The Daisy Children

by Sofia Grant

  She opened the door of the medicine cabinet and peered inside. The shelves were filled with toiletries of a dubious vintage: a tin of talcum powder, a bottle of Jean Naté body splash, roll-on deodorant and Pond’s cold cream and Vaseline and tweezers and nail clippers. There were two Estée Lauder lipsticks with the gold trim faded from the tubes; she twisted off the caps and found them worn down to chalky nubs, one a lurid pink and the other an orangey red. A cake of rouge was dried out and cracked, the brush losing its bristles. Katie shut the medicine cabinet door guiltily, feeling as though she had violated the old woman’s private sanctuary.

  She ran the sink taps for a while to flush out anything that might have collected in the pipes, then rinsed off her face and brushed her teeth.

  Then it was time for bed.

  If the old house had ghosts, Katie meant to seal them out, at least for tonight. By tomorrow night, she’d have a nice antiseptic room at the Days Inn, clean clothes, a proper meal. The old braided rug felt soft under her bare feet, and the evening had cooled off comfortably. Katie patted the mattress experimentally and it didn’t seem too terrible. The mattress pad was yellowed with age but otherwise looked as though it had barely been used. Well, that made sense; according to Georgina, Margaret had no friends and had alienated everyone she ever knew, so who would there have been to stay in the guest bed?

  (But Georgina hadn’t known about Scarlett, about the fact that she’d been visiting Margaret all along, a thought that nagged at Katie. Unless Georgina had known but decided to keep it to herself for some reason. What else might her mother have kept from her?)

  Katie went in search of linens. A single blanket was all she needed; she could sleep in her dirty clothes. In the linen closet in the hall, she found stacks of folded quilts, boxes of incontinence pads, an old humidifier.

  And a shoe box marked “Letters.”

  SOMETHING SMELLED WONDERFUL.

  Katie yawned and slowly opened her eyes, to find—not Liam sliding an omelet from the pan to a plate, one of the two dishes he knew how to cook flawlessly—but her cousin Scarlett sitting cross-legged on the other bed and digging into a Taco Bueno bag.

  “Well, good morning!” she said, grinning. “Did I wake you up? I’ve been trying to be quiet—I figured you were probably beat after yesterday.”

  “I was—I didn’t even hear you come in.” The events of the day before came back with a dizzying rush. Katie sat up against the headboard, and something crinkled under the sheets. She dug through the covers and there were the thin pale blue sheets of airmail paper that she’d been reading before she fell asleep.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s . . .” Katie felt suddenly shy. “Uh, something I found in the hall closet. A box of letters. They go back to when Margaret was in college . . . There were a few that my mother sent to Margaret when she lived in Europe.”

  “Aunt Georgina?”

  Katie paused, having never heard that phrase before. Aunt Georgina. “Did you ever meet my mom? I mean, other than that one time you visited when you were little?”

  “Almost. This one time I went to see Gomma at the convalescent home, and she had just left.” Scarlett’s smile turned pensive. “I would have liked to, you know, but Mom always said . . .”

  Her voice petered out and Katie felt embarrassed. “Look, Scarlett, I’m sorry we never made more of an effort. I mean, I know my mom and, uh, Grandma didn’t get along. But now it seems kind of silly that Mom never brought me around to get to know you. I mean, not that it’s all her fault. I should have, I don’t know, tried harder.”

  It felt so strange to say the word “Grandma.” All of Katie’s life, her mother had referred to her as “Margaret,” on the rare occasions when she deigned to say her name at all.

  “Gomma told me your mom lived in France. Is that where Aunt Georgina sent those letters from?”

  Katie looked down at the thin sheets, at her mother’s familiar loopy handwriting. “France, Switzerland, one from Lake Como in Italy. Well, that one was a postcard. Here.” She handed over the postcards, touristy photos of fishing boats in Italy and a Swiss mountainside dotted with wildflowers.

  “Wow, she went all those places? I’ve barely been out of Texas.”

