The Daisy Children

by Sofia Grant

  It was impossible for Margaret to say if Mr. Dial was all that handsome, because he was a grown-up, with a mustache no less, and big, hairy forearms. But she had to admit that her own father was not very handsome at all. Hugh Pierson was barely taller than his wife by a smidge, which meant that Mother had to wear tiny flat heels, and that made her cross. Daddy’s face was pink and veined with tiny blue lines, and his chin swelled above his collar. His nose was too dainty for his face, and his hair—long, pale strands of it plastered to his gleaming skull with Brylcreem—was not adequate to cover his head.

  This, then, was a topic to be avoided. Margaret sighed and tossed the bandage on the floor. “But my daddy’s rich. That’s better. Ladies have to be pretty, and men ought to be rich. That’s just the way it is.”

  That had been enough to silence Helene that day, but today posed a fresh challenge. By virtue of the many hours that Mrs. Dial and her mother had spent together on the publicity committee in the months leading up to Remembrance Day, the two girls had been cast together as a pair, and Margaret would be expected to entertain Helene during the Mothers’ Breakfast that kicked off the day’s events.

  The breakfast had taken place in the Piersons’ dining room since the very first Remembrance Day, when the Daisies were all still babies, or not even born yet. After, the Daisy families walked together to the site of the new school, the one that Margaret and Helene and all the other children had attended their whole lives. It was hard to imagine a time when the school wasn’t there, but Margaret had seen the pictures herself: reporters had come from all over Texas, and even all over the entire country, to interview the families in front of the building site.

  When the Daisies were babies, their families had done everything together. “Not everyone was happy for us,” her mother had explained primly. “You would have thought we were raising little demons instead of babies.” But instead of letting that hurt their feelings, the Daisy mothers had worked very hard to make Remembrance Day special for everyone, a party to which the entire town was invited.

  All these years later, the breakfast would be followed by a solemn parade down the main streets of town to the park. Along the way, others would join them, until it seemed like half the town was walking together, dressed in their best, men with photographs of their lost children pinned to their lapels, ladies with carnations tied with ribbons. Eventually, someone would start humming a hymn, which would be picked up by the whole parade, even people who never sang at church—and Margaret secretly believed it must be like being on the inside of God, inside his breast, while all around him the angels sang in praise. Holding her parents’ hands, she would close her eyes and allow them to lead her along, enveloped in the hymn, and she would feel almost as though she herself was an angel.

  But when the parade reached the park, everything would change. There was no signal, no specific moment that the group dispersed, but when the bandstand came into view, festooned with bunting and balloons by the decorations committee, there was a collective gasp and then the spell was broken and everyone began talking at once and children broke away from their parents and ran to see.

  The speakers selected by the program committee would find their places in the folding chairs arranged in neat rows, and the ladies of the refreshments committee would take their posts behind the long tables covered with bright cloths and pitchers of lemonade and platters of sandwiches and cookies. Mr. Cheek would corral the children, along with several of the other teachers recruited to help, and the reporters who still came—fewer of them every year—would mill around with their notebooks and the pop and flash of their cameras.

  “And then we’ll be off the hook for the rest of the day,” Margaret had overheard her mother saying recently to her father, as they talked in their bed before turning out the lights. Nighttime roaming was a new habit of Margaret’s, now that she was nearly twelve and judged herself ready to stay up later than her parents believed she should. “We won’t even have to help with cleanup this year.”

  “I shouldn’t think so,” Daddy said irritably. He did not enjoy Remembrance Day; he was of the same opinion as Mrs. Sowell, who thought that the event had gone on long enough, that after more than a decade they should let all the dead children rest in peace without reminding themselves and everyone else of the tragedy every year. He’d only said so once—and Mother had told him in no uncertain terms that she didn’t want to hear it again. After that, he’d borne the flurry of preparations in gloomy silence, and they knew to stay out of his way each year until the day was finally over.

  Margaret had a secret about Daddy. A long time ago, a few days before her eleventh birthday, she had come upon him one afternoon in the garage. Daddy did not spend a lot of time in the garage, not like other fathers who had all kinds of tools and worked on their own automobiles and made furniture and fixed things. Daddy had men to do those things for him, so their garage was neat as a pin and held only Daddy’s car and the workbench that he never used and an area where he kept his golfing equipment.

