The Daisy Children

by Sofia Grant

  “But then what happens to the dog?”

  “Every once in a while you get a hunter that returns the dog. Most breeders will take them back. But most of them, well, you can guess how it goes, people get attached. It becomes the house dog and never has to work a day in its life.”

  Katie thought of the dog in her backyard, slinking along the edges of the yard, baring its teeth at the slightest provocation. That was not a dog that had wormed its way into anyone’s heart.

  But it was also not Royal’s fault.

  She grabbed her drink. “Can I do it? Feed him?”

  “Be my guest,” Scarlett said. “That actually sounds kind of entertaining. And I can drive you to the emergency room after he bites your hand off.”

  Scarlett had kicked off her shoes, and Katie did the same before following her out onto the back porch. She turned out the light so that the only light came from the moon, and the glow from the windows of the neighboring houses. One of which belonged to Jam, so it was a good thing she wasn’t the least bit attracted to him or anything.

  Scarlett grabbed a threadbare lawn chair from under a tree and dragged it over, plopping down in it a safe distance from the porch to watch. Katie took a sip of her drink and sat on the porch with her back against the house and the bowl of kibble between her feet. She picked up a nugget and chucked it in Royal’s direction. He seemed to debate with himself for a moment before slinking forward and retrieving the bit of food.

  “So,” Katie said casually, tossing a second chunk to the dog, “what happened? And remember, I’m drunk, so you can tell me the truth. I mean, I’ve already figured out that Merritt isn’t exactly boyfriend of the year.”

  Scarlett didn’t say anything for a long moment. Then she let out an aggrieved sigh.

  “Okay, look. I don’t need a lecture. Merritt’s got his issues, but he’s not, like, abusive. I do know the difference, okay? My bio-dad put my mom in the hospital after he knocked her up, when she was only sixteen.”

  “That seems like kind of a low bar,” Katie said after a moment had passed.

  “But it’s fucking hard, you know? We haven’t been getting along all that well, but I don’t exactly have all kinds of alternatives lined up. Before Mom died, I thought— I always knew I could go back and live with her. But . . . see, I went straight from our trailer to Merritt’s place. I’ve never lived on my own, or even with a roommate. I guess— I just feel like I haven’t had any practice. And Merritt doesn’t like any of my friends, so they don’t really come around like they used to, and I’d feel stupid calling them. And besides, sometimes he can be so sweet. I mean, really sweet, not like he’s faking it.” She tapped her forehead. “He’s got a few issues, right? But I feel like, all of us do, at some level. And I know that doesn’t mean he gets to treat me bad or whatever. But most of the time he’s fine.”

  Katie was biting her lip to keep herself from saying anything. This was real; this was important—and she was half in the bag and slurring her words.

  How many times had she tried to talk to her mother about the ridiculous choices she made in men? Her last husband—Gil, the doctor—had been at turns desperately dull and officious, and about as attractive as a fresh cow pie. But when Katie pointed out that Georgina didn’t love him, her mother quit speaking to her for over a month.

  She tossed some kibble to the dog, but her aim was off and the nuggets fell short, fanning out on the porch. Royal stared balefully at her over the gulf of the old, weathered boards.

  “Suit yourself,” she said. “I thought you were hungry.”

  The dog’s eyelid twitched and he gave her a long, assessing look. Then he loped up the stairs and hoovered up the food before retreating again.

  “Aha,” Katie said. “I think he’s starting to trust me.”

  “Yeah, right up until he sinks his teeth in your neck,” Scarlett scoffed. “So tell me, were you and Jam up there doing the nasty when I got here? ’Cause you both looked like you got caught with your hands in the cookie jar.”

  “No! We were doing exactly what I said we were doing—going up there to look around.”

  “It’s okay with me,” Scarlett said. “I’m fine with it.”

  “Scarlett, you do understand that I’m married, right?”

  “I mean, yeah . . . that’s what you said. Only, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out you and him are having trouble.”

  Great. “It’s not like that,” Katie said. Then she hiccupped.

  “See?”