  “Yes, she ran off to New York City right after she graduated from high school, and then after that she went to France. She’s always pretty vague about how exactly she got by, but if I know my mom, some generous boyfriends were probably involved.” Katie smiled at the thought. “She used to say that she went to the school of life instead of college.”

  “Wait, so she didn’t even work??”

  “That’s a good question. I know she waitressed for a while, and she had some sort of job at a gallery. The thing is . . .” Katie hesitated, not sure she ought to confide in someone she just met, even if it was her cousin.

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, it’s just— Mom always made it sound like Margaret threw her out of the house. Like she disowned her or something. But I don’t know . . . if Margaret saved these letters all this time, well, I feel like she must have missed her. Worried about her.”

  “Well, of course she missed her,” Scarlett said. “She was still her mom, even if they didn’t talk much. You said you found these in a closet?”

  “I wasn’t snooping—I was trying to find a blanket.”

  “Upstairs in the hallway? That closet?” Scarlett seemed surprised. “Were they underneath something?”

  “No, just sitting there in a box. Here.” She picked up the empty box from the floor, where it had fallen.

  “That’s weird. I’ve never seen it before. It was just on a shelf?”

  “Um, yes, right in the middle. Next to a stack of towels.”

  “It’s just that I know I looked through that closet before Gomma had her stroke. She used to ask me to get things down from high shelves.” She stared at the box; it was labeled “Spring Step Comfort, Size 7.5.” “I just feel like I would have noticed it. Oh! I brought you coffee, here.”

  Scarlett jumped up and went to get a Styrofoam cup from the dresser top. She was wearing a pair of cutoff shorts that barely covered her crotch and a tiny white sleeveless turtleneck that revealed enough of her midriff for Katie to see that a pink stone winked from her navel. Long, feathery silver earrings twisted through her colorful hair.

  “Oh God, I think I might cry,” Katie gasped, accepting the cup, which was still blessedly hot. “Remind me to buy you a really, really nice lunch. With cocktails.”

  “I didn’t know what-all you take in your coffee,” Scarlett said. “Mine’s got sugar and creamer, if you want to trade.”

  “No, this is perfect,” Katie said. She sipped, sighing contentedly.

  “I would have made you some here, but Gomma quit drinking coffee because it didn’t agree with her, and she gave her machine away. Oh, and I got you a sausage quesadilla too. Can I look through those while you’re eating?”

  She handed over the bag of food, and Katie handed her the box. She unwrapped the layers of waxy paper, inhaling gratefully. The first bite was pure greasy cheesy heaven.

  “That’s unbelievably good,” she managed around a second bite, washing it down with another belt of coffee. “Sorry, I barely ate yesterday. I mean, I went down to the store and some guy mistook me for a homeless person, which, I guess I can’t blame him, and he gave me some fried chicken that was amazing.”

  “Wow,” Scarlett said reverently, examining each envelope and laying them carefully on the bed. “Did you read all of these?”

  “Honestly, just the ones from my mom, and then I fell asleep. Do you recognize any of the other names?”

  “Uh-uh.” She picked up a square white envelope, examined the return address, and carefully removed a folded sheet of paper. “This one’s the oldest. ‘Gertrude Bell.’ Want me to read to you?”

  “Sure,” Katie mumbled around a mouthful.

  “Dear Margaret, I hope this finds you well. As I write this, it’s eleven d
egrees outside and Pop has his card club over so I’m holed up in my room, hiding. Christmas here was nice but I can’t wait to get back to campus. You don’t know how lucky you are to be in New London, they say it’s going to snow every day next week!

  “I’m still dreaming about that chestnut stuffing from Thanksgiving! Your mother was so gracious to me. I was just telling my friend Beth from high school about her and about the Tragedy she endured. I practically started crying just thinking about it. To think that she somehow found the strength not just to carry on but to care for your beautiful home and be involved in so many worthy causes.

  (“Wow,” Scarlett said, looking up from the letter, “what a kiss-ass!”)

