance around and make her a legal resident of the states, especially in light of the crackdown the government had commenced on illegals post-9/11. Darrel did give her a ring, just like she asked for—a very nice teardrop-shaped diamond on a thin gold band. And he took her on a simple but romantic honeymoon to The Big Cedar Lodge a couple hours away on the Lake of the Ozarks.

  Darrel realized for the first time he was finally allowed to exist without expectations, and for a long time Darrel didn’t know how to deal with this freedom. So he drank each night until he was intoxicated enough that he could sleep. Sometimes before falling asleep in a beer-induced stupor, he would attempt to call his children and have conversations with them, but he quit this after getting the impression his kids were avoiding answering these sloppy interruptions to their otherwise nicely appointed lives. Besides, he found himself frustrated that he could never remember what they had conversed about the next morning. After a few months of this, he had also grown a large potbelly and was depressed. So, just as quickly as he’d started it, he gave up drinking, bought more land, did more “brush hogging,” and threw himself into his business with a renewed vigor.

  It was the purchase of Edward Cullen that really changed Darrel’s life, though. Edward Cullen was a black lab with the energy and strength expected of a healthy puppy. He was sitting in a small, wire pen at a farm show in Topeka, Kansas, a few booths down from Darrel. For the entire week that Darrel worked the show, discussing the finer points of the product line his company manufactured with interested farmers, Darrel would look down the aisle and see Edward Cullen blinking back at him with imploring brown eyes. On the last day of the show, as everyone was taking down their booths, Darrel approached the cubicle where Edward Cullen had been penned up with his brothers and sisters. It was a booth promoting the cultivation of soybean crops, replete with interactive displays, brochures, and free bumper stickers. All of Edward Cullen’s siblings had been sold, and the price for Edward Cullen had been slashed from one hundred and seventy-five dollars to fifty. Upon Darrel’s approach, Edward Cullen went crazy wagging his tail, his whole body rigid with excitement, as if he knew what was coming. Darrel whipped out his wallet from his back pocket, found fifty bucks in cash, and held it out to Edward Cullen’s owners, a weathered-looking farm couple. “I’ll take him,” Darrel said.

  “He’s my favorite,” said the wife, a plump lady wearing a puppy print T-shirt and rubber milking boots. “You wanna hold him or anything before you decide?”

  Darrel shook his head. “That’s fine.”

  “All right. His name’s Edward Cullen. My daughters named him. He was the best of the litter. Can’t believe he’s the last one to go. Let me get you his papers.” And as the lady dug through an accordion file holder, Darrel moved over to the pen and plucked Edward Cullen up. Immediately Edward Cullen began licking Darrel’s face, his whole body quivering with rapture and love for his new owner.

  The lady held out some official-looking documents. “There you go. You ever had a lab before?” she asked.

  “Nope. I always had coonhounds. But, I’m not lookin’ to do any coon huntin’ these days. I just need me a buddy
around the farm, I guess.”

  The lady smiled. “Here’s a little brochure I typed up about ’em.” She handed Darrel a sheet that had been poorly copied but was readable. He took that and the other documents with a nod. “Thanks.”

  Edward Cullen and Darrel became inseparable. When Darrel was up at the manufacturing buildings, Edward Cullen lay down on the concrete and waited for him to finish whatever business he was up to. When Darrel went out on the four-wheeler checking fence lines, Edward Cullen charged right alongside. When Darrel crossed a creek, Edward Cullen dived into the water with a childish thrill. Edward Cullen went on machinery deliveries with Darrel and was part of the reason Darrel closed down the plant in Mexico, so he and Edward Cullen didn’t have to be separated for such long stretches of time, though Darrel would never admit that to anyone. Darrel even let Edward Cullen sleep in the bedroom he and Constance shared, despite Constance’s pleas against it. And for the first time, just as Darrel watched Edward Cullen grow, Darrel wanted to grow as well, wanted to be more than what he had been his whole life. Darrel wanted to love like his always-enthusiastic canine companion, and in time, he did.

