The Daisy Children

by Sofia Grant

  As Margaret lay back gingerly against the pillows, Caroline put her thin arm around her daughter’s shoulders and let out a sigh.

  For a moment Margaret didn’t dare even breathe. She closed her eyes and allowed herself to slowly absorb the novelty of the moment. Her mother had her arm around her. Not only that, but she was murmuring the sorts of things that . . . that mothers are meant to murmur.

  “Sweetheart,” Caroline whispered. “My poor, poor baby girl. You’re going to be fine, you know.”

  Margaret allowed herself to breathe again. She smelled her mother’s rosewater scent over the earthy, sour notes of illness; there was the sharpness of the bleach from the laundry, and the sun on the marigolds from the garden. Moments went by, her mother gently stroking her hair. Margaret’s tears slowed, but she didn’t dare break the spell by pulling away to wipe her face.

  “Mother,” she finally whispered. “Why couldn’t you ever love me like you loved her?”

  The stroking stopped for a moment. She could sense her mother considering. There was no doubt in Margaret’s mind that Caroline knew exactly what she was asking.

  Margaret was not at all sure she was ready to hear the answer. But if not now—when? In a day, a week, her mother would be dead. Margaret had never gotten to ask her father the same question. It was now or never.

  “You weren’t like that with Georgina,” Margaret pressed. “You always told her . . . told her that she was pretty, and smart, and funny. You held her when she was little, I had to pry her out of your arms. It was you she ran to when she came home from school. It was you she wanted to go with her when she got her tonsils out. But you never . . . never . . .” The words trailed away. “Was it because I was a replacement baby?”

  There—she’d named it, her greatest fear. She’d first heard the term used casually at one of the early Remembrance Days. She couldn’t have been more than five or six, and she didn’t know what the word replacement meant, but she was quite sure that the two ladies at the punch table were talking about her and the other children. “We are not,” she said stoutly. “We’re Daisies.”

  But it wasn’t very many more years before she understood the term and all the implications it carried with it. She and Helene and Clara and Eileen and Rosalee and Nell, Tim and Gordon and Johnny and Lorenzo—none of them had been wanted, not really. Not for themselves, for who they really were. Their families had been complete, until the terrible tragedy that ripped the best-beloved children from their parents, leaving a gaping hole that they were desperate to fill. And then the term became a curse, one so unbearable that no Daisy ever uttered it to another.

  Two of the families had seemed to recover: the Cains, who lost a daughter, carried on with their second “only” child with a cheery, brisk can-do attitude. Margaret couldn’t imagine Mr. Cain hunched over his workbench, the way she’d found her father that day, but maybe it was because he now had a boy to throw a baseball with and take fishing. Maybe it had even seemed like a fair trade.

  And then there were the Bakers, Margaret’s least favorite Daisy family. They had had six children and had lost four, then had Lorenzo and then they did what no other Daisy family had done and had two more children. So Lorenzo was folded into the pious melee of a pastor’s family too busy not just with their own affairs but with those of their entire congregation to continue endlessly mourning their loss.

  Two relatively unscathed families out of eleven. The rest, if you looked at all closely, never really recovered. And more meetings of the Daisies than not ended in a sort of solemn gloom that even the most elaborate luncheons and ambitious Remembrance Day plans could never extinguish.

  “I guess I can sort of understand,” Margaret said softly. “She was perfect.”

  Caroline pushed herself up with great effort so that she could stare down into Margaret’s face. Margaret tried to burrow into the covers, feeling ridiculous—she was a grown woman, for heaven’s sake, not a toddler at naptime—but Caroline took her chin in her hand and forced her to look at her.

  “She was not perfect,” she said. “Ruby was clingy and fearful and lazy. Your father thought she’d never catch up to the other children in her class and was threatening to send her to private school. She fed her dinners to the dog—”

  There had been a dog?

  “—under the table and thought I didn’t know and if I caught her she would just excuse herself and put it in the toilet. She copied from the other children and got terrible marks.”

