The Daisy Children

by Sofia Grant

  But she was too late. Her little speech died on her lips as the couple waved and the crowd threw rice and cheered—and then they were gone, dashing for the convertible that Tansy’s parents had given them for a wedding present, Hank never even knowing how hot the flame of Margaret’s love for him burned.

  Chapter Nine

  You heard that, I guess,” Katie said, mortified.

  Dan seemed to have finally exhausted his seemingly bottomless well of goodwill. He had taken back his phone and was polishing it nervously on his shirt. “Well,” he said, then cleared his throat. “Whoever you were calling, he does have the sort of voice that carries, doesn’t he?”

  The phone rang and Dan nearly dropped it. Then he recovered and answered with more dignity than Katie would have expected.

  “I’m sorry, okay, but he thought you were Digger,” a female voice said, loud enough for Katie to hear. “Who is this, anyway?”

  Dan handed her the phone like it was on fire.

  “Scarlett? This is Katie Garrett. Katie, um, Dial? Your cousin?”

  “Oh! Oh, Katie, it’s just awful, isn’t it?” The voice changed timbre and lost a few decibels. “About Gomma?”

  Gomma.

  “Um, yes, yes, it is. So sad!” Katie clutched the edge of her vinyl seat with her free hand and avoided Dan’s gaze. “I haven’t talked to you in—well, I guess about twenty years, now that I think about it.”

  “Wait, you mean we actually met? I met you?” Scarlett sounded unaccountably pleased. “That’s so cool! When was it?”

  Katie chastised herself—maybe she shouldn’t have mentioned that. “You were four,” she said. “Or maybe five. Your dad brought you over to our house one time when he had business in Dallas.”

  “Heh,” Scarlett said, considerably more quietly. “If I was five, that wasn’t my dad. He took off before I was even born. It was probably just one of Mom’s boyfriends. How old were you?”

  So they had something in common after all. Katie thought back to that afternoon; all she remembered was Scarlett splashing all the water out of the plastic swimming pool and then sitting in it holding a damp jam sandwich, while the neighbor’s tiny schnauzer barked its head off and tried to climb in.

  “Nine or ten, I guess.”

  “You live in Boston now, right?” This, spoken with a sense of awe, as if Katie had decamped for the rings of Saturn.

  “I do, actually—but I’m, um, well, I just landed in Dallas. I’m coming for the, um.” There wasn’t going to be a funeral or a service, according to her mother—Margaret had expressly forbidden it. She had been cremated and her ashes interred next to her long-dead husband’s grave.

  “The will thing?” Scarlett said incredulously. “For real? Oh my gosh. I told Merritt there wasn’t any way—I figured it would be just us. That’s so great! Where are you staying?”

  Katie took a deep, careful breath. “Uh, well, I haven’t quite figured that out yet.”

  “Oh gosh, I’m so sorry, Katie, I wish I could ask you to stay with us but it just isn’t the best time here but I can—but I’ll totally come to you,” she stammered. “I mean, I can’t wait to see you. I could like come over to get ready first?”

  Ready for what, Katie wondered—the meeting with the attorney? But surely not. “When’s the, um, will thing?”

  “It’s tomorrow afternoon. I have to check what time. Is your mom coming too?”

  “Look, Scarlett . . .” The buzzing in Katie’s head was growing louder; the growling of her stomach had turned into a dull ache. For a moment Katie wondered if she might pass out right here in front of the endlessly spinning, screeching baggage carousels.

  It would simplify some things . . . like trying to explain to her estranged cousin that her mother didn’t give a shit. That she and Georgina were bad relatives, selfish ones, who’d never even bothered to Facebook stalk her cousin until she had no other possible alternative because she didn’t care.

  Scarlett was notable for only two things in the family lore—at least, what passed for family lore with Georgina, who had disowned her few relatives years ago. (Twice, in fact; once when she first managed to escape New London at the age of eighteen and then again at twenty-seven, after getting knocked up in Paris. The second time, she stayed just long enough to have a fight with her mother, before hitchhiking to Dallas and giving birth two days later in a church-run shelter.) The first notable thing about Scarlett was that her father had been Mexican.

  The second was that she was the last living descendant of the Willems family besides Katie and Georgina, now that Margaret was dead.