  In just the first few months at her new job, Sheila had already left a positive impression on everyone she’d encountered around Norman. Though she was only expected to bring in three or four new chamber members a month, Sheila was pulling in double and triple that. It hadn’t been as hard as she had imagined to settle into this new life. Her new house was large enough to hold her and her kids for the holidays, but it was small enough she could manage it on her own when no one else was around. She decorated it with the gusto of someone proud to own her first home all by herself, filling it with feminine flourishes and little details about herself and her family that gave away their stories if anyone visiting chose to look close enough. She bought herself a new wardrobe, filling her closet with outfits that fit her and made her feel successful. And she found a convertible BMW, just like she’d always dreamed of owning, and parked it in her garage, which she kept as immaculate as her parents had always kept theirs. Whether she was aware of it or not, she was for the first time being the woman she’d always been meant to be. And in ways, she was filled with the emotion and energy of a girl of twenty, all flushed and nervous about everything she encountered, from office politics to first dates. There were nights when she still felt alone and a little desperate, especially after some man she’d been set up with had turned out to be too short or too fat or too old or too cranky for her to imagine ever forming a lasting bond with him. But if she held these moments up against the past and looked at them logically, she was still so much better off. If she only kept looking ahead, the good in her future multiplied double and triplefold, just like her chamber memberships.

  With the crushing exit of Ryan from his life, Lonnie decided to move out of the craftsman they had shared. He bought a loft near the hip, artsy area off Green Street in Pasadena, 2,500 square feet, which doubled as a gallery and studio space. And he began spending hours dissecting his former relationship through his paintings. What he realized in this process was that love had duped everyone. It had convinced them that it came when it came and could not be thwarted. But in reality, he was starting to understand that “love” was just a chemical reaction in the brain, a rush of drugs through one’s veins so powerful that people fall to their feet at its mercy, begging for its kiss once more, begging for its continuance for fear that their lives will end if it goes away. And, “happily ever after” was basically a love addict’s dream of staying high forever. The resulting pieces of Lonnie’s exploration into the depths of love and relationships were depictions of men and women in clothes from sixty years ago, locked in interstellar embraces among planets, galaxies, and gorgeously rendered nebulae, which he explained to collectors were based on the concept that attraction and mating is treated in the twenty-first century the way thousands of years ago ancients treated their ideas about the sun and moon. Eventually science proved there aren’t any mystical gods doing the heavy lifting of our celestial orbs, just gravitational pull managing its job like clockwork, and Lonnie believed our concept of love was the same way, ready to be redefined on principles as opposed to emotions. There was a maturity that had been lost over the last couple generations—a maturity his grandparents had known. Gwen and Willie’s pragmatism had allowed them to live the romantic fantasy everyone nowadays strives for but are incapable of achieving because Lonnie believed people had decided the way to realize that romantic ideal was by following their feelings—a ridiculous notion so far as Lonnie was concerned, being that feelings changed like the breeze depending on which way the wind blew—whereas principles were unmoving like a mountain, no matter how many options were out there. And this thesis he’d taken on like a mantle was only substantiated further when he met Gregory.

  It was a Wednesday night and there was a drag show at Eye Candy, a small gay club on the outskirts of West Hollywood. Lonnie had been invited to attend by a graphic artist named Steven, who was going to the bar with his boyfriend, Randy, to see off a friend of theirs who was headed for Afghanistan with the Navy the next day. Being single and forcing himself to go out and meet guys so that he might not be single any longer had become a sort of pastime of Lonnie’s over the last nine months, and on Wednesday night Eye Candy was always packed with those sorts of guys Lonnie found himself attracted to—taller, muscled, jock-types who were still successful professionally despite their seemingly carefree, masculine personas. Peggy Leggs, a drag queen who really got the crowd going with a rendition of a Björk song while wearing a hot pink flamingo outfit that poked fun at Björk’s Oscar swan ensemble, had just finished a lip-sync to “It’s Oh So Quiet” when Lonnie made his way into the club. He pushed through all of the men swilling cocktails and gossip, looking for Steven. When he finally found him near the back, they grabbed a couple beers and caught up on the latest happenings in each other’s lives.