  “I’ve been thinking about the spring formal, Margaret, and I wondered if you might do me a small favor. Now that Carter and I have broken up, I wonder if Tripp might know a boy who might like to go to the dance with me. I’ve got a few fellows I’m thinking about but Tripp is so clever and kind. Once we get back to school we’ll be so busy, I thought I would ‘put a bug in your ear’ now.

  “Please give your parents my best, and see you soon! With Lyres and Pearls, we’re the Greatest of Girls! Love, Gert.”

  Scarlett laid down the paper. “Lyres and pearls?”

  “It’s a sorority thing,” Katie explained, feeling a bit embarrassed. “I think it’s A Chi O. I had a friend who was a member. The lyre’s their symbol, it’s like a harp.”

  Scarlett raided an eyebrow doubtfully. “Honestly? She sounds like all she wanted was for Margaret to set her up.”

  “Was Tripp the guy she ended up marrying?” Katie asked, trying to remember if Georgina had ever told her the first name of her father, who had died when she was only a small child.

  “No, that was Hank. Hank Dial. You didn’t know your own grandfather’s name?”

  Katie sighed. “You’d have to know my mom. Or . . . well, you already know she didn’t keep up with her relatives. She just didn’t care much about family. I mean, I know that sounds terrible . . .” She trailed off, wondering how to explain without besmirching Margaret’s memory. She couldn’t exactly tell Scarlett that her beloved Gomma had—according to Georgina, anyway—been neglectful and borderline abusive, that she’d turned her back on her only child when Georgina was broke and desperate. “I guess they just didn’t get along.”

  Scarlett nodded. “I know it made Gomma sad. She didn’t hardly talk about it, but every once in a while she’d say, ‘I wonder what Georgie’s up to these days,’ or she’d see something in the Dallas news about a shooting or something and fret all week over whether your mom was safe.”

  “She did?”

  “Uh-huh. Oh look, here’s one from the museum.” She smoothed out a typewritten page.

  “That little building across from the school?”

  “Mmm, they started it back when I was a little kid. It used to be a drugstore. This is from 1990. ‘Dear Mrs. Dial, We are putting together a special exhibit about the Daisy children and their families and are looking for any memorabilia, photographs, or other materials you might be able to loan to the museum. In addition, we are soliciting first-person accounts and would be honored to include yours. Please contact us at the number below if you are interested.’ Wow, I’m surprised Gomma even kept this—she didn’t want anything to do with those folks.”

  “Who, the museum people? But why?”

  Scarlett shrugged. “I don’t know, really. I guess she just didn’t like to think about it. With Gomma, she’d let you know if there was something she didn’t want to talk about. Listen, can I read the rest of these after you’re done with them?”

  “Of course,” Katie said, but her mind was on what Jam had said the night before: that Margaret had been “mean as a wasp and tough as stewed skunk.” And yet, if she wasn’t mistaken, he’d been fond of her. “By the way, Scarlett, do you know some guy named Jam that lives next door?”

  “You met Jam?” Scarlett peered at her with interest, putting the letters back in the box before digging in the paper bag and pulling out a second quesadilla.

  “Well, if you can call having him help me break into the house, and then him threatening me, meeting, then . . . yeah, I guess we met. Though it was dark—I don’t think I’d know him from Adam in daylight.”

  “Well, he’s . . .” Scarlett trailed off thoughtfully. She took a bite of her own quesadilla, chewed and swallowed, and dabbed at her lips with a napkin before finally saying, “Jam’s interesting, that’s for sure. He’s had a hard life.”

  Katie turned that over in her head, wondering what would qualify as a hard life from the perspective of her cousin, who lived with a jerk boyfriend and had lost her only parent in a horrific accident and until last week had been working on the line in a factory.

  “So listen,” Scarlett continued, changing the subject. “I brought you some clothes and stuff. The lawyer thing’s not until three o’clock, so what do you want to do until then? And also, like—do you know what people wear to see a lawyer? I mean, is a dress okay, or I have a suit—well, it’s not really a suit, more of a jacket and skirt thing I wear for interviews . . .” She trailed off, peeking up at Katie uncertainly. “Honestly? The only lawyer I think I ever met was from when Merritt had to go to small claims court.”