  Katie had had to do a family history project in the fourth grade, so she knew that Espen Willems and his young bride, Griseldis, had come all the way from Holland to the Gulf of Mexico in 1904 to grow rice, which had struck her as a really dumb thing to do. But apparently lots of other Dutch people had the same idea, because a few years later there were so many of them that overproduction wiped out the coastal Texas rice industry. Many of these poor immigrants simply turned around and went home, but not stubborn Espen Willems, who moved two hundred miles north to the tiny town of Archer and opened a general store.

  Espen and Griseldis had two daughters before succumbing to overwork when the girls had barely reached adulthood. From there, the two branches of the Willems family tree had gone in different directions. The only thing that the sisters and their descendants had in common, as Katie learned by reading through the lines, was a propensity among the girls to give birth before carefully considering the provenance and character of the father. Generation after generation of women found themselves abandoned, widowed, or simply unloved and uncherished, until it seemed as though any romantic inclinations ought to have been bred out of their blood.

  Georgina liked to imply that her own out-of-wedlock pregnancy was the result of a mysterious serendipity, a bohemian sense of adventure; but when Scarlett—daughter of Georgina’s cousin Heather—came out of the womb caramel brown with no father to claim paternity, it was something entirely different: trash, in Georgina’s words, doing what trash does. By the time Katie realized how hypocritical and cruel her mother’s assessment had been, it was much too late to offer any sort of olive branch to her cousin. When Scarlett’s mother had died a few years earlier in an accident that twisted her Hyundai like a pretzel between a semi and a guardrail, Katie had sent no card, no flowers . . . not even a sad-face emoji on Facebook.

  Katie couldn’t very well make amends now—Say, sorry about your mom, by the way.

  Instead, she blurted, “I got mugged, Scarlett. I’m at the airport with no money and no way to rent a car and—and—I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  Scarlett’s gasp was audible. “Are you hurt? Did they hurt you?”

  “No, no—nothing like that. I mean, it didn’t even happen here. It’s, well, a long story.”

  “Well, you just sit tight,” Scarlett said, her voice suddenly edged with steel. “My car’s out of gas, but I’ll see if I can borrow Merritt’s truck, okay? I’ll be there in, like, well, I don’t actually know how long ’cause I got to find him first. I’ll call when—oh wait, I can’t call you, can I?”

  “No, no, that’s fine,” Katie said, suddenly weak with relief. She was being rescued. “I’ll just stay right here. I’m at D31 in arrivals. I won’t go anywhere. Take your time.”

  “I’ll try to hurry. What do you have on?”

  Katie looked down at herself. “White blouse, jeans, black boots.”

  “Okay,” Scarlett said doubtfully. Katie couldn’t blame her—half the women in her office wore the exact same thing on their days off, though the style didn’t appear to be quite as prevalent here. “Tell you what, keep your eyes peeled for a red Dodge truck with tires up to your tits. Oh, Katie, this is going to be great!”

  “WELL, I’D BETTER get going if I’m going to make my flight,” Dan said. “Thank you for making the airport a little less soul-sucking today.”

  “And thank you for
, well, saving me. I don’t know what I would have done without you.”

  “You would have done just fine.” Dan rose, stretching; his shirttails had pulled out of his slacks, revealing a slice of pale, rounded stomach. “I can tell—you’re a survivor. You would have figured it out.”

  He gave a little bow, then a smart salute, before turning and striding purposefully away from her. He checked his watch, then broke into an awkward jog, pulling his carry-on along behind him. It fishtailed, nearly taking out a woman with a stroller.

  Katie watched him go. No one had ever called her a survivor before—which probably spoke to Dan’s poor judgment (well, of course: he was the sort of guy who talked to strangers in airports). Georgina was the tough one in the family—some might say ruthless—and Katie had been blessed with luck. And genes, of course. Very good genes that had been her ticket out of more than a few difficult situations, like the one she’d just found herself in—pretty enough to capture a man’s attention, if that man was Dan.

  Katie sighed. She’d traded on her looks ever since she saw the way her mother smiled at the man at the deli to make him add a few extra slices of turkey onto her order. By the time she left for college, it was as natural as breathing.

  But maybe it was time to stop.