  Margaret had been looking for her birthday gift. She had asked for a children’s portable electric phonograph, and she was not at all sure she was going to get it, because her mother thought she should just listen to the real one in the living room with the rest of the family, and her father said she should wait until she was older. The phonograph was large and came with six real records and would probably arrive in a big crate that would be hard to hide; but if it had come while she was at school, her mother might have had the deliveryman carry it to the garage, the only place besides the basement where it could have conceivably been hidden. Margaret had already checked the basement, and if she didn’t find a large box in the garage, then she was likely to be very cross indeed.

  When she let herself in the side door that afternoon while her mother was preparing the supper that Alelia had cooked before leaving for the day, she was surprised to discover that the lights were on, and she was confronted by a strange sound—like Ferdinand the bull from the story, she thought, lowing and snorting. It didn’t occur to her to be frightened, but she moved carefully and quietly because she was curious, edging around the big dark Packard and being careful not to brush against the rakes and shovels hung along the wall.

  It wasn’t a bull at all. It was her father—still dressed in his work shirt and suspenders, his sleeves rolled up his pale forearms—hunched over the workbench, his big body spilling over the stool and his head cradled in his arms. And he was sobbing—huge, racking sobs that shook his shoulders and sounded both ethereal and heartbreaking.

  Margaret moved forward without thinking. Years later, she would think often about how her father had carried this remarkable emotion around with him, hidden away so that no one ever saw it, and what a feat of determination that must have been to keep it from being discovered—but that day, she was merely awestruck and curious: What on earth could make her taciturn father cry?

  “Daddy?” she ventured, when she got close—just as her gaze fell on the object lying on the workbench next to his head. It was a small, oval silver frame, and inside the frame was a photograph of a girl.

  Margaret knew who it was right away, even though she had only briefly glimpsed any likeness of her dead sister, Ruby, other than the fourth-grade school picture from the year she died, which was used at every Remembrance Day. Any other photographs and mementos of Ruby that her parents had kept were stored in her mother’s curved-front armoire in the mysterious locked top drawer. Margaret very much wanted to pick up the photograph and study Ruby’s features, to look for similarities, for proof that—as Miss Pellingham said at Sunday school—Ruby was watching over her from up in heaven.

  But when she spoke his name, her father froze, his shoulders instantly going rigid and still, his keening ending on a hiccup of grief, and closed his fist over the little frame. He palmed it into his shirt pocket, and when he turned around to face Margaret, his hands were empty and his expression guilty.

  “Margaret, I was, uh . . . W
hat are you doing in here?” he asked, swiping at his eyes.

  “Looking for nails.” Margaret lied without thinking, marveling at how disheveled her father looked. His eyes were puffy and red, and a smear of snot glistened along his upper lip.

  “Oh. Nails.” Her father dug for a handkerchief with shaking hands, then blew his nose on it noisily. When he was finished, the snot was thankfully gone from his lip and he seemed to have composed himself. “Well, there aren’t any, I’m afraid. I was just in here, ah, working on my speech for the Lions Club.”

  “But why were you crying?”

  At that point, Margaret hadn’t actually made the obvious connection, something that would puzzle her in the years to come. Even though she knew that other Daisy families missed their dead children very much, and even though her mother always created elaborate displays for Remembrance Day in which Ruby’s name was surrounded by hearts and ribbons and pictures of flowers and kittens and dolls and other nice things, she would have been hard-pressed to say that Ruby featured very prominently in her parents’ lives and minds. For instance, when anyone inquired about Ruby, her mother would answer vaguely and quickly change the subject. Her father would barely seem to notice at all, focusing on tamping down the tobacco in his pipe, or taking a sudden interest in the newspaper lying on the table, as though the subject bored him.

  “I was, ah . . .” Daddy picked up an empty coffee mug that was resting on top of a calendar from Morty’s Auto Service, then set it down again. “See here, Margaret, I was thinking about dinner. I’m awful hungry, aren’t you? I wonder if we should go see what Alelia fixed for us.”

