The Daisy Children

by Sofia Grant

  “Oh,” Katie said shortly. “Well, gee, I hope you could spare it.”

  “Hey. Look. I’m sorry, okay? We’re trying. I don’t have any cash either, just so you know. I had to ask one of my interns to cover me at lunch. Also, I had to wait like seven hours for the cops to come, and I highly doubt they’re actually going to do anything. The guy said they’ve had a lot of these lately.”

  “Huh,” Katie said, picturing Liam holding court at lunch, spinning the story of their mugging into entertainment for his little band of interns. He’d emerge as a self-effacing hero—and the interns would probably fight over who got to pick up the tab.

  “Right. Okay.” Now he was pissed off too. “Well, you’re welcome. Look, one of us is still working, okay, and this set me back for the rest of the week. I might have to miss Gavin’s promotion thing.”

  “That’s tonight?” Katie had never liked Liam’s friend Gavin. “Wasn’t that couples?”

  “Well, yeah, but I am capable of holding a conversation on my own, Katie.” Liam sounded even more pissed.

  “No, I just meant—never mind. Tell him congratulations and I’m sorry to miss it.”

  “Yeah, okay.” Katie could hear laughter in the background—she pictured the conference room she’d seen only once, when she’d accompanied Liam to his holiday party. There had been beanbag chairs in the corners of the room and a pair of foam antlers mounted over the door.

  “Look, Kate—”

  “I have to go,” she said. “Tell Lolly thanks.”

  “I’ll try you tonight.”

  “On what? I don’t have a phone, remember? I’m using my cousin’s.”

  “Yeah. Okay, right. Well, then you can try me, okay?”

  “Uh-huh. Bye.”

  When Katie handed the phone back, Scarlett gave her a little smile. “Any luck?”

  “Yeah, I guess my friend Lolly sent some cash. It’s supposed to get to the house by three. I just hope he had the right address.” Her stomach growled again, and she covered it with her hand, embarrassed. It was still two hours until their appointment with the lawyer. “Listen, Scarlett, I really hate to ask, but do you think I could borrow some money for lunch, and I’ll pay you back tonight?”

  “Um, yeah, but . . .” Scarlett stared down at her lap. “I’ve got cash at home, but Merritt’s kind of . . . I don’t think this is maybe the best time to meet him. He’s, you know how guys are, he’s been working on the retaining wall all morning. And I guess I got the wrong screws but he couldn’t tell me what exact size he needed and . . . anyway, he’ll be fine once he gets it done. So, like, tomorrow would be a good time, we could maybe sit out in the backyard or something. Hey, but listen!” She brightened, sitting up. “I know where we can get some lunch. It’s Friday, right?”

  Katie had to think about it for a minute. “Yes—”

  “Well, come on! It’s just down the street.”

  “Scarlett, we’re not going to a soup kitchen or anything, are we?”

  Scarlett laughed. “No. Friday’s hog day.”

  HOGS, IT TURNED out, meant motorcycles—and also pork ribs slow-cooked on a massive steel-drum smoker in a parking lot behind a garage with a half dozen bikes in various states of repair, refurbishment, and customization. A woman with short blue hair and dime-size holes in her ears emerged from the garage with a beer in her hand and gave Scarlett a hug.

  “Wondered when you were going to show up,” she said. “I heard a rumor you quit your job.”

  “Rumor’s true!” Scarlett said. “Maude, this is my cousin Katie. Katie, I’ve been friends with Maude since kindergarten.”

  “So you’re the prodigal cousin,” Maude said. “It’s nice to meet you, Katie.” She wiped her free hand on her cutoff overalls before shaking Katie’s hand.

  “Is this your garage?”

  “Me and my brother,” Maude said. “He’s around here somewhere—I sent him down to the market for more buns, but he should be back any minute.”

  “You guys got a good turnout today,” Scarlett observed.

  “Yeah, well, it’s a good cause and all, right? We’re raising money for Rover Ranch,” Maude explained to Katie, pointing to a banner hung over one of the garage bays, which featured a silhouette of a dog leaping for a Frisbee. “They’re a no-kill shelter. The puppies are pretty easy to place, but it’s kind of hard to find people willing to take the older dogs, especially the ones they rescue from breeding operations. A lot of times they’ve lived their whole life in a cage and they’ve got a lot of behavior problems.”