  Katie had now let so many mentions of Merritt pass that it felt awkward to ask more about him. There was the casual way Scarlett had let slip the details she knew about Liam—she’d obviously cared more about the delicate thread of blood kinship that bound them than Katie did. Katie had never liked feeling socially unbalanced this way. She wished she’d asked Georgina a few more questions about her cousin while she had her on the phone.

  “Well, I need to get to the bank,” she said. “As soon as Liam lets me know which one, though . . .” She realized that she had no idea what time it was, and had no phone to check. But the sun was high in the sky, and besides, it was an hour later there, which meant that Liam would surely be at his desk by now. “Did he happen to text you?”

  “My phone doesn’t really do texts,” Scarlett said. “I mean, not very well, anyway. Sometimes I get them, sometimes they’re like hours late—that’s the first thing I’m going to buy, I think.”

  “A new phone?”

  “Yeah!” Scarlett’s eyes lit up. “With texting and streaming and all that. I had an iPhone for a while—Jody, he was my boyfriend before Merritt, he gave me his old one. But I upgraded the operating system and then it wouldn’t do shit.” She shrugged. “This time I’m going to be like, put everything on that thing. All the memory, all the data, the . . . well, whatever they put on phones.”

  “That’s really wonderful,” Katie said, sincerely. She couldn’t imagine getting by without her phone—the last twenty-four hours had been unnerving, to say the least. She—and everyone she knew in Boston—was tethered to her phone. She’d read somewhere about a study that revealed that women would go without sex before going without a phone and men would trade an inch of height before giving theirs up.

  By now, on an ordinary day back home, she would have checked her schedule and caught up on her Instagram feed and taken at least a first pass at her email; she would have exchanged half a dozen texts with Liam and Lolly and sometimes Liam’s sisters. She might have scheduled her wax (the salon had a convenient app for that), and at nine o’clock on the dot her thumb would be poised over the SisterCycle schedule, because that was when they opened up the classes for the next day, and if you didn’t nail it right away the five-thirty after-work class would be gone.

  By the time she left work at five-twenty with her gym bag slung over her arm, walking the two blocks from the office to the SisterCycle studio, her digital tracks would have taken her through four social media apps and dozens of texts and several laps around the work calendar and a Yelp review or two and—her secret indulgence—a round of SpellTower while in the bathroom, and she might have even used the thing to make or answer a call, though she and Liam and pretty much everyone she knew,
with the exception of Georgina, did better texting.

  “Hey,” she said, overcome with a rush of generosity toward her cousin. “How about as soon as I get my new credit card, let’s both go get new phones. You can put the plan on your credit card, but the setup and all will be my treat.” She grinned, feeling pleased at this idea: the few hundred dollars it would take to set up the plan and get a phone in her cousin’s hands would be a fitting gesture of gratitude, considering the ready kindness Scarlett had shown her.

  “Oh,” Scarlett said, and her face went through an odd series of subtle tics. “I mean, yeah, that’s so great. Except I, um . . . well, I don’t have a credit card anymore. Because of some things that happened . . . I mean, that’s the other first thing I want to do, is get a new Visa. I probably have to get like one of those secured cards where you put the money on it up front—my friend did that. After a year they let her have a thousand dollars in actual credit. But I mean, to start with, I’m probably just going to have to pay cash for the whole thing.”

  “Oh,” Katie said, embarrassed. She did the calculations in her head—prepaying for the iPhone and service was more than she really ought to be spending. Especially if she really had come all the way down here only to score a few old teacups. “Well, tell you what, let’s see where we are tomorrow, after the, um, lawyer and everything.”

  Except, shit! That meant that she couldn’t very well go and get a phone of her own after having made the halfhearted offer to Scarlett. This was all getting so complicated, as though Katie had taken a wrong turn on a twisting path and found herself in another dimension.

  “I really have to pee,” she said instead, buying herself a little time to think. What she really needed to do was talk to Liam, and break it to him that she probably wasn’t inheriting any life-changing sums of money. “And honestly, I badly need a shower. Would you mind . . .”