by Sofia Grant
In Marilyn Withnall, Margaret had met her mother’s match, and she was both amused and a bit apprehensive to imagine the two of them squaring off during the wedding weekend. But as all of the planning was the domain of the bride and her mother, Mrs. Withnall would be able to do little more than follow orders and seethe. Margaret had half a mind to put her in a salmon-pink gown, which would clash with her future mother-in-law’s sallow complexion—but she’d known since she was a little girl that her colors would be robin’s egg blue and pale yellow. Daddy had promised that no expense would be spared, and when Margaret tested that notion by suggesting that he buy a matched pair of swans to swim in the little pond out back during the reception, he’d barely flinched.
Despite the fact that they were sitting inches apart, Everett barely seemed to have registered Gert’s presence, even though she was leaning forward so that her breasts were practically spilling into his lap. With only a week to go before their graduation from UT, Gert was understandably panicked; her boyfriend had broken up with her back in March, and there had been no suitable prospects since. She was planning to make the most of Margaret’s wedding to meet Tripp’s single friends, and Margaret couldn’t blame her: if their roles were reversed, she’d be doing the same.
“Now, I understand that you’re going to be a dentist,” Gert said brightly, attempting to steer the conversation. Margaret felt a familiar spike of annoyance: it was all simply too dull for words.
“A funny thing about being a Daisy,” she said, pretending not to have heard Gert. “All of our birthdays were within a few weeks of each other. It’s as though, following all the funerals, our parents went directly home to screw.”
She held Everett’s gaze as she said it, fully aware of the effect she had on the majority of men. Next to him, Gert tittered nervously, a hand to her mouth.
“People always screw after disasters,” a nearby voice said. A tall man had separated from the hazy edge of the crowd of young people, many of whom were attempting the Bop dangerously close to the edge of the pool. He was wearing a brown bomber jacket and blue jeans, and he had a cigarette and lighter in hand; as the four of them squinted in the darkness he lit the cigarette, took a single puff, and then handed it to Margaret.
She took it automatically, then nearly dropped it as she realized who he was: her entire body seemed to shift with the knowledge, heat flooding the places inside of her that she hadn’t known had gone cold.
“Heh,” Tripp said, scowling. “Hello, Lucky. I suppose Mother sent you down here to break up the party.”
“Hank,” Margaret whispered.
THE LAST MARGARET had heard, Hank had been working in one of Tansy’s father’s bank branches. She’d lost touch with Helene, who’d married and moved away after her father’s death. At least, that’s what Caroline had reported offhandedly, never knowing how hungry Margaret was for these occasional bits of news, which she recorded in the diary that she kept hidden behind her textbooks in her room at the sorority house.
As she watched Hank shake a second cigarette from the pack and light it for Gert, never taking his eyes off Margaret, she wondered: What would he make of the fact that he featured prominently in all of the diaries that she had kept, from childhood on? That writing his name had kept him close to her all of these years?
“Miss,” he said, and Gert, who never smoked, nonetheless put it to her lips and immediately convulsed in a fit of coughing. She jumped off the chaise and barely managed an “excuse me” before hurrying away.
“Nervous girl,” Hank said mildly. “You don’t even remember me, do you, Mags?”
Margaret shrugged and let the cigarette dangle from her fingertips, fluttering ash onto the pool deck. Her skirt had somehow skimmed up over her knee, and she stared down at the long, smooth expanse of her calves, shimmering in the light of the tiki torches. Her heart seemed to pause for a moment before beginning to beat again with what felt like renewed purpose—and she knew that her life was finally changing.
“Perhaps,” she said. “Have you done anything memorable lately?”
Tripp and Everett goggled. Hank laughed and pulled up a chair.
“You know each other?” Tripp demanded.
“Hank’s sister—I’m sorry,” Margaret said, recovering herself. “Lucky’s sister was my best friend when we were children.” An exaggeration, but Helene wasn’t here to argue.
“You’re from New London?” Everett asked. “Tripp’s doing a magazine story about the school disaster.”
Hank’s smile didn’t slip, but something shifted around his eyes. “No kidding. What’s the angle?”
“It’s, ah. Well, you know, it’ll be a long piece. Think Joe Mitchell in the New Yorker,” Tripp said.
Joe? Margaret thought. Tripp had made her read the man’s pieces—endless long, boring column inches by Joseph Mitchell and other writers, whose talent Tripp felt his own equaled and sometimes exceeded. Margaret was no critic and not much of a reader, but even she could tell the difference between the published stuff and the pieces—the fragments of pieces, actually, because as far as Margaret knew Tripp had never finished anything that wasn’t required for a class—that Tripp was convinced would launch his literary career and eventually make him famous.
To be fair, she had rather thought she might like to be the wife of a famous author—living in a New York City apartment, rubbing elbows with glamorous people—and that, combined with the knowledge that Tripp’s parents would fund the literary life for a while even if it didn’t work out, had been enough to keep her enthusiasm adequately stoked.
Until now, anyway. The way Hank was looking at her—and where he’d picked up such an undignified and absurd nickname, she couldn’t begin to imagine—she actually felt a little . . . soiled by Tripp. A tiny bit ashamed, even.