  As if on cue, a chubby bulldog came trotting through the crowd with a package of buns hanging from its mouth. “Sadie!” Maude scolded, making a grab for the dog and managing to snag her collar. She dropped the bag of buns and collapsed at Maude’s feet, rolling over on her back with her tongue hanging out.

  “Sadie had eight litters before she was rescued,” Maude said, bending to scratch her stomach. “Now she’s our official shop dog. She likes to ride in my brother’s sidecar.”

  “Eight litters? That’s—that’s awful,” Katie gasped.

  Scarlett shrugged. “These people just keep breeding them until they get too sick and then they put them down, unless someone turns them in. Come on, let’s get something to eat.”

  Katie followed Scarlett through the crowd. Twenty-five or thirty people of all ages, some dressed for work, others in shorts and T-shirts, ate from paper plates. Manning the grill, half hidden behind a cloud of smoke, was a thirtyish man in a gray T-shirt stretched tight over well-developed muscles. His sun-bleached hair was cut short and he wore mirrored sunglasses and a scowl.

  “Hey, now I can introduce you properly,” Scarlett said. “Hi, Jam.”

  The man looked up just as Katie noticed that, under his cargo shorts, he had a prosthetic leg, a high-tech chrome assemblage that looked at odds with his well-worn, dingy sneakers.

  “Scarlett,” he said, in the same unfriendly tone Katie remembered from the night before.

  “So I think you met my cousin,” Scarlett said. “Katie’s visiting all the way from Boston.”

  “Yeah, so you said.” He glanced at Katie. “Burger or ribs?”

  “What’s your specialty?” Katie asked, determined to thaw his icy demeanor. “They both look delicious.”

  He merely shrugged. “Depends what you like, I guess.”

  “Have the ribs, Katie. Jam, give us a couple plates and pile ’em high. We’re starving.”

  “Are you involved with the Rover Rescue?” Katie tried again.

  “Rover Ranch,” Jam corrected. “Yeah, I guess.”

  “He takes the tough cases,” Scarlett said. “The ones that have so many behavior problems none of the other agencies will accept them.”

  Jam made a grunt that could have been agreement or disgust.

  “That’s admirable,” Katie said, remembering the care with which he placed the food on the porch the night before, the wariness of the dog as it slunk past her.

  “Not really. I’m already training my paying clients anyway,” Jam said. “A few more don’t make any difference.”

  He handed them each a plate piled with a mound of ribs glistening with sauce. The delicious aroma made Katie salivate. “Well, thank you,” she said.

  That earned her another grunt.

  Scarlett led the way to a folding table with two empty seats. “Sadie was one of Jam’s dogs,” she said. “When he first took her in, she peed everywhere and she’d shake whenever anyone came close to her. She was so bad he kept her crate in his bedroom for a few months before he could bring her around any other people.”

  “How did you get to be friends with him?” Katie asked. “He doesn’t seem especially, um, friendly.”

  Scarlett dug into the pile of ribs. “I mean, yeah, I guess if you don’t know him—but he moved next door to Gomma with his mom when he was in high school. I was just a little kid, but he was always nice to me. In a kind of grumpy way. I used to sneak into their yard through the
fence and he’d let me hang around until Gomma came and got me. I think he was my first big crush.”

  “And then after high school he went into the service?”

  “Yeah, he went to college for a couple years but I don’t think he liked it. He joined the marines—his mom had a fit. But he used to come home whenever he was on leave. When he got hurt, everyone thought he’d stay put, but he went to work at this military dog training school out in North Carolina instead. He only came home for good when his mom got married and moved to Oklahoma. He took over the mortgage.” She shrugged. “He really is nice, when you get to know him. You should eat—they’re best when they’re hot.”

  Katie did as her cousin suggested and dug in. At first she tried to keep the sauce from getting all over her hands, but after a few bites of the delicious, smoky meat, she gave up and ate like everyone else at the table, with her elbows on the flowered tablecloth and big gulps of lemonade to wash it down.