  Margaret was aghast. She couldn’t have been more shocked if Caroline had said that Ruby had actually been a goblin. “But—but the poster,” she said. “The pictures—you couldn’t even bear to look at them.”

  “Your sister wasn’t perfect. Good heavens. But that doesn’t mean that we didn’t love her. We did, with all our hearts. I loved her much more than I ever loved your father and the same was true for him, even if we never spoke of it.”

  “But why . . . why couldn’t you love me like that too?”

  Margaret had imagined this moment for her entire life: why, she imagined asking, and she fully expected the answer to be that the love of her parents had been all used up, smashed, destroyed, before she came along. But she also could never escape the knowledge that she had not been a very lovable child.

  “I know I was spoiled,” she said in a rush, scrabbling to sit up. Suddenly it seemed very urgent to get the words out. “I sassed back and I was unkind and selfish and never appreciated everything you gave me. No matter how bad Ruby was, I know I was worse. But it was just that—I always felt like you were . . . I don’t know. Looking past me. Looking through me. Like I wasn’t there—like it was her you were always wishing for.”

  When Margaret had imagined saying this dangerous truth, she’d assumed that her mother would protest that it wasn’t true, that she’d try to spare Margaret’s feelings with hasty assurances that it was all in her head, that she’d been loved just as much as Ruby was.

  Instead, Caroline looked at her thoughtfully for a long time. Her face, ravaged by her illness, was still except for the bright intensity of her gray eyes. Finally she cupped her hand around Margaret’s cheek and took a breath.

  “I’m so sorry, my darling. I wish it had been different.”

  So it was all true. Ruby was the best-loved, and Margaret had never been enough. She felt her heart give way, felt it flatten in defeat. The years that had taken her beauty, her sass, her once-famous wit, had turned her into this morose, lumpen thing, looking for crumbs at her mother’s knee.

  “But you don’t know the whole story,” Caroline said. “And if I may, I’d like to tell you the rest.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Georgina couldn’t stay. She had a date (an appointment, she called it, but eventually admitted she was meeting a gentleman with whom she’d been conducting a monthlong OkCupid campaign) in Tyler, one that, she coyly announced, might well extend into Sunday.

  “I only came to make sure you hadn’t fallen into the well or gotten trapped in the basement,” she explained. “When I didn’t hear from you, I thought something dreadful had happened. Well, not that dreadful, obviously, or I would have made a beeline!”

  “So instead you made more of a fire ant line,” Jam suggested. He was standing at the counter mixing drinks, at Georgina’s request, and using the provisions she’d brought in the tiny trunk of her little red Miata convertible.

  “Ha! You’re so funny, darling! Now fill it up the rest of the way with Sprite and grenadine—more Sprite than grenadine.”

  Jam did as he was told and then presented Georgina with the drink, something she called a Bend Over Shirley, which included at least two fingers of raspberry vodka.

  “Georgina, are you going to be able to drive?” Katie asked. She had stayed in her seat while her mother flirted shamelessly with Jam and ordered him around the kitchen she had grown up in—and hadn’t said one word about the fact that she’d discovered them kissing.

  Georgina clucked and s
hook her head. “Katie, Katie, always my little worrywart! I’m just pregaming a little.”

  “Don’t!” Katie moaned. Georgina had a mortifying habit of picking up slang from the girls at her health club.

  “Do you want something to eat with that?” Jam suggested. “I could go back to my house—”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Georgina, is there anything here that you want me to save for you?” Katie asked, to change the subject. She’d given her mother a brief summary of the events since she’d arrived. Georgina took it all in stride, including the disappointingly small inheritance. “Do you want to go up to the apartment and look through your old things?”

  Georgina shuddered. “Hell no. Everything here is just the way I remembered it, which is to say, depressing. And please don’t start telling me I need therapy again. I’m working with the HOA board to plant a memorial tree for Margaret by the pond near the golf course, and we’ll have a nice little ceremony in the spring when it’s in bloom. Jam, would you like to come for that?”

  “Mother!” Katie rebuked her. “Please.”