And there was something else. Something worse. The story of the Daisies . . . she’d given it to Tripp like feeding steak to a dog, knowing he wouldn’t be able to resist, knowing he’d swallow it whole, a morsel of shock and horror with a larding of infamy and a taut crust of pain. She’d offered it up to him to see herself reflected back in his eyes, to give him a project with herself as its center, a way to make sure he never looked away.
Except that it wasn’t her story to give. There, sprawled in the pool chair with his dark core of unknowability under a disguise of insouciance and swagger, was one who truly could claim it. To her parents, his parents, all the parents and siblings of the lost, the story of what happened on that long-ago afternoon—once you stripped away the headlines, the reporters from all over the world—was sacred. And she’d bartered it like a cheap bauble.
“Tripp,” she said warningly—almost pleadingly.
But Tripp had taken a long slug from his tumbler and fortified himself. “It’s been two decades,” he said. “How old were you when it happened? Five or six?”
“Nine.”
“Nine, then. Still too young to know what it all meant. You were, what, sick that day? I read that there were a few kids who were absent. Talk about luck.”
“I was there.” Hank held out his hands; even in the light of the tiki torches, or maybe because of it, the scars stood out in high relief, ridged and shiny and still shocking.
“You were there? Aw, this is fantastic. I mean, God, you know what I mean, I’m sorry, hell, all that suffering, all that loss. Your parents, I mean, I can’t even imagine how relieved they must have been that you survived—”
“They might have been, if they weren’t busy burying my brother,” Hank said—and still the only sign of emotion in his languid, placid voice was the hard flash in his eyes and that twitch of his jaw. If anything, he seemed to relax even further in the chair, and his fingers trailed lazily in the pool. “He was eight. He went in the coffin in pieces, what was left of him after he burned up.”
“Uh.” Finally, Tripp seemed to have realized that he was in over his head. Everett had sobered up fast, and swung his legs over the edge of the chaise—he was sitting very s
traight, his mouth hanging open. “Look, I’m sorry, Luck—Hank. I didn’t know.”
“Yeah, that’s okay. I mean, I’m just the guy who takes your dad up to check on his rigs. No reason for you to know my life story.”
“The piece is going to be sensitive,” Tripp said earnestly, and Margaret thought shut up, shut up, shut up.
“You’re still flying, then,” she said brightly. “You’ve got your own business?”
“Don’t, Mags,” Hank said heavily.
“Wait,” Tripp said. “The lady was just trying to be polite.”
Hank raised one eyebrow and stared at Tripp, then at Margaret. His eyes took her in, coming to rest on the diamond glittering on her left hand. Finally he said, “You know, you’re right—here she’s gone and grown up. A regular lady,” he added, almost to himself.
Then he stood and yanked Tripp off his chaise as though he was picking up a bag of autumn leaves, and threw him into the pool. This time, when Tripp came up sputtering and coughing, the party guests looked on in shocked silence.
“What the hell—” Everett said.
“I’ll show myself out,” Hank said. “You can tell your dad not to worry about my last check.”
“Fuck you, flyboy,” Tripp said, water streaming in his eyes. “Get the fuck off our property!”
Hank shook his head, chuckling mirthlessly. “All right. Sorry to crash your party, folks. Good to see you again, Mags.” He paused next to her, so close she could see the frayed seam of his jeans. “You really marrying him?”
Before she could answer, he shook his head. “Never mind, forget I asked. I guess that’s a mistake we all have to make on our own.”
“I BARELY KNEW him,” Margaret pleaded an hour later, when the last of the guests were either gone or passed out in the pool house. Margaret had arranged the pillows under the bedcovers in the guest room, just in case anyone was nosy enough to look in on her, and snuck down the stairs to meet Tripp.
She had a vague plan to mollify and distract him, but it turned out that Tripp was in no mood to pursue his campaign up her thighs and under the elastic of her underwear, a battle he’d been waging for months now. Instead, she found him waiting for her in the swing hanging from an old oak near the end of the drive, in an unfamiliar and dangerous mood.
“Mags?” Tripp demanded, incredulously. “You told me you hated nicknames.”
She’d actually told him she hated his nickname—who would stand for being known as the third of something?—but no matter. “I never told him to call me that. We were kids.”
“When did you last see him?”
“Must you interrogate me? Like some—some criminal? It was at his wedding, if you must know.”
“He’s not married,” Tripp said. “He rents a room from a rancher.”
Something stirred inside Margaret. This wasn’t news, of course; the annulment had been scandalous, awash as it was in rumors that her parents had secured it with a sizable donation to the Church. The public version of the story was shifting and vague; no one seemed to be quite sure who left whom, and why. Tansy was in Europe with her mother, or maybe she was back by now. If she was lucky, she’d soon be married again—swiftly, without fanfare—to a widower or a friend of the family. If she was smart, she’d produce a baby within a year and never speak of her first marriage again.
These were things that girls from good families knew. Margaret bit her lip, frustrated with herself: now was not the time to indulge in idle speculation. Rather, Margaret needed to do what she did best, which was to go on the offensive.
