The Secret Hum of a Daisy

by Tracy Holczer

  As she was helping Soup Lady, I went around the store, touching things. Silky pajamas, lacy bras, fluffy bathrobes. It was a cozy place to be.

  “Your mama used to design my windows,” Margery said once the lady had left. Her muumuu was a much softer batch of colors today, and it made me think of Mrs. Greene, how the color of her clothes matched the color of her mood. Maybe Margery was like that too.

  “Really?”

  Her hair was curly, just past her shoulders, mostly silver with threads of walnut brown. She tossed it behind her shoulders. “Once she and your dad started spending time together, she took over my window. She’d combine her art with different antiques and place the slippers and hosiery just so. Like they were meant to be together. People would gather around when she was designing. One time we even had this fancy photographer come all the way from San Francisco to take pictures of her displays. It was great for business.”

  “Lou told me she used to steal her spoons.”

  “Ha!” Margery said. She reached into a low drawer behind her and pulled out a handful of bent spoons. “She sure did. I always thought I might give it a try, put stuff together the way she used to and make something pretty, but I wasn’t any good at it.”

  I fanned the spoons in a circle, bowls facing out so that it looked like a daisy, and thought about Mama’s daisy meadow. How I felt certain I’d find the next clue at Spoons.

  “Looks like you have the knack,” Margery said.

  “Not like Mama.”

  “So what’s your knack?”

  I didn’t want to talk about writing. Instead, I asked my own question. “Did Mama and Grandma ever get along?”

  She got up from the zebra-print chair and went over to her bureau of pictures. She pulled one out and handed me a picture of a girl my age and a woman who looked like Mama. I took a sharp breath realizing it was Mama and Grandma.

  “They were as different from each other as a monkey is from a pinecone, so that didn’t help. Miranda isn’t soft around the edges, and people like that can be hard to love. But she loved your mama something fierce.”

  I set the picture back on the dresser. “Mama said that love was an action, not a word. If Grandma loved Mama so much, she never would have sent her away.”

  “Sometimes we lose pieces of who we are in times of great sorrow and distress. And then we have to find a way to get them back. Your grandma lost so much of herself when your grandpa died and then when your mama got off that bus.” She shook her head.

  The truth of that finally hit me—how much Grandma had lost. Her husband and then her daughter. Her granddaughter. I thought about her sitting in her living room by the fire day after day, waiting for her daughter to come home, waiting for a phone call or a letter that never came. For years.

  “I think that’s why your mama left too. She lost herself. Some people think space is the answer, that somehow in the wide-open they might stumble into answers. Soon enough it’s just easier to stay gone.”

  It should have made me angry, her saying that. But it didn’t. Because it was true.

  “I’ve got something for you,” Margery finally said. She went through the red velvet curtain behind the counter.

  I heard shuffling and then she came out with a small, hard plastic suitcase and set it on the counter.

  “Go ahead, open it,” she said. She reached one plump hand up and pushed at the fuzzy hairs at her temple.

  I flipped the tarnished brass latch and opened the lid. It was an old-fashioned typewriter with a folder of typed pages wedged into the lid. I ran my finger along the pages, flipping them. It was a collection of poems and what looked like short stories.

  “It was your father’s. His own father had been a writer and your dad wanted to be one too.”

  I took a step back from the typewriter—stumbled was more like it—as I put a hand up to my mouth. I wanted to jump up and down and spin around. My father had been a writer too.

  “He wrote mostly poetry, but kept ideas for a novel.”

  I smiled. “I have his book of Robert Frost.”

  “I always wondered where that ended up,” Margery said. “That book had belonged to his father, your granddad. I think he read it to keep himself close to his parents after they’d died.”

  “Mama used to read me poems from that book. Every night.”

  “Did she tell you what those poems were about?”

  “She didn’t like to look for the meaning stuff. She told me to enjoy the words and not worry about what they meant.”

  “That’s a good thing to do sometimes. But sometimes, you want to know the meaning of a thing. Your dad loved those poems because he thought they were about a boy going out into the world and finding his way, coming home a man. They brought him comfort because they reminded him of his father, but also because the words gave him confidence, making him feel that he’d find his own way, no matter what.”

  Words started to trickle into my mind from different Frost poems.

  . . . I left you in the morning . . .

  . . . Now close the windows and hush all the fields . . .

  . . . Give a heart to the hopeless fight . . .

  “I had hoped your mama took it with her when she left, but I always wondered why she didn’t take the typewriter too.”

  “Probably because a book was easier to take from place to place.”

  By reading me the poems, Mama said she was filling me up with my father in the only way she could. She was planting words inside my empty places, hoping something would take root and grow. But she never told me he was a poet. That he wanted to write novels. She didn’t take his work or his typewriter, things I would have cherished. She didn’t tell me stories about him, and I was starting to see that her efforts weren’t good enough. She should have set aside some of her own aches and pains so that I wouldn’t have so many of my own.

  After a while, I asked, “What was his favorite kind of soup?”

  “Minestrone.”