  Steven was creating a website for an up-and-coming underwear designer that boasted both a censored version of the site and an uncensored one, which Steven joked was allowing him the most fun he’d had playing with graphics in a long time. Lonnie had been told that day by one of his curators that the Guggenheim was looking to purchase one of his paintings for their collection. If that happened, it would place Lonnie in an exclusive group of painters and set up his career for the long haul. They cheered to one another’s continued success. Then Lonnie asked about Gregory, for whom they had come together to bid farewell. Steven craned his neck to look for him, but couldn’t see him around the crowd. “He’s the really buff guy with crazy blue eyes and trucker’s cap on,” Steven said. “He’s probably too young for you, but you guys should meet. He’s nice.”

  A few more drag queens performed, including one who took a grinder to her metal-clad crotch, spraying the crowd with an array of sparks and sending them into frenzied applause. Lonnie wandered through the dense bar population, his eyes trying to casually scope out everyone he passed for viable boyfriend material: Too fat. Too skinny. Too girly. Too old. Too short. No sense of fashion. Over-the-top sense of fashion. Then he saw Gregory. His eyes were indeed crazy blue—shocking blue, in fact, even in the darkness of the club! And he was definitely buff and way too young for Lonnie. Still, Lonnie shouted over the loud music. “Gregory, right?”

  Gregory looked at him, taken off guard and uncertain. “Do I know you?”

  “I’m friends with Steven and Randy,” Lonnie said.

  “Oh,” Gregory gave nothing away.

  “Good luck over in Afghanistan,” Lonnie said to him. “And thanks for doing what you’re doing for our country.”

  “Thanks,” Gregory shouted back.

  And that was it until more than a year and a half later, when Lonnie attended a swanky party in the Hollywood Hills with Steven and Randy and ran into Gregory once again. Greg, as he told Lonnie to call him, had only returned from the Middle East a few weeks prior, and he was thrilled to be back in the states
eating “American” food, going to fun parties, and catching up with all his friends.

  That night, Lonnie invited Greg back to his loft and they ended up making love until the pigeons began to coo on the building next door, heralding the coming sunrise. And over breakfast a few hours later, Greg admitted that he’d known before they even kissed that a guy like Lonnie was his idea of the perfect boyfriend.

  “Boyfriend, huh? Big word after one night,” Lonnie chided him.

  Greg stared at Lonnie, unflinching. “Is it?”

  “It’s just, I didn’t seem to have made that big of an impression on you back when we met two years ago,” Lonnie said.

  “I was leaving for Afghanistan the next day. The last thing on my mind was a relationship,” Greg teased.

  “And now?” Lonnie challenged.

  Greg smiled and leaned halfway across the dining room table, where what had been their breakfast lay between them, mostly devoured. “Why are you so far away?” he asked.

  Lonnie said nothing, just leaned across the table, too, and met Greg’s lips.

  Their first morning together easily turned into their first weekend and their first week and first month, and then, before they knew it, their first year together—spending far too many hours in bed, taking in each other’s bodies and scents and intertwining their life stories—becoming one flesh. It was all pretty easy, even the patience they had to employ as they discovered the traits they most deplored about one another, like Greg’s tendency to strew about half a closet’s worth of clothes all over the loft, trying on a million different outfits before he could leave even just to run to the grocery store, and Lonnie’s propensity for rearranging the furniture often enough that Greg was certain he would break his neck one night tripping in the dark over some newly situated end table or armchair. They both seemed to agree, however, even if silently, to really evaluate what was worth fighting over and what wasn’t.