“It was completely callous of you to talk about your article like that,” she chided. “He lost his brother. He got those scars trying to save him from the fire. He received a letter from the governor, did you know that? He risked his life. And that was before he ever served in the armed forces.”
“Goddamn it,” Tripp snapped, pushing up from the swing and pacing in front of her. “I knew that’s what this was about. You know I would have fought. I would have been the first one to sign up.”
But I was only nine years old on V-J day. His words echoed in Margaret’s memory—she’d heard it all at least twice before, the bravado of boasts that could never be proved. Lots of boys said things like that when they were drunk. She couldn’t really blame them.
But then again, that was the problem. Compared to Hank—and wouldn’t she have liked to look at him in the light of day, to see if there were lines around his eyes, grooves from sorrow, gray in his hair—Tripp was lesser and always would be.
“Something else,” Tripp fumed, stopping his pacing to shake his finger at her. “He’s been to jail, did you know that?”
“What for?”
“I don’t know, does it matter? He probably came to Austin to get out of hot water.”
“How do you even know it’s true?”
“Dad told me, that’s how. Dad knows a judge—talked him into giving him a chance.”
“Listen,” Margaret said. She needed time to think. She dreaded the party tomorrow—she needed to get to bed soon or it was going to be horrid, and Mrs. Withnall sent the girl up at an atrociously early hour every morning to announce breakfast. “I’m sorry that he spoiled the party”—though of course he hadn’t; Tripp’s temper tantrum had done that—“and I probably won’t ever see him again, and we’re going to laugh about this later, but right now I think we should just go up to bed.”
“And you egged him on,” Tripp said, without any indication that he had heard her. “Talking about his business, as though he owned a bank or something!”
“I did no such thing!” Margaret said. She had had enough. She got up from the swing and put her hands on her hips. “You’re being ridiculous. What if I created a scene every time I met some girl who came to your birthday party when you were nine? No, don’t answer that,” she snipped, already picking her way across the brick driveway. “Good night.”
“Margaret,” Tripp called after her, but she didn’t turn around.
A LETTER ARRIVED the next morning. The girl brought it up on a square silver tray. “Thank you,” Margaret said regally, even though the envelope was cheap and her name appeared to have been written with a carpenter’s pencil. She caught her breath and closed her eyes and waited for the door to close behind the girl, all the while her mind tumbling like diamonds spilled into a chasm.
Mags—you can’t be serious. I’m staying at the Pratt Ranch, come here once you’ve come to your senses. I’ll fly you home, you can be there by supper.
MARGARET DRESSED QUICKLY and summoned the girl with the little electric intercom by her bed. When she arrived moments later, her eyes swept over the neatly made bed, the suitcase standing by the door—the ring resting on the little silver tray. She met Margaret’s gaze and her brown eyes flashed with some emotion that belied the rest of her carefully neutral expression.
“Miss?”
“I’ll need a car. I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.”
“It’s Poppy.”
“Poppy, then. Is there someone who can drive me? I’m going to see a friend who’s staying at the Pratt Ranch, and I’d prefer not to disturb the family. Perhaps I could wait by the carriage house?”
Poppy looked over her shoulder, into the empty upstairs hallway. “I didn’t see nothing,” she said. “But I expect Magnus might be out there polishing up the Cadillac.”
Margaret smiled. “I can carry my own suitcase.”
SHE HAD TEN crisp dollar bills that her father had given her when he came to the sorority house to take her things back home to New London. She gave the driver six of them. He didn’t look at them when he closed his large hand over them, but he carried her suitcase up onto the porch of the dusty long bunkhouse.
“You want me to wait, Miss?”
“Thank you, but that won’t be necessary.”
She waited until the shiny maroon Cadillac had disappeared in a cloud of dust back the way they’d come before knocking on the door. When no one came, she
tried the handle and the door swung open.
There were four plain, spare rooms in a row. Three of them were empty, save the battered dressers and empty bed frames. In the one on the end, there was little more—shirts hanging from a rail, a cracked mirror the size of her palm on the wall, a dun-colored wool blanket folded at the foot of the bed.
A photo in a small tarnished frame: two boys, hair like straw, the younger one missing his front teeth, laughing into the sun.
“Well, well.”
She turned fast, knocking her hip against the dresser, jostling the photo so that it toppled over. She righted it with care, suddenly more nervous than she had ever been.
“I got your note.”
“So I gathered.” Hank watched her from the doorframe, leaning against it, arms crossed. Many years later, this was the way she would remember him—his eyes a faded blue, hair in need of a cut, shirt streaked with dirt and grease and sleeves rolled up over tanned and corded arms. Time, now that she had a proper look at him, had aged him. It was as though every hard moment had left its imprint, every searing memory its scar.
“Well, you were right.” Suddenly she was frustrated. Why hadn’t he stopped her sooner? Why hadn’t anyone? Twenty years of indulgence, her whole life, a thread loose on the spool, a feather released on a breeze. Someone should have tethered her.
But maybe it wasn’t too late.
“All right.” He walked into the room, passing within inches. Her skin seemed to register his presence. He smelled of hard work in the warm early hours of the day, sweat and oil and dirt.