  Now the memory made Margaret feel mean-spirited and sneaky—but on its heels came an idea. “I forgot,” she told Helene. “We’re supposed to be getting a bag of flour for Alelia.”

  “We are?”

  Stupid cow, Margaret thought, looking into Helene’s trusting, relieved face, happy to have something other than her father’s secret to focus on. Margaret led the way down the back stairs to the larder, a place that had often come in handy for hiding when she wanted to eavesdrop on goings-on in the kitchen, where now and then Alelia would visit with one of the neighbors’ maids during the long afternoons when the bread was rising or the laundry had been hung on the line.

  Margaret had been there last week, in fact, when the coal man came, pressed uncomfortably between the bins of onions and potatoes while she waited for them to finish visiting. And there she’d spied the rip in one of the sacks of flour on the shelf, the tiny white avalanche spilling over the side.

  She went first into the dim interior of the larder, and hooked the edges of the small rip with her fingers. To cover the sound of fabric tearing, she pretended to sneeze—not the easiest thing to fake, but Margaret was a born actress, everyone said so.

  “It’s so heavy,” she sighed, turning around to face Helene. “Can you please help me?”

  She picked up the sack and clutched it in front of her, and when Helene reached to help, Margaret executed the perfectly timed stumble on which her plan hinged.

  Helene fell backward, the bag toppling forward with a little extra shove from Margaret so that it landed right on top of Helene. It split open, and flour went everywhere—great drifts of it billowing onto Helene’s dress and face and hair and arms, a cloud of it wafting upward through the air like the newsreels of German submarines sinking the HMS Barham. Helene squealed and batted at the flour, flapping her hands helplessly.

  Margaret had to stifle a grin.

  “Oh, no—what have you done?” she demanded sternly.

  “But it was an accident,” Helene gasped. “I think the sack must have ripped!”

  “Mother’s going to be furious,” Margaret said. “Now Alelia won’t be able to make any more biscuits today.” Alelia had actually been in the kitchen before dawn taking fragrant trays of her flaky biscuits out of the oven, but Helene didn’t know that. “Tell you what—stay here, and I’ll go get a rag to clean you up. Maybe we can hide what happened so you don’t get in trouble.”

  When Margaret returned a few moments later with a rag dampened in the powder room sink, Helene was on her knees, frantically trying to sweep the flour into a pail with her hands. “Here, let me,” Margaret said. She took the wet rag and wiped it across the front of Helene’s pink organdy dress, and the dusting of flour turned into a sticky paste.

  “Don’t—you’re making it worse!” Helene cried, trying to push Margaret’s hands away.

  “Stop it—I’m helping,” Margaret said. A noise behind her made both girls turn, and Margaret’s heart skipped in alarm.

  But it wasn’t Alelia standing there, or either of their mothers. It was Helene’s brother, Hank.

  Hank had been a fourth-grader on the morning of the explosion, which had sent him through a window like a stone tossed through a waterfall. The only lingering proof that he’d been there at all was a small half-moon-shaped scar on his forehead and burn scars on the backs of his hands, from when he’d tried to crawl back into the rubble to rescue his little brother, Ralph, who’d been in the second grade. Twenty-one now, Hank had a habit of keeping his hands in his pockets, so the ridged, shiny pink scars were out of sight.

  “Mom’s looking for you,” he told Helene, and then—almost as an afterthought—“Hello, Mags.”

  He knelt down and took the rag from her without asking, and Margaret tried to think of something to say. Hank Dial was an honest-to-God hero, the closest thing to an angel that she had ever seen. He had not been able to save his brother that day, and maybe it was that failure that shaded the depths of his beautiful blue eyes and roughened his deep voice. Not only was he as devastatingly handsome as his father, with thick brown hair that fell over the sculpted planes of his face, but he was famously reckless, and he’d wrecked a car that didn’t even belong to him and won an airplane in a game of cards and was setting up his own business taking oilmen to look at the fields from up in the sky, and he sassed his mother and had gotten in a fistfight with three men in a bar (so they said) and talked back to the policeman who’d come to break it up.