  “See what?” Another hiccup—this one louder. She covered her mouth with her hand. “Excuse me! I don’t usually drink like this.”

  “Well, okay. But you wouldn’t be hiccupping like that unless you were lying to yourself.”

  “What? That’s ridiculous.”

  “No, it’s not,” Scarlett said earnestly. “My mom always said if you start hiccupping and you can’t stop, you’re trying to talk yourself into something. Or out of something. Or you’re just generally in denial.”

  “Scarlett . . .” Katie took a small, dainty sip of her drink. Really, it would be a good idea to slow down. “All couples go through difficult times.” But wait—she was supposed to be guiding her cousin away from her terrible boyfriend. “I mean, sometimes it’s because they shouldn’t be together at all, or the guy is . . . is . . . um.” She took another sip, a bigger one, to give herself time to focus.

  “The guy is?” Scarlett prompted helpfully.

  “The guy is selfish,” Katie said, enunciating carefully, wiping her mouth on her forearm. “He says he wants to start a family, right? And you think you’re both on the same page? But all he does is work and . . . and . . .”

  Her eyes were blurry, and she dabbed at them experimentally. Huh. She seemed to be crying.

  “Hang on,” Scarlett said, setting down her drink. She disappeared into the kitchen and came back with a paper towel, ignoring Royal’s warning growls, plopped down next to Katie and dabbed gently at her face. “You had a little, um. Eyeliner, or something. Do you love him?”

  “Liam? Well, of course I do.”

  “You sure about that? Look, I saw how you were with Jam. There were practically flames coming out of the two of you. Does Liam do that to you?”

  Katie snorted just as she hiccupped again, which made her giggle. “Oops.”

  “You know what this makes me think of? When I was thirteen, a boy at school said I had a big ass. I still had some baby fat on me, I guess, and anyway it just about killed me because I liked this boy. So I decided to go on this diet one of my friends told me about where you pick one thing and just eat that, only that. And my thing was popcorn because I loved popcorn. I made a big batch in the morning and I ate it all day long. The first day was great, and after three days I was kind of tired of popcorn but I thought my ass looked a little smaller so I just kept going. But after about a week I was so sick of popcorn that even the thought of it disgusted me.”

  “I think I see what you’re doing here,” Katie mumbled.

  “I’m not saying Liam’s popcorn.”

  “But you’re not . . . not saying . . . not popcorn. That he is popcorn.”

  “Yeah, sweetie, something like that.” Scarlett smiled wistfully. “Although what do I know? I’m not exactly good at relationships.”

  “I just thought . . . I mean, we never used to fight. Everything was the way it was supposed to be, you know? But maybe we were both just trying to fit in these . . . these templates our families and friends had of us. Like Liam was a successful advertising executive, right, and I had a job at this branding firm that everyone wants to work at. Seriously, all my friends were so jealous, but by the second month I was there I was so stressed out my hair started to fall out.

  “And then all of our friends started having babies. And I mean it was like a baby blizzard—I was going to one baby shower after another. And it just kind of seemed like it was time. Plus I always thought I’d be good at it. Being a mom. I mean . . . I couldn’t do any wor
se than Georgina.” Katie realized that she’d been tossing the kibble shorter and shorter distances, until the pieces were falling only inches from her feet. Royal didn’t look happy about it—his ears were flattened against his skull and his eyes rolled up when he lapped at the food—but he had inched forward on his belly until he was almost close enough to touch.

  Not that she was about to try. She valued her hands too much.

  “I think you’d be a good mom,” Scarlett said quietly. She put her arm around Katie and held her, which was both awkward and comforting, and after a while Katie blew her nose in the paper towel and sat up straighter.

  “God, I’m sorry,” she said. “We were supposed to be talking about your problems. I swear I’m not always this selfish. Or—or maybe I am, but—”

  “Look,” Scarlett exclaimed softly, pointing.

  Royal was watching her with what looked like canine concern. Scarlett toed the bowl of kibble toward him over the splintery boards, and after hesitating a moment, he ate the rest in a few bites. After a final furtive glance, he retreated at a trot, disappearing through the same break in the fence that Jam had used.