  “What about music? Did he like listening to music?”

  “He liked to dance.”

  I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, he was there in the corner of the room, and so was I, small, my feet on top of his as he danced me around in circles. Where he’d always been this flat image I’d carried around in my pocket, suddenly he was here, right in this room, inside me in a way I hadn’t felt before.

  He had been someone I would have loved, and I didn’t realize what a relief that was until I felt it, through and through. And he would have loved me. I let myself fill up with it, fill up with the knowing that Margery was here and I could ask her anything. Forever.

  “Did you help Mama and Daddy get to the Greyhound that night?”

  Margery fidgeted with the edge of her sleeve. “Your grandma never forgave me, and I can’t say I blame her. Your mama was just seventeen. But I knew your grandparents wanted to send her away and I didn’t believe that was right. Scotty had already lost so much. Not many days go by that I don’t think about what might have happened if I’d helped them figure things out differently.”

  Just like the pieces of Mama’s cranes, each of us was a piece in her life, and her death. But maybe that’s how it was with everything. If you were going to let yourself be connected to people, you had to be willing to take chances.

  “Is he buried here somewhere?”

  “In the same cemetery as your mama.”

  I thought about that for a minute. The foreverness of it. It was why I hadn’t visited Mama’s grave. I just didn’t want to see the grass growing over her body, her name engraved in stone.

  “Do you think Mama would have wanted me living with Grandma?”

  “I don’t know, Grace.”

  Mrs. Greene’s didn’t feel like the right place anymore, but neither did Grandma’s. I thought about my signpost cranes and the clues that were
left, still thinking Mama was trying to help. To show me where I belonged.

  “Can I take these?” I gestured to the spoons.

  “Make something pretty,” she said, and came around the counter to give me a hug. She was only an inch or so taller than I was and I let my head rest on her shoulder. She smelled like the bakery next door.

  I pulled away.

  “Home is in your hands, Grace.” She gestured around her store and then gave me a bag for the spoons. “Sometimes you have to make a place for yourself.”

  I gave her another hug, tight around her waist, and took off for Spoons and whatever clue Mama had waiting.

  22

  Tangled

  I walked into the Spoons Souperie, the cowbell ringing above my head, and when lots of people turned from their soup-slurping to look at me, I felt like a gunslinger coming to town. If Mama had been wiping one of the tables, or busy at the condiment station, I would have twitched my hand above my hip and grabbed something like a banana or a coat hanger and drawn it. She would have clutched her chest and spun around, and we would have laughed to pieces.

  Instead, Grandma smiled and took her giant black purse off the seat next to her, Sheriff Bergum winked and went back to his berry pie, and Archer scurried away from the table he’d been busing, disappearing into the kitchen, where there was a loud and long clattering, as if he’d launched himself into a mountain of silverware.

  I sat down on the red stool next to Grandma and laid out my spoons on the counter. “For Mama’s crane,” I said.

  Grandma smiled again. “When it’s done, we’ll hang it wherever you like.”

  I nodded, wondering if she’d let me hang it in my shed.

  Lou hurried over. “Please tell me you aren’t going to be stealing my spoons too!” She and Grandma laughed.

  “I don’t think Miss Grace here wants to overfamiliarize herself with my jail cell,” Sheriff Bergum said, laughing along.

  Even I smiled at that. But I came here for a reason. “Did Mama leave anything here?”

  “What do you mean, sweetie?” Lou said as she wiped her crepe-paper hands on a white towel.

  “I don’t know. Did you ever find anything in the lost and found that might have belonged to her, or . . .” I was grasping. I had no idea what I was looking for. “Did she make anything for your restaurant? A piece of junk art, maybe? Did she paint or draw something?”

  The elusive Mel came out from the kitchen with his famous ladle and pointed toward the room where the comfy chairs were. He had a very large, round, and red nose. There wasn’t much hair on top of his head, just a thin covering, like he’d spread what little was left with a butter knife.

  “There is one thing, I guess,” Lou said, following Mel’s ladle. “But your mama didn’t take the photograph.”

  I jumped up from the stool. “Where?”

  Lou slung her towel over one shoulder as she came from behind the counter. Her shoes squeaked as she walked across the floor.

  I followed her into the cozy room, and she pointed to a fancy-looking black-and-white photograph of Mama’s fountain in Bear River Park. Hanging beside it were three framed sketches of different bird and wing designs, signed in Mama’s curly handwriting.

  “Your mama was so talented,” Lou said, beaming at the photo and sketches.

  Mama never made her clues easy. I always had to use imagination and craftiness to figure out where to go next. The good thing about her treasure hunts from Before, though, was that everyone was in on it, so when I’d get stuck, someone was around to give me a nudge.

  This time, I had to rely on my gut, this flimsy little thing that didn’t seem to know up from down anymore. I almost wanted to tell Lou or Margery or Grandma. But how do you tell someone that you believed your mama, who had passed along, was still near, like that wavy heat coming off the asphalt on a hot summer day? My own best friend didn’t even believe me.