  But he was always nice to Helene and Margaret.

  “I don’t know what you were thinking, Helly,” he said mildly, tossing the rag into the bucket. “That’ll just make it worse. Mags, I bet you’ve got a pretty dress Helene can borrow, don’t you? Oh now, don’t cry, sis. You’ll break my heart right in half.”

  He picked Helene up and set her on his shoulders and Margaret’s plan was ruined, but there was nothing for it but to lead them up the back stairs to her room and offer Helene her best dress—yellow dotted swiss with a wide white sash—just because it made Hank smile. He made a great show of waiting outside the door while Margaret helped Helene change out of the ruined dress, and then, when he was allowed back into the room, he whooped.

  “You’re the prettiest girl in East Texas,” he assured Helene, while Margaret burned with envy.

  Chapter Five

  It turned out that Katie could get a bereavement fare, but it was still so expensive that Liam hunkered down over his laptop with a furious expression on his face, muttering, and spent the evening searching until he figured out how to save a hundred bucks on a flight with a three-hour layover in Charlotte. Katie left him to it while she packed, already fairly sure how the exercise would turn out, but grateful to have Liam kept occupied. He seemed to think of Texas as an exciting new ride at Disneyland, and Katie as the gatekeeper who refused to honor his Park Hopper pass.

  Luckily, Margaret’s death prevented him from suggesting, as he had on a couple of occasions, that it would be really fun to rent a convertible and make a week of it, driving from one end of the state to another, from San Antonio to Houston to Dallas before ending up in New London.

  While he searched and cursed the airlines’ lack of compassion, Katie moved her hangers from one end of the closet rod to the other and back, trying to figure out what to take. She was packing for two weeks, to be safe; the first to do whatever one ha
d to do to claim an inheritance, and the second to loll poolside at Georgina’s town house complex. Ordinarily she tried to limit her rare visits to Georgina to long weekends, but the events of the last few days had left Katie feeling vulnerable and raw, as though someone had taken a paring knife to her outermost layers, leaving her nerves and emotions and maybe her very heart exposed.

  Under her mother’s wing she would be smothered—literally, by the Jo Malone orange blossom candles her mother favored, and also by the attentions of her many friends in Pecan Ridge Estates, a luxury town house complex billed as an endless pleasure romp for the fifty-five-plus set. Katie could never be sure what her mother would have told her friends, and on various occasions in the past she’d discovered that she’d been offered a modeling contract (after a photographer at the mall had tried to sell Georgina on an expensive set of head shots) and that she had outwitted an armed attacker while waiting for the T (her mother had confused public transportation, which she considered uncivilized, with the shuttle Katie’s company had hired to transport her group to an off-site in Amherst; her laptop bag had been pulled off her arm as she exited, but luckily, all that was in it were dirty gym clothes that Katie kept forgetting to take out at home). Georgina’s friends, most of them widowed or divorced, fawned over Katie; they plied her with bottles of seltzer and visors to protect her face from the sun and copies of Harper’s Bazaar, and told her she was much too thin and left lipstick kisses on her cheeks.

  The attention sounded rather nice, to be honest. Katie would let her mother take her out to lunch every day, and mist her face with her mother’s cucumber-scented hydration spray, and wear her expensive sandals and swimsuit cover-ups. Maybe, after two or three or seven days together, she’d be ready to cry it all out.

  In the end Katie settled on her good black pants, mid-heeled ankle boots, and tweedy Rag & Bone blazer for the reading of the will, or whatever they called it—and for any fancy dinners her mother might take her to. She added two sports bras and two pairs of spandex capris and her sneakers, and then she got stuck. She hedged, carefully rolling her panties and bras and a tasteful navy one-piece swimsuit while she tried to decide what was appropriate for a thirty-one-year-old professional woman to wear in New London, and finally settled on two pairs of jeans, two skirts, and six sleeveless tops. Her ivory cashmere wrap, a splurge purchased on her honeymoon (by Liam, to atone for the spittoon). A T-shirt a coworker had given her in the Secret Santa exchange, to sleep in, which inexplicably showed a cartoon mound of noodles wearing a pained expression and the legend “Big Eat Now.”