  After all, this was turning into a journey of discovery, wasn’t it? A few days to figure out who she really was, and what she really wanted. Maybe the first step was to strip off all of the trappings of tony Boston—especially since it was being done for her. Looking around the airport, she was reminded of how far she’d come since she left Texas, putting behind her the teased and highlighted hairstyle that she’d learned at her mother’s knee; the wardrobe of “cute tops” (Georgina’s words) designed to show off her cleavage, her bare shoulders, her midriff; the acrylic nails and the logo purses and a hundred other details of the illusion Georgina worked so hard to create. What a revelation it had been, on her first date with Liam, when he told her that he’d noticed her for the first time in their freshman psych class because she’d overslept and rushed over in no makeup and an old sweatshirt: “I could finally see you,” he’d said in a husky voice, and then he’d changed the emphasis slightly: “I could finally see you.”

  But that first blush of wonderment had quickly turned, as it must for all insecure girls, into studying and decoding what this new man in her life had really meant. “No makeup” turned into learning to contour and highlight and shade until she looked natural under as much makeup as she’d worn before. The bright-colored sundresses and camisoles were traded for simple but expensive pieces that she worked two off-campus jobs to pay for, jeans with no bling and boots with no heel and sweaters with no synthetic fibers.

  More than a decade later, it suddenly dawned on Katie that this was a costume too, just harder to recognize. She brushed at a smudge on her white pinpoint shirt cuff and headed off to find a ladies’ room.

  She checked the time on a departure screen and did the math. It would be midafternoon by the time Scarlett arrived, and that was if she drove the maximum speed the whole way.

  In the bathroom, she used one of her precious dollars to buy a couple of tampons and then, after considering, bought two more to be safe, stuffing the extras in her back pocket. She took care of business and then gave herself a long, hard look in the mirror as she washed up. The flight had taken its toll; her eyeliner was smudged, her lipstick chewed off; her nose was shiny and there were dark hollows under her eyes. Her cashmere wrap hung like a dirty rag around her shoulders, her blouse had a mysterious stain on the front, and her face looked puffy from the flight. She dampened a wad of hand towels under the faucet and scrubbed off as much of the remaining makeup as she could.

  There—better. Already, she was feeling like she’d shed a few layers that were weighing her down. Maybe it was the period hormones gone haywire and the lack of sleep, but Katie was feeling . . . something. The start of a second wind, maybe. Giddy, almost.

  She dug in her jeans pocket to make sure that her remaining ten dollars were still there as she left the bathroom. It wasn’t even enough for a paperback—not the kind Katie liked, anyway, the beautiful matte-finished novels with soft-focus watercolor covers and titles like The —— of —— or All the —— We ——. Lately, they had all run together, and she hadn’t even minded; she had used her pregnancy as an excuse to go to bed early with her orange blossom tea and lose herself in the stories that blended into each other.

  She couldn’t buy, but browsing was free. Katie found the biggest bookstore in the airport—a real one, not a souvenir shop with a few titles shelved next to the packaged peanuts and granola bars—and tried to make the experience last. She read each title on the shelves, picked up half a dozen and read random pages as though she was trying to find the perfect choice, squinted at the magazine titles. Finally, when she couldn’t keep up the ruse any longer, she squared her shoulders and marched out with her head held high, the way Georgina had taught her all those years ago.

  Make them think they have nothing to offer you, her mother counseled her at thirteen, when she took young Katie window shopping at Highland Park Village. Act like nothing in the store meets your standards. And it had worked. Salesclerks had fawned over Georgina, bearing her disdainful dismissals with equanimity, even humility.

  But Katie didn’t have her mother’s confidence. She walked slowly up and down the terminal, making a deal with herself that she wouldn’t check the time on the arrivals and departures screens again until she had completed a circuit, and still the time crawled. Eleven o’clock came and went. Eleven-thirty . . . noon . . . twelve-fifteen. Her stomach was angry, growling mutinously, and her brief burst of energy dwindled like a jet turned down on a stove. The aromas from the Cinnabon were torture; even the greasy burnt smell wafting from Manchu Wok made her salivate. She spotted an abandoned newspaper and picked it up discreetly, squaring the pages and tucking it under her arm, thinking she could find a quiet gate and read stale news.