  It was only when she looked up and saw Jam staring thoughtfully at her, iron tongs idle in his hand, that she worried that she had sauce all over her face.

  Chapter Eighteen

  September 1963

  Margaret stood very still while Lucille fastened the buttons of her cuffs: four each, tiny ebony balls pushed through black crape loops. Downstairs, Caroline was watching Georgina, who didn’t understand a lick of what was going on, and had asked once too often why they couldn’t go for ice cream.

  When Margaret slapped her daughter’s hand at breakfast after she nearly knocked over the syrup pitcher, Caroline had ordered her back to the apartment. Lucille had followed moments later.

  “Miss Margaret, you know I’m a widow too,” Lucille said, as she finished the cuffs and got to work on Margaret’s hair. Margaret hadn’t so much agreed to allow Lucille to arrange it as run out of energy to keep saying no. Her hands were hard and rough but she barely pulled, teasing out the tangles carefully with the metal comb.

  “That can’t be,” Margaret said dully. “You’re hardly old enough to be married.”

  “I’m twenty-four.”

  Through the haze of her grief, Margaret was surprised—Lucille looked no older than seventeen or eighteen. She’d come to the family nearly two years earlier, when Alelia had a stroke.

  “My Will, he was down to the sorghum plant helping a man load a truck,” Lucille went on. “The axle broke and the truck ran him up against the wall. That was two years now. So I know what you’re feeling, I do, and I can’t say it’ll ever get any better. But it do get easier.”

  Margaret peered at Lucille in the mirror with renewed interest. Dr. Galbo had given her some pills that he said would help her sleep; instead they had made her feel thick and sort of spongy, as though she was sitting next to herself and trying to speak around a mouthful of cotton.

  “Easier?”

  Lucille paused, meeting her eyes in the mirror, and appeared to genuinely consider the question. “Well, maybe not for you, since you have a child. Will and me, we never had time to. But the feeling like you wish you’d gone and died with ’em—that’s the part that maybe doesn’t last forever.”

  There was a knock at the doorframe. Caroline had come up the stairs without announcing herself, already dressed in her black suit. “If we might have a minute, Lucille.”

  “Sure, ma’am, I’ve just now finished up.” Lucille left in a hurry, with a last glance at Margaret.

  Caroline waited until she was gone and then lowered herself gingerly on the edge of the bed, the only other place to sit besides the single hardback chair. She looked around the room, sighing. “Now will you listen to reason and move back into the house? Georgina can have her own room, and so can you.”

  “Mother,” Margaret said tensely. “My husband has been dead for five days. Do you think you could wait a little longer before you wash your hands of him?”

  “I beg your pardon!” Caroline shot back. “I simply made a suggestion that would make you and your daughter—my granddaughter—much more comfortable. Especially because of what’s happened. You’d be able to receive callers with a little bit of—of—dignity.”

  “Is that what this is about? I shouldn’t be surprised. That’s all you’ve ever cared about—the way people see you. See us.”

  “Margaret—”

  “I’m sorry this happened, Mother, okay? I’m sorry I didn’t marry someone who was worthy of you and Daddy. And I’m sorry that he’s dead and left me with nothing and I’m a burden to you all over again.”

  “Sorry, sorry, sorry!” Caroline snapped. “Don’t be so melodramatic.”

  She jumped up and began pacing the small room, her shoes tapping out a tense rhythm on the floor. Her mourning suit was trimmed with satin welting, the jacket fitting perfectly over an elegant, narrow skirt. Lucille had confided in Margaret that the suit had been purchased a year ago for the funeral of one of Hugh’s business associates. So: her mother hadn’t even bothered to buy something new for her son-in-law’s funeral.

  As she paced, Caroline seemed to grow angrier, and Margaret was thrown off course. She’d always managed her mother with her own displays of emotion: tantrums when she was a child, and as she grew, threats and demands and pleading. “She’s a dramatic child,” her mother would say in Daisy Club gatherings when the children were eight or ten or twelve and Margaret’s outbursts took center stage. Some of the other Daisies had given almost as well as they’d gotten, and the other mothers would nod in chagrin: they too had treated their replacement babies with kid gloves, sparing not only the rod but any discipline at all.