  “I told you he liked me,” Katie said.

  “Nah, you’re just a free meal,” Scarlett said. “You could be Jack the Ripper, but if you smeared some raw hamburger on your skin he’d probably follow you anywhere. Now, with Jam, on the other hand, you might want to play a little harder to get.”

  “Stop!” Katie shrieked, scrambling to her feet. “Watching Royal eat makes me realize I never had any dinner. There’s fish sticks and a package of mixed vegetables in the freezer—how about we pretend they didn’t expire months ago?”

  “Mmmm,” Scarlett said. “My favorite—how’d you know?”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  March 1977

  Margaret set the basket of folded laundry on the papasan chair, practically the only surface in the old coachman’s apartment that wasn’t already burdened with clutter. Georgina liked to sit in the chair and talk on her princess phone for hours at a time—all night long for all Margaret knew, since Georgina had moved into the apartment when she was fifteen, nearly three years ago.

  Both the chair and the telephone had been gifts from Caroline, whose generosity had ratcheted up sharply since her diagnosis last year. At the time, her doctor had predicted that she wouldn’t last six months, but until last week she’d still been feeling well enough to climb the stairs to her room. Now there was a hospital bed in the living room, delivered two days ago, and Margaret couldn’t get a moment’s rest unless she escaped to do an errand or sneak up to the apartment.

  At fifteen, Georgina had hung a hand-lettered sign on the door that read “Keep OUT that means YOU Mom!!!” Now the sign was gone, but Georgina was just as fierce in her insistence on privacy. Nevertheless, she made an exception for the delivery of laundry—otherwise, she would have had to do it herself.

  Margaret leaned against the doorjamb, exhausted. She’d been up no fewer than four times last night when she heard Caroline’s moans traveling up the stairs and through the open door of her room. It was as if her hearing had grown preternaturally strong, stronger even than it had been when Hank used to stay out late at night and she lay awake waiting for the turning of the key in the door.

  She let her gaze travel the room, looking, as always, for evidence of what went on in her daughter’s head and heart. Georgina was aloof and often hostile to Margaret; she was grudgingly polite to Caroline, effusive with her girlfriends, and positively seductive with boys, a precocious siren. Since the arrival of the hospital bed, however, Georgina had gone silent and unreadable, gliding around the house in stocking feet, barely eating. Just yesterday Margaret had caught her sitting on the old sofa in the last light of day, watching her grandmother sleep.

  One might think that the impending death of the child’s grandmother might sweeten her up a little. But instead it seemed to have rendered her numb. It was as though she wasn’t entirely there—as though a piece of her was flying high above, where Margaret could not follow; as though she’d taken refuge in the searing blue skies of the travel poster depicting a Grecian seaside village that was pinned to the wall over Georgina’s bed.

  The bed. It had been a plain, worn iron bed when Margaret had lived there so long ago, with baby Georgina nestled next to her on the sagging mattress. Now the iron frame had been painted a brilliant lime green (and not very tidily; there were spots of paint on the old plank floor that Georgina hadn’t bothered to clean up) and a pile of secondhand quilts was mounded on the mattress Caroline had insisted on buying when Georgina moved into the apartment. A large pillow that Georgina had bought from a street market (actually, Margaret was nearly certain that she had stolen it, which would be unsurprising behavior from the band of hippies and punks she was hanging around with) was silk-screened with a lush pink large-petaled flower that looked so like a woman’s private parts that Margaret couldn’t bear to look at it.

  The entire bedroom was a riot of color and clutter. It hurt Margaret’s eyes—or rather, the place behind her eyes where her headaches were born. These days, a bad one could keep her in bed for the entire afternoon, and Margaret had to resist the urge to flee. She was here looking for clues, and she meant to find them while Georgina was safely gone for the weekend at some outdoor concert in, of all things, a fallow field off Highway 243. (If that’s where she had really gone: Georgina had refused Margaret’s offer of a perfectly good suitcase and stuffed a dress and a peasant blouse into an old canvas bag she found hanging on a nail in the garage, something that Hugh had probably used for rags. She’d added a paper bag full of foul-smelling tea bags and two lipsticks and a blush compact, a hand mirror and her hairbrush. Margaret, for her part, couldn’t imagine how one would get through two whole days in the outdoors with such meager provisions, and suspected that Georgina was actually planning to spend the weekend in some boy’s house while his parents were away.)

