The Daisy Children

by Sofia Grant

  She choked back a sob and knocked hard enough to sting her knuckles and her mother opened the door so quickly it was as if she’d been standing on the other side, waiting.

  “Margaret Anne Pierson!”

  Her mother was wearing an unforgiving slate-blue day dress with a stiff white collar, and her face was a tight-wound rictus of fury. For a moment they simply gaped at each other, and then Caroline seized Margaret’s upper arms in a painfully tight grip and pulled her close, so that Margaret felt more than heard the shuddering exhalation of a breath that her mother might have been holding for a century. And just as quickly Caroline pushed her away.

  “Well, you may as well come in,” she said, and the moment had passed. Margaret followed meekly into the suite, took in the heavy brocade drapes and the peonies in the round crystal bowl on an inlaid ebony console. Such luxury—how she’d taken it for granted, how she missed it now: but acknowledging the ache felt like a betrayal.

  “Sit,” Caroline said, pointing at a matched pair of emerald-green velvet settees that faced each other over a dainty oval coffee table in front of the tall windows overlooking downtown Austin. “I’ll have tea sent up.”

  While her mother spoke to the room service operator, Margaret gazed out at the view. Piercing the searingly blue sky was the thin white line of a jet’s contrail, and Margaret thought of the afternoons when she heard the plane’s engine high above and went out onto the porch and found Hank in the sky, buzzing her on his return from wherever it was he’d gone that day. He’d told her he always blew her a kiss, and she always blew one back to him.

  Her mother hung up the telephone and walked stiffly to the same window, staring out of it as though she were alone in the room, back as straight as a ruler.

  “All right,” she finally said, and sat down on the other settee, her legs crossed primly at the ankle and her hands folded in her lap. “Please don’t say anything until I’ve finished, Margaret. I’ve given this a lot of thought and I would appreciate it if you would hear me out. There is a way to make this right. It’s not going to be easy, but I’ve spoken to your father about it and he agrees that it must be done.”

  “Mother, I—”

  “Stop!” Caroline roared, slamming her fist down on the coffee table, rattling a potted African violet and a tray of candies. Margaret drew back against the scratchy velvet, her heart in her throat. “You listen to me, for once. You have no idea—no idea!—what sacrifices I’ve made for you. The things I’ve done for you. It’s time for you to stop thinking only of yourself now, just like I—like your father and I—did the day you were born.”

  Margaret felt dangerously close to crying, more from shock than any genuine affront. She’d expected her mother to be angry, but not like this—the woman across from her was barely recognizable. Margaret had only seen Caroline lose her composure once before, on the day of the long-ago picnic when the hobo had come looking for her—but even then her mother had managed to quickly restore a sense of outraged decorum.

  But now angry spots of red showed through her mother’s powder. A tiny bubble of spittle was lodged in the corner of her mouth, and one tail of her blouse had come free of her skirt. Also, she’d become old. But how was that possible? Margaret had seen her only six months earlier, when Caroline had come to UT for the Alpha Chi Omega Mothers’ Weekend, carrying a heavy satchel full of fabric samples and menus and registry lists. Caroline had been positively radiant then, as she debated the merits of Wallace sterling versus Towle, Heisey goblets versus Tiffin, in the sorority’s parlor.

  Margaret focused on the lines bracketing her mother’s mouth and cleaving the space between her brows and calculated her age: she was twenty, so that made her mother . . . fifty-three. Fifty-three! An unpleasant roil of guilt crowded out her other emotions; her mother’s birthday was in April, and Margaret had meant to call, meant to send flowers . . . and in the end had done neither. Her father could always be counted on to see to that sort of thing, and Margaret had been caught up in the final days of her senior year. How long ago that seemed now!

  “Mother!” Margaret barked, determined to arrest her mother’s fury before things spun further out of control. “It can’t be undone. I’m married and I’m going to have a baby. And that’s all there is to it.”

  “I’ve spoken to Mrs. Withnall,” Caroline continued doggedly. “They are willing to . . . cooperate, on several conditions.”

  “You spoke to her?” Margaret cringed inwardly; she’d started several letters to Tripp’s mother, but was stymied by the memory of Tripp lurching down the stairs of their cottage after Hank had punched him.

  “The marriage will be annulled,” Caroline plowed on shrilly. “I’ve made a number of calls, and a very sizable donation to their parish building fund. Our position will be, and the Withnalls will support this, though of course not in public, but everyone will be made to understand that there was . . . coercion. That you were not in your right mind.”

  “Wait—”

  “Your father is prepared to make Hank understand his options, if necessary.” Caroline looked down at her hands, examining her perfectly filed nails. Then she looked up at Margaret with an inscrutable expression. “You’ll go to Dallas until it’s all over.”

  It took a moment for Margaret to take her mother’s meaning. Her hands went to her stomach, protecting the tiny swell. “I will not.”

  Her mother exhaled angrily. “There is no reason for you to throw your life away like this, Margaret! If you’d just take a moment to think about this—about Hank, for God’s sake, about the life he could provide for you—well, it’s all well and good now, when you’re in your little fairy-tale cottage and Hank hasn’t seen you haggard from being up all night with a baby, and too tired to fix his breakfast. How do you think it’s going to be then? Do you think you’ll still be his little darling when you’ve lost your figure and you’re nagging him for egg money?”