  Nope, I was alone in all this.

  Lou dusted the glass of the photograph with her white towel. “We were so glad to have a place for Billy’s tree house. He helped Mel build it in our yard when he was ten years old and we thought to keep it for the grandkids when they came. When he died, it was too hard to look at it right outside the windows. But it would have been harder to take it down.” She smiled a sad smile. “When your grandma designed the park, with all those different projects in mind, it was the perfect answer for us. So Mel took down the tree house, one plank at a time, and rebuilt it. Now we can visit when we need to. Mel has been known to nap up there on a warm summer day, even went as far as to build a wooden sign that lets people know when it’s occupied.”

  She pointed to the photograph of Mama’s fountain. “Your grandma tends to that fountain and her park like they were actual blood and bone family.”

  “So I’ve heard,” I said.

  She looked at me, took the curve of my cheek in her hand. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

  I was so caught off guard by what she said that all I could do was thank her and ask for a minute to myself, where I slumped down in a soft leather chair. It never occurred to me that other people besides Grandma had wondered about me and Mama, hoping we’d come back.

  After a little while, Archer came around the corner with a glass of something and sat in the chair next to me. “Here, I made you my favorite,” he said. “It’s called an Arnold Palmer. Half lemonade, half iced tea.”

  “No way,” I said. “That’s my favorite too.”

  “Really? I took you for the Shirley Temple type.”

  “Ha.”

  We sat there for a second, looking at everything but each other.

  “How do you work here, anyway? You’re not old enough to have a job.”

  “Lou is my grandfather’s sister.” He shrugged. “They like having me around.”

  I noticed he had one dark freckle on his earlobe and one close to it on his jaw. I had the urge to take a pen and draw a line from one to the other.

  “I was worried you might not come back,” he said.

  I liked the way he could be flustered one minute and direct the next. It made me see I wasn’t by myself with my own tangled feelings.

  The sun was setting in a burst of orange with rain-cloud slivers. It took up the whole sky.

  “Are there lights in the park?” I said.

  If he thought that was a strange question, he didn’t look it. “Nope.”

  So I’d have to wait until tomorrow to go to the fountain.

  “Archer Lee Hamilton!” Lou shrieked from the restaurant side.

  “Gotta go,” Archer said, and zoomed around the corner.

  I stood up and looked again at the photograph of Mama’s fountain, the sketches beside it, thinking about Grandma’s hard work. How she probably would have traded it all, the park, the fountain, maybe even her own garden, to have us back. I didn’t know for sure if that was true. But it felt true. “I’m counting on you to show me the way,” I whispered. I touched my lips and then touched the cold glass of the photograph, missing Mama so much, my bones ached.

  23

  A Home

  of My Own

  My feelings scooted from one side of things to the other and then back again. Over and over until finally, they crashed so hard to one side, I felt sure they might just knock me flat. Grandma wasn’t this horrible person I’d made her out to be. But that didn’t mean I could trust her. She couldn’t erase what she’d done with all the good deeds in the world because, in the end, what if I made a bad decision? Would she put me on a bus to Texas? I didn’t want to go to Texas. It’s hot, and there are cows everywhere.

  Thinking can steal the magic right out of a thing, Mama’s voice echoed in my head.

  So I tried really hard not to think as Grandma drove me to school on Tuesday. Mama had been gone a month and it still felt like I could turn around and she’d b
e there, arms wide, telling me it had all been a mistake.

  Grandma walked me in to excuse my absence and then went into Mr. Flinch’s office and closed the door, leaving me to wait for Mrs. Turner to give me a pass. Grandma would have to make it fast, though, since first period was about to start, and Mr. Flinch had to get to class.

  Mrs. Turner’s nails were long and white-tipped and they clicked extra loud on the computer keys. She wore her dyed brown hair in a short bob, frozen in place with hairspray so that it looked like a helmet. I was mesmerized by how she whisked herself from one end of the desk to the other, dug through drawers and printed things, answered the phone and leaned down to pick up a dropped pencil, all without that hair moving one square inch.

  She slid a small pink absence form onto the counter, phone between her shoulder and ear, and as she filled it out, I noticed an origami crane sitting next to the pencil holder. Just sitting there plain as day. This one was bright pink and the paper was crumpled as though someone had fished it out of the trash before folding it. It seemed Mr. Flinch’s cranes had a way of getting around.

  I waited until she hung up. “Where did you get that?”

  “It showed up a couple of days ago, like so many things do. You would not believe what has come into this office. Retainers, a fake tarantula, a tiny red box of baby teeth.” She slapped her hand on the counter. “One morning, there was a bag of dirt sitting right here on my counter. Dirt, I tell you.”

  I touched the crane. It was another signpost. Mama was telling me I was on the right track even though I had no idea what I might be looking for at the fountain. Instead of feeling excited, though, it made me tired.

  “You look like you could use some toast,” Mrs. Turner said. She took a bag of bread from a deep drawer and set a piece into a toaster sitting right there between her computer and printer. “Toast can fix most things.”