  Somewhere in this apocalypse of a room there was a diary—the one habit Georgina seemed to have inherited from her. She often spotted it tucked furtively under her daughter’s arm or wedged between the papasan chair’s frame and cushion. It was a pink vinyl-covered thing, bursting with dog-eared pages and all kinds of ephemera that served as bookmarks—strips of photographs from the carnival photo booth and torn dollar bills and cocktail napkins and bus tickets. In it, Margaret suspected, were, if not the secrets to her daughter’s soul, at least answers to some of the questions that plagued her: Namely, what did Georgina think about when she was sitting sullenly at the dinner table waiting to be excused? What on earth did she see in that horrible boy with the grotesque sideburns?

  And—the most pressing question of all—why did Georgina despise her so?

  Hands on hips, Margaret tried to decide where to search first. She would have to be careful—as random as the clutter appeared to Margaret, she knew that there was a kind of strange order known only to her daughter, and that if she was careless when searching the stack of her drawings or the pile of library books or even the overflowing wastebasket in the corner, she’d be found out for sure.

  She decided to start in the part of the room that had once served as a kitchenette. Georgina used the old pine cupboards to store all kinds of things, mostly memorabilia from her childhood—the red plastic monkeys were strung like Christmas lights from the knobs, and the shelves were full of board games and cigar boxes full of Barbie clothes and Lite-Brite pegs and troll dolls.

  She threaded her way gingerly through the mess on the floor, unable to stop herself from picking up several dishes and bowls as well as two empty Big Red bottles. Then she noticed something sitting on the narrow strip of counter. Between a shoe box filled with makeup (some unopened, no doubt more evidence of her daughter’s shoplifting with her hoodlum girlfriends) and two of Caroline’s old handbags and a bottle of eau de toilette that had gone missing from Margaret’s dressing table was a letter. Its crisp white ordinariness stood out in the cacophonous t
ableau, and when Margaret saw the return address, she caught her breath.

  Setting down the dishes and bottles, she seized the letter and made a break for it, holding it against her skirt until she was in the house and up the stairs with her bedroom door closed and locked. Her daughter might be forty miles away in a field getting bitten by chiggers and serenaded by hippies, or she might be five blocks away getting stoned in Duke Sauer’s parents’ lanai, but either way, she would have a fit if she knew what her mother had stumbled on.

  GEORGINA HAD BEEN telling the truth after all, judging by the dirt on her skirt and the sunburn that was already peeling on her shoulders. She came through the door as twilight was dappling the kitchen with gold and Margaret was peering over her reading glasses at the Joy of Cooking propped up against the toaster, attempting a Mornay sauce for chicken divan.

  “What’s for dinner?” Georgina asked by way of greeting, dumping the canvas bag—even more misshapen now, with bits of grass and twigs stuck to it—in the hallway. Something clanked inside, some new “treasure” that Georgina had picked up somewhere. She looked lovely despite her slightly stale odor and the knotted tangles of her hair.

  Margaret had been preparing for this moment all day. She was glad her mother was asleep in the other room; she didn’t need Caroline to hear. She removed her glasses and set them on the counter with trembling fingers, and untied her apron and folded it over a chair before plucking the envelope from behind the coffee canister, where she’d concealed it earlier. She slapped the envelope onto the kitchen table and, in a high-pitched voice that didn’t sound like her own at all, demanded “Do you want to explain this to me?”

  Georgina glanced at it, then scowled. “I assume you read it, so what’s there to explain?”

  “How about starting with why you’ve been telling me you hadn’t heard back from UT yet? That you were pretty sure you hadn’t gotten in, since other people had already gotten their acceptance letters?”

  Georgina slumped in a chair and rested her arms on the table. No elbows on the table, Margaret thought automatically.