Daisy's Back in Town

by Rachel Gibson

  Steven was gone. She and Nathan would always feel his loss, like a missing part of their souls. He’d been her best friend and a good man. He’d been a buffer, a comfort, someone who made her life better. Easier. He’d been a loving husband and father.

  She and Nathan would never forget him, but she could not continue to live in the past. She had to live in the present and begin to look toward the future. For Nathan, and for herself. But in order for her to move forward, she had to take care of her past. She had to quit hiding from it.

  Fingers of morning sun crept into the backyard and sparkled in the dew-covered lawn. The early sun cast long patterns in the wet grass, crept up the windmill, and shot sparks off the tip of Annie Oakley’s silver rifle. Daisy wished she had her Nikon and wide-angle lens on her. It was up in her room, and she knew if she ran up to get it, she’d miss the shot and the rising sun. Within seconds, dawn broke over Daisy’s feet, legs and face; she closed her eyes and soaked it all in.

  Living in the Northwest, Daisy had lost most of her accent, but she’d never lost her love of wide-open spaces and the huge blue sky stretching across the horizon in unbroken lines. She opened her eyes and wished Steven were here to see it. He would have loved it as much as she did.

  Daisy looked down at the rubber garden clogs on her feet. She wished for a lot of things. Like more time before she had to confront Jack again. She was in no hurry to see the anger in his face. She’d known that he would not welcome her back with open arms, but she was surprised that after all of these years, he clearly hated her as much as he had the last time she’d seen him.

  You call this ugly? he’d said. This is nothing, buttercup. Stick around and I’ll show you how ugly I can get.

  She wondered if Jack had realized he’d called her buttercup. His old name for her. The name he’d first called her on her first day at Lovett Elementary.

  She remembered being nervous and scared on that day, so long ago. She’d been afraid no one would like her, and she’d suspected that the big red bow clipped to the top of her head looked stupid. Her mother had pulled it off the handle of a Welcome Wagon basket filled with coupons, a recipe book, and Wick Fowler’s chili kit. Daisy hadn’t wanted to wear the bow, but her mother had insisted that it looked good and matched her dress.

  All that first morning, no one had spoken to her. By lunch, she’d become so upset, she was unable to eat her cheese yum-yum sandwich. Finally, during recess, Steven and Jack walked up to where she stood with her back against the chain link fence.

  “What’s your name?” Jack had asked.

  She’d looked into those green eyes of his, surrounded by long black lashes, and she’d smiled. Finally someone was talking to her, and her little heart leapt with joy. “Daisy Lee Brooks.”

  He’d rocked back on the heels of his boots as he looked her up and down. “Well, buttercup, that’s the stupidest hair bow I ever did see,” he’d drawled, then he and Steven howled with laughter.

  Hearing that the bow was stupid confirmed her worst fears, and the backs of her eyes started to sting. “Yeah, well y’all are so stupid you have to take off your shoes to count,” she’d responded, proud that she stood up for herself. Then she’d ruined everything by bursting into tears.

  The memory of that day brought a sad smile to her face. She’d vowed to hate those two boys as long as she lived. It lasted until Jack had asked her to play on their softball team, three weeks later. It was Steven who showed her how to play second base without getting hit in the face with the ball.

  At first, Jack had called her buttercup to tease her, but years later, he’d whispered it as he kissed the side of her throat. His voice would go all dark while he discovered whole new ways to tease her. There had been a time when just the memory of his kiss had sent a warm shudder through her chest, but she hadn’t felt anything warm and tingly for him in years.

  She thought of how he’d looked last night, half naked and fully ticked off. His lids lowered over his sexy green eyes, and that sardonic curl of his lips. He’d grown even more handsome than the last time she’d seen him, but Daisy was older and wiser and no longer tempted by good looks and bad attitudes.

  Nathan didn’t resemble Jack much. Except maybe the attitude part. He was staying with Steven’s sister in Seattle while Daisy was in Lovett, but he knew the reason behind her trip. She’d learned her lesson about lies, no matter how well intentioned, and she never lied to Nathan. But she had purposely chosen his last week of ninth grade to make the trip so he couldn’t come along. She didn’t know what Jack’s reaction would be once she told him about Nathan. She didn’t think he would be cruel, not to Nathan anyway, but she wasn’t certain. She didn’t want Nathan here if Jack got truly ugly. Nathan had had enough pain in his life.

  From inside the house, she heard her mother moving around. She stood and walked back inside.

  “Good morning,” she said as she hung up her coat. The warm scent of her mother’s kitchen filled her nose. The smell of baked bread and home-cooked comfort food surrounded her like a familiar blanket. “I watched the sun come up, and it was absolutely gorgeous.” She kicked off the garden clogs and looked over at her mother, who was stirring cream into her coffee. Louella Brooks wore a blue nylon nightgown, and her blond hair was piled on top of her head like cotton candy.