  But then she spotted something even better.

  A People magazine with Kate Middleton on the cover, slightly worn and wrinkled from something being spilled on it, left on a seat at the end of a row. Katie glanced around, but no one was nearby. She picked up the magazine and hurried to the exit. It was almost one o’clock—really, she ought to be waiting outside anyway, in case Scarlett made excellent time. In the midst of the arrivals, the honking of the horns and the tweeting whistles of the security staff, she found a bench next to the crosswalk, sat down, and flipped through the magazine until she found the glossy photos of the beautiful princess, regal even in an ugly blouse and awful hat. One could do worse for company. Glancing around every so often to make sure that she didn’t miss the arrival of a monster truck with wheels up to her tits, Katie dug deeper, looking for clues into the princess’s beautiful yet inscrutable life.

  Chapter Ten

  1958

  Wait a minute,” the gangly young man in the houndstooth vest said. “You’re one of those? The Daisy children?”

  The boy, whose name Margaret had instantly forgotten, was intoxicated, but then again, so were most of the boys in the Withnalls’ backyard. Half of them were Tripp’s fraternity brothers, familiar from two years of Phi Psi dances and parties, but the rest were boys he’d gone to St. Stephens with and boys from his baseball days and boys who’d grown up in the same tony Austin neighborhood. The engagement party was to be tomorrow night—an elegant affair that Mrs. Withnall had been planning for months—and she’d made it known that she expected all of Tripp’s guests to be on their best behavior. By way of a bribe, she and Mr. Withnall had offered them the use of the pool and cabana this evening for a much more casual party.

  “I’m surprised you’ve heard of us,” Margaret said, favoring the drunk boy with a modest smile. She was stretched out on a chaise longue, her yellow patent sandals on the pool deck next to her. Earlier today, she and Tripp’s sisters had gone to the salon to have their hair and nails done. She wasn�
�t quite sure about the set that Mrs. Withnall’s hairdresser had given her: for one thing, the curls piled on her crown added a good two inches to her height, which made her perilously close to Tripp’s five feet nine inches and meant that she wouldn’t be able to wear her silk pumps tomorrow night; for another, she could still smell hairspray even over her perfume, and it was stiff as a board to the touch. Thank goodness Mother was going to have Mr. Jaffrey, her Tyler hairdresser, stay in the guesthouse for the wedding weekend, so he could make sure that the bride and her mother looked nothing short of perfect all weekend long.

  Tripp wandered over with a drink in his hand and plopped down on the chaise next to Margaret. Now they were a proper foursome, as the drunken boy was sharing a chaise with Margaret’s roommate, Gert. Tripp was still wet from having been thrown, along with several other boys, into the pool half an hour earlier after they’d lost some sort of bet, and Margaret shifted away from him to avoid brushing his clammy thigh with hers.

  “We were just talking about the Daisy children,” the boy said. “You didn’t tell me she was one of them.”

  “Yes, Everett, I did,” Tripp said, tipsily affronted. “I’m writing the article about them, remember?”

  “Her mother’s the president of the Daisy Club,” Gert chimed in. Gert had come home with Margaret to New London over the Thanksgiving holiday, since she was from Ohio and it was too far to travel. She’d been fascinated by Margaret’s family—annoyingly so, asking dozens of questions and asking to see her mother’s scrapbooks—and thought that story of the explosion was ever so sad. By the end of the weekend, as Gert trailed Caroline around the house helping her mother arrange flowers for the dining room table or bringing in the mail, Margaret was thoroughly sick of her.

  But Margaret had few female friends—a lack that she hardly considered a deficit, given how melodramatic and time-consuming friendship with other girls seemed to be—and she would need at least five to serve as bridesmaids, so she had put up with Gert all through the winter and spring. She’d suggested to Tripp that an earlier engagement would allow them to be married right after graduation, which seemed expedient, but his mother had been adamant that they wait so that she could hold the engagement party when her garden was in bloom and would photograph its best. By the time Tripp had finally produced the two-carat emerald-cut diamond and platinum ring, Mrs. Withnall had already met with the caterers, the florist, and the society editors of the Statesman, whose favor she had curried for decades to make sure that her parties received the proper attention.