  The Daisies were undeniably spoiled, one more thing that bound them all together: Daisy mothers understood, and let their children’s behavior pass without judgment.

  Now, though, it was Caroline who appeared ready to fly into a rage. Which was all the more confusing, because she certainly hadn’t lost anything she cared about. In the four years of Margaret’s marriage, Caroline—who after Georgina’s birth had made an awkward truce, sending gifts and letters to Margaret, and many more for Georgina—had never, not once, acknowledged Hank. No birthday card, no Christmas gift, and certainly not a peep on their anniversary.

  The memory hit Margaret in the gut. “It would have been our fifth anniversary next month,” she snapped, seizing one of the folded, pressed handkerchiefs that Lucille had left on the table and dabbing her eyes. “And I’ll never have another with him.”

  “So?” Caroline whirled around. “He was only a husband, Margaret. Even with the stunts you’ve pulled, you can probably find another one. Mark my words, you’ll look back on this years from now and it will probably seem as though fate did you a favor.”

  Margaret leapt to her feet. “What did you say?”

  But Caroline stared her down. “You heard me. Hank was a drunk. He was too busy burning through whatever money he made to take care of you and Georgina. People talked about it all the way back here in New London, Margaret. His parents would have died of shame.”

  All of the things that Hank had confided during his darkest moments—the dreams of Ralphie, memories of the fire raging in the rubble, his hands burning while he tried to free his brother—how was it that Caroline could never understand? “I loved him!” Margaret cried, not caring that the windows were open, that all of the neighborhood could hear.

  “You loved him!” Caroline echoed, her voice gone high and mocking. “You think so, truly? You think that love would have carried you through another year, a decade, the rest of your life? Do you really believe a man like that would have stayed with you? He already left one woman, Margaret. He’d have left you too. At least he had the courtesy to do it this way.”

  Margaret picked up the pitcher from the table and threw it across the room. It shattered against the wall, shards of pottery crashing to the floor.

  Caroline merely shook her head in disgust. “You stupid girl. I blame myself. We expected much too little of you, we were always so concerned about protecting you. And look what you’ve become
.”

  “What have I become, Mother?” Margaret asked, aiming for defiance, the waver in her voice giving her away.

  “You want to know about real loss?” Caroline said, walking to the window and looking out on the garden. Last week, the gardener had stocked the pond with golden tench, and their scales glistened in the sun as they flicked through the water. The magnolia tree had just come into bloom, heavy blossoms weighing down the branches and carpeting the lawn, but Caroline didn’t appear to notice any of it, staring out at the treetops. “Real loss is feeling the floors shake before you even hear the boom, seeing the bricks fall from the walls. Hearing the windows shatter and seeing the smoke rise up, and all the mothers running like we’ve never run before, and getting outside only to see that it was—it was just gone, fire burning up what was left, and the screaming, and knowing—I knew, the minute I saw it I knew she was gone. But it doesn’t stop there. I called her name for hours, until my throat was raw, I wanted to run into the broken buildings, they had to hold me back, some man I didn’t recognize, I still don’t know who he was, because the first of the volunteers didn’t show up for half an hour, driving in from—well, you know that part of the story.”

  Say her name, Margaret willed her. She had grown up hearing versions of this story, over and over and over, from people who’d been there and those who’d learned it secondhand; from those who’d helped sift the rubble for the bodies and those who’d made sandwiches and coffee, those who’d laid out the little broken bodies—and parts—under donated blankets.

  But never from her parents. And the other Daisies confirmed that it was so at their houses too: there might be photographs of the lost, carefully preserved reminders, favorite dolls and toys and art projects. Some parents kept shrines to their lost children; others preserved entire rooms just as they were the day when the children left for school.

  But few of them could talk about the day. And her parents never had. Not until now.

  “Saint Ruby,” Margaret cried. “Why’d you even have me, when I could never measure up to her memory?”