  “You don’t know him.” Margaret hurled the words back at her mother, but buried in her anger was a snag, a splinter of doubt. “He’s good and he’s hardworking and he’d do anything for me. He loves me.”

  Caroline laughed, an ugly sound, harsh and unfamiliar. “He loves you? Let me tell you what they say about him, Margaret. Hank Dial loves his liquor and he loves to fly his plane. And that’s the whole story. I’m sure he’s fond of you, and every man wants a girl who’s above his station—a prize he can show off, especially after he took you away from Tripp Withnall. But in the end, he’s headed for ruin and he’ll take you down with him. You forget that I’ve known him his whole life—even before that day. I knew him when he was just a boy, I saw him fly kites on your father’s land. I saw him cry when his dog got run over—just think about that for a minute, Margaret, I saw Hank Dial cry.”

  Margaret sucked in her breath. Because she knew what her mother was insinuating. Just as Caroline always described the disaster only as “that day,” she’d never come out and say what she really meant: that Hank had been damaged beyond repair by surviving the explosion that took his brother, that something in his soul had been left behind in the flames when he emerged, burnt and out of his mind with grief.

  No, Hank was not a man who cried—nor did he laugh unguardedly, or tell jokes, or sing drinking ditties like Tripp and his friends did. The range of his emotions hung heavily on the dark end of the spectrum; he was a brooder, a man who kept his thoughts to himself.

  But there was another side of that coin, one that Margaret couldn’t possibly share with her mother. When Hank walked through the door, windburned from a day in the sky, there was a hunger in his eyes that stirred something in her every time. When he drove himself deep inside her so hard their little bed shuddered and knocked against the wall, she was as ready for him as if it was the only use for which God had made her. When she brought him his coffee, he closed his scarred fingers over her wrist and even the look that passed between them could undo her.

  He called her his angel. He told her nearly every day sh
e was too good for him, and it only made her want to work harder to deserve him. He laid his head in her lap when the dark thoughts became too much—anyone could see when that happened, anyone who loved him—and she stroked his hair until he fell asleep, his eyelids twitching with the dreams that chased him.

  Margaret was healing him, she was sure of it. Slowly, yes, but they would have a lifetime together. And what could Tripp have offered her that could compare to the intoxication of being needed like that? What good were the rows of crystal goblets, the silver engraved with a monogram that would never be hers, the dress that had been ordered from New York?

  “You don’t know the first thing about him,” Margaret snapped. “Or about love. Look at you—you married Daddy, just because he was rich. I don’t believe you ever loved him at all, you just pretended to so he’d buy you nice things.”

  “How dare you,” Caroline gasped. “I’ve worked my entire life so you could have this chance! You want to be like your cousins, with a dirt yard and babies they can’t afford to keep in shoes?”

  “Better than tricking a man into marrying you just so you could live in a big house,” Margaret shot back. “Better than ordering Alelia around because you’re too lazy to fix lunch. Better than having your husband hide in the garage because he can’t bear to listen to you anymore.”

  The impact caught her by surprise: her mother launched herself off the sofa and slapped her face. Margaret put her hand to her cheek, felt the burn, the tears pricking her eyes. She couldn’t believe her mother had done it—but mixed in with her shock was a strange, thrilling shiver. Caroline stumbled backward, collapsing onto the settee, her expression aghast.

  “I won’t be told what to do, Mother,” Margaret said coolly; the balance had somehow shifted. “Hank and I make our own decisions now.”

  “You won’t convince me that baby was one of your decisions. It was—it was reckless.”

  “We didn’t plan to have a baby so soon,” Margaret allowed, “but we’re certainly going to have more. Three or four or—I don’t know, but we want a big family.”

  In truth, she and Hank had had no such discussion; Margaret wasn’t all that certain how he might feel about more children, despite the reverent way he placed his hand on her stomach. She hadn’t found the courage to bring up the subject yet.

  But her mother’s interference had to be stopped, and now, when she held this unexpected advantage, was the time. “Is that all you wanted to discuss?” Margaret asked. “Because I find that I’m feeling a bit indisposed.”

  “I’m going to give you one more chance,” her mother said, regaining her own composure. “But before I do, there’s something you should know. This family you’ve married into—they don’t even want you.”

  Margaret blinked: other than the note and gift from Helene, there had been only a single letter from Hank’s mother, from up in Wichita Falls, where she’d moved with her new husband after Mr. Dial’s death. In two misspelling-addled paragraphs in a tight, miserly hand, Mrs. Dial had promised a visit “once Mr. Weathers gets the crop in”; she had signed it “your devoted Mother,” and Margaret had tried not to be affronted by the exclusion. For Mrs. Dial—now Mrs. Weathers—would never be her mother, and given the way Margaret and Caroline had treated her and Helene all those years ago, she was smart enough not to pretend.

  “We were never that close before, as I recall,” she said haughtily. “I suppose I’ll simply have to carry on without their approval.”