  “How was your party last night?” Daisy asked. Every second Friday, the Lovett single’s club held a dance, and Louella Brooks hadn’t missed one since she’d joined in nineteen ninety-two. She paid fifty dollars a year to belong to the club, and she believed in getting her money’s worth.

  “Verna Pearse was there, and I swear she looks a good ten years older than her real age.” Louella placed her spoon in the sink and raised her mug to her lips. Her brown eyes looked back at Daisy over her coffee. “She was surely saggin’, baggin’ and draggin’.”

  Daisy smiled and filled her own mug. Verna had once worked at the Wild Coyote Diner with Louella. The two had been friends at one time. During Daisy’s junior and senior years of high school, she’d worked at the diner too, but she couldn’t recall what had happened to break up the friendship. “What happened between you and Verna?” she asked.

  Louella put her mug on the counter and grabbed a loaf of bread from the pantry. “Verna Pearse is as loose as a slipknot,” she said. “For a year she told me she got paid ten cents more an hour than me because she was a better waitress. She bragged and held it over my head, but come to find out, she was earning it in other ways.”

  “How?”

  “With Big Bob Jenkins.”

  Daisy remembered the owner of the diner, and he hadn’t been called Big Bob for nothing. “She was having sex with Big Bob?”

  Louella shook her head and pursed her lips. “Oral gratification in the storeroom.”

  “Really? That’s criminal.”

  “Yes. It’s a form of prostitution.”

  “I was thinking it was more like slave labor. Verna blew Big Bob for what turns out to be like—eighty cents a day? That’s not right.”

  “Daisy,” her mother scolded as she got out the toaster. “Don’t talk filth.”

  “You brought it up!” She’d never understand her mother. “Oral gratification” was okay, but somehow “blew” wasn’t.

  “You’ve been in the North too long.”

  Maybe she had, because she just didn’t get the difference. Although there had been a time when she never would have uttered the word in that context.

  Louella opened the loaf of bread. “Do you want toast?”

  “I don’t eat in the morning.” She took a drink of coffee and moved to the corner breakfast nook. The bright morning sun poured in through the sheers and lit up the yellow table.

  “Did you go out last night?” her mother asked as she toasted one slice of bread.

  Meaning, did she work up her nerve to drive to Jack’s. “Yes. I went to his house last night.”

  “Did you tell him?”

  Daisy sat on one of the bench seats a
nd looked down at her hands wrapped around her mug. She had a chip in her red fingernail polish. “No. He wasn’t alone. His girlfriend was there, so it wasn’t a good time.”

  “Maybe that was a sign you should leave it alone.”

  Growing up, her mother had always liked Steven more than Jack. Although, Louella liked Jack too. When the three of them got into trouble, Jack was often blamed. And while it was true that he’d usually come up with the offense that landed them in hot water, Daisy and Steven would gladly go along with him. “I can’t do that,” Daisy said, “I have to tell him.”

  “I still don’t understand why.” Louella’s toast popped up and she set it on a little plate.

  “I told you why.” Daisy didn’t feel like discussing her reasons again. She opened the bottle of fingernail polish she’d left on the table yesterday and set about repairing the chip.

  “Well, if you’re determined to do this, you shouldn’t go over there at night.” Louella lifted the lid off the butter dish and buttered her toast. “People talk about widows. They say you’re desperate.”

  Daisy’s father had died when she was five, but she’d never heard any gossip about her mother being desperate. “I don’t care.” She covered her index fingernail with red polish, then screwed the lid back on the bottle.

  “You should.” Louella grabbed her plate and coffee and sat across the table from Daisy. “You don’t want people to think you’re going over there for relations.”

  Daisy blew on her wet fingernail to keep from laughing. It had been over two years since she’d had relations, and she wasn’t sure she knew how to do it anymore. After Steven’s diagnosis and first surgery, they’d tried to have a normal, healthy married life, but after a few months, it just got too difficult. At first she’d really missed sex with her husband. Then the more she’d gone without, the less she’d missed it. Now, she really didn’t think about it all that much.

  “Tell me about all those flamingos in your backyard,” Daisy said to change the subject.

  “I think they’re pretty,” her mother said. Growing up, her mother had been into Disney. Their yard had been overrun with Snow White, the Seven Dwarfs, and several characters from Alice in Wonderland. “I got the big flamingo with the little pocket book in its beak from Kitty Fae Young. Her granddaughter Amanda makes ’em up special order. You remember Amanda, don’