  “Actually, Mrs. Dial, I need to head back to my place. I’ve got a few things to do before we head over to Archer.”

  “Well, it was very nice to meet you, Jam. And please give my regards to Scarlett. Next time, I’m going to pry it out of you!” Georgina wagged her finger playfully at him, as though her efforts to get him to tell her about losing his leg were a merry little game they both enjoyed.

  “I’ll, uh, look forward to that,” Jam said. “See you in a couple hours, Katie.”

  Neither woman spoke until the front door closed behind him. Then Georgina practically threw herself across the table. “What on earth is going on, Katie-Bear? Is this because of the baby thing? Is it hormones?”

  “It’s—it’s nothing. I mean, it just happened—I don’t know, it’s been a really weird few days.”

  “Well, in case you want my opinion, I’m not very impressed with how Liam’s handling all of this,” Georgina sniffed. “I must have called him half a dozen times. And in return I get what—a single text? Here, look!”

  She dug her phone out of her handbag and showed Katie. “See, it starts with the day you left.”

  Katie isn’t answering my calls. Everything OK?

  “Then he answered that night, after he got a new phone.”

  We were mugged. We are both fine. Mugger got our phones and wallets. He let her keep license so OK to fly. Will send her money and cards tomorrow.

  Oh no! Poor you and poor Katie!

  “Next day.”

  Has she called you? Does she have a new phone yet?

  Do you have a number for her cousin?

  Liam, please check in and let me know everything is okay. Tell Katie to call me please!!!!!!

  LIAM GODDAMNIT

  “—and that’s when I just got in the car and came here. When did you last talk to him?”

  “Um, yesterday, I guess. I asked him to overnight me some cash, but he had Lolly do it, and he was supposed to go to the bank this morning and change the account so I can get a new card.”

  “He didn’t do it?” Georgina demanded angrily. “Doesn’t he realize that you need money? I mean, look at you!”

  Katie rolled her eyes. “Thanks, Mom. I have money; Lolly sent me like five hundred bucks. And I have higher priorities than going shopping for new clothes, believe it or not.”

  “Like concealer,” Georgina suggested. “And I’m not sure what’s going on with those shoes.”

  “They’re Scarlett’s,” Katie said tiredly. “Look, I’m sure Liam did go to the bank, and he’s probably been trying to call me on Scarlett’s phone too, but I don’t have a way to get in touch with her.” It was a transparent fib, but it didn’t seem to occur to Georgina to ask why Katie couldn’t just call Scarlett from Jam’s phone.

  “Honey . . .” Georgina said, and then she held up a finger and took a long, deep draw on her drink, emptying half of it. “Ahh. That boy can mix a drink. Anyway, I know I’m probably the last person in the world who should be giving romantic advice. But if what you’re doing here”—she pointed vaguely in the direction of Jam’s house—“is about getting back at Liam—for not wanting to have a baby as bad as you do, for spending so much time at work, for any reason at all—then you’re going to have to deal with it sooner or later. Putting on a Band-Aid, even a Band-Aid as attractive as Jam, is just going to make you feel worse eventually. I can’t even count how many times I went from one man to the next because I didn’t want to work on what I had. Just imagine what I’ve missed out on.”

  Katie closed her eyes and focused on her breathing. In . . . out. In . . . out. “Georgina. I’m calling bullshit. Name one man you wish you’d gone back to.”

  She opened her eyes to find her mother staring at her, openmouthed with surprise. “Well, but that’s me,” she said. “I mean . . . yeah, I wouldn’t—but I’m just an awful person when it comes to men. Remember?”

  “Wait one damn minute,” Katie said. She certainly did remember—those were the very same words she flung at her mother her freshman year when, after telling all the girls in her new sorority that her mother was bringing her boyfriend the investment banker to parents’ weekend, Georgina had showed up with Katie’s high school boyfriend’s father, with whom she had kindled an affair after rear-ending him in a Burger King drive-through—and begged Katie not to say anything until the poor man had left his wife. Which he proceeded to do—only to have Georgina go back to the banker.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Georgina said. “I’m not trying to dredge up anything, really, sweetie. I’m trying to tell you that I was wrong. Am wrong. I’m awful. And you’re not. You’re a hundred times better than me. A thousand! Oh, oh—”

  She started flapping her hands and Katie leapt up and grabbed a paper napkin off the counter. Crying, in their household, had always been treated as an emergency, since it led to ruined mascara and red eyes and puffy skin and nose blowing, all unacceptable before a date.