  “It’s not just them,” her mother snapped. “Do you know what I overheard Dessie Webb saying the other night after dinner at the club?”

  “I can’t imagine.”

  “That after what you did to your fiancé, you deserve what you get.”

  Margaret felt her face heat with shame; it was all very well to pretend the snubs didn’t bother her, but this one hit too close to home. She’d been cruel, but she wasn’t—despite what everyone thought—intentionally cruel by nature. Selfish, yes, though she blamed her mother’s example; spoiled, certainly, but loads of girls in her sorority were spoiled. And she’d been a crafty and occasionally unkind child, but children were often unkind, if the impulse went unchecked—it was simply part of growing up.

  Even now she couldn’t think of Tripp—of that ring on the silver tray, of her covert escape down the back stairs—without a measure of guilt and the suspicion that she was going to be made to pay.

  “I don’t care,” she said grimly, as much to remind herself of the need to be resolute as to defy her mother.

  “Well, maybe you’ll care about this.” Her mother stood and went to the little inlaid writing desk along the wall, and picked up a piece of notepaper.

  No, not notepaper but a check, Margaret realized, as her mother marched back and held it up just out of reach. The figure Caroline had written out nearly made Margaret’s eyes pop.

  “This is my final offer. I won’t beg, Margaret. Do the right thing, and your father and I are prepared to make sure that you are more than comfortable once you return from Dallas. You can have your own house; you’ll never need to worry about money. If you’re clever, you’ll find someone else to marry—this will certainly help convince him.”

  Margaret held her chin high. “I don’t want your money.”

  The second the words were out of her mouth, she thought of all the things she and Hank could not afford: a bigger house with a room for the baby, a bassinet. A car, a vacuum cleaner, a washing machine. Even a trip to the salon—Margaret had been forced to trim her own hair as well as Hank’s, and while she made light of it as she wrapped toilet paper around his neck to catch the snipped bits, she missed the smells of hairspray and setting lotion so much it made her want to cry.

  She’d secretly assumed that her parents would begin sending her a little to help, once the baby came, and it was with alarm that she understood that was not going to happen now. Everything she needed, from bobby pins to baking powder, she would have to beg money for from Hank. And she could not count on him to understand. Money coming in from her parents, to be spent on fripperies and follies, would be easy to hide for the simple reason that a man like Hank was unlikely to notice a new dress or lipstick; but the unfortunate truth was that she had no hope of explaining why she needed them.

  And that was if there truly was to be extra, if the money wasn’t needed for something else. It sounded so romantic, when Hank had first explained that he worked for whom he wanted, when he wanted; these three months later, she had come to understand that Hank had a temper that did at least some of the deciding for him. She’d once answered the door to a man who claimed that Hank had cheated him—and another time, Hank had left without telling her where he was going, leaving instructions that “if anyone shows up, tell ’em I’m not working today.”

  The unfortunate but perhaps unsurprising fact was that at least some of the time, liquor was behind Hank’s rash actions. But there was no way Margaret would confess that to her mother. Besides, she had a plan. She was going to talk to Hank about it, when the baby was a little closer to being born. She’d remind him of the sacrifices that they both had made—him his first marriage, her a fiancé who’d once seemed quite good enough—and convince him that it was time to settle down for good. He’d come home in the evenings, he’d start keeping more regular work hours, he’d quit playing cards and frequenting taverns and start looking for a house that he could fix up on the weekends.

  Reminding herself of these plans did the trick. Margaret smiled, not very nicely, and moved forward so that she was mere inches from the check her mother was still holding. She snatched it out of her mother’s hands, tore it in half, then tore the pieces in half twice more and let them flutter down onto the exquisite rug.

  “You stupid, stupid girl,” her mother said tonelessly. “I should have known.”

  The words stung, but Margaret did her best to hide it. “Known what?” she asked loftily. “Known that I was capable of making my own decisions? That I’d never settle for a
life like yours?”

  Her mother’s face drew in on itself, her eyes narrowing into glittering slits, her lips compressed until they were devoid of color. Margaret was almost to the door when she finally spoke.

  “That no good deed goes unpunished,” Caroline called after her. “Though I imagine you’ll figure that out for yourself soon enough.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  The little supermarket smelled faintly of American cheese and Windex, and there was no one in it besides Katie except for the clerk, a bored-looking young man with a mop of jet-black hair that hung in his face. Katie wandered the aisles, her hand closed tightly around the bills in her pocket. What she really wanted was a bottle of the moderately expensive cab that she and Liam bought for date night, with its pretty scrolled label and the pinkish foil cap. But even if she used all her money, there wouldn’t be enough for a single glass.

  She settled for a toothbrush and tiny tube of Crest, an apple, a Clif Bar. She deliberated over the Lunchables, which were on sale for a dollar off, but the pink circle of lunch meat made her feel slightly nauseous. The tinny country music playing in the background seemed like it had come from another era, all fiddle and twang. It was as though all of New London had been frozen in 1998, when she’d last come to visit.

  The young man at the register cleared his throat. “Fried chicken’s half off,” he called. “After six o’clock, when my boss figures she can’t sell it. I think there’s a couple of thighs left, over in the fridge there.”