  “It’s okay, Mom,” Katie said. “Here, let me do it.”

  “Watch the eyeliner! If you knew how long it took me—”

  And so Katie dabbed around the artful ebony wings at the outer edges of her mother’s eyelid.

  “But what if I’m really not so different from you?” she asked quietly. “I mean, would that be so terrible?”

  Her mother snuffled a couple more times, then swatted Katie’s hands away. “I know what I don’t want,” she said fiercely. “I don’t ever want to lose you. I don’t want to end up like my own mother, alone at the end of her life, bitter and sad and having driven away everyone she loved.”

  “Oh, Mom.” Katie sank into a chair next to her mother. “In the first place, you’ll never drive me away. I love you, okay? And in the second place, I think you might have been a little bit wrong about Gomma. I mean Margaret,” she added hastily. “I’m not saying this to make you feel bad, and I know you had your own reasons, and I’m sure they were good ones, for staying away. But she wasn’t alone. If that helps. She had Scarlett and Jam and—and a dog and a lawyer who was pretty cool and probably other people too. So you don’t need to feel guilty.”

  “Hmm,” Georgina said. “I’ll need to think about that one.”

  “Well, think about it on your drive, okay? And after you get home from your dirty weekend, let’s talk about my visit. I have a feeling I’m not going back to Boston for a while.”

  WHEN JAM CAME back, he was wearing a pair of khakis that was barely frayed at all, and a button-down shirt in a nice blue and white stripe. His hair was still damp and he’d shaved—he’d cut himself and there was a tiny spot of blood—and he looked altogether delicious.

  “You’re distracting me,” Katie said.

  “Well, let’s get this fool errand over with, then.”

  He drove a very tidy white truck with a big toolbox bolted to the bed. He held her hand while he drove.

  “Can I ask you a
question?” she asked after a while.

  “I can drive just fine. It comes in handy that it was the left leg.”

  “Oh. That’s not what I was going to ask,” Katie lied. “I just wondered if you could stop at the Walmart so I could buy a phone.”

  Jam told her he’d meet her out front, and when she emerged a while later, after buying a phone and a six-pack of underwear and shampoo and conditioner and the same Maybelline mascara she’d worn as a teenager, he was waiting with a shopping bag of his own.

  “Whoppers,” he explained, holding up the bag, “and pink Peeps. Scarlett’s favorites.”

  “Aww.”

  “Don’t.”

  It took most of the rest of the drive for Katie to get the phone set up and charged. They had passed the Archer town limit before it had enough power for her to make a call.

  “Pull over,” she said. “I just—I need to make one call before we, you know.”

  Jam did as she asked, pulling into a Dairy Queen parking lot. He stared straight ahead as Katie jumped out of the car, his jaw twitching fiercely.

  Oh dear, this was complicated. She dialed Liam’s number, then waited patiently until it went into voice mail. “Liam,” she said. “I still don’t have my phone, so I don’t know if you’ve been trying to call me, and I’m hoping, I guess you probably went to the bank today, but to be honest I haven’t had a chance to go check and—well, this is my number now, at least until I get a real phone, so—call me?”

  She hesitated for a moment, then ended the call.

  Then she called Lolly.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, Lolls, it’s me, Katie.”

  “Katie! Oh my God! Uh—have you talked to Liam?”

  Her voice sounded strange. The skin along Katie’s arms prickled. “No, why?”

  “Oh! Because! Because . . . how are you, anyway? Find any treasures yet? How’s your cousin?”

  “Lolly,” Katie said.

  “Oh God, okay, you dragged it out of me. Shit. I didn’t want to have to—you sure you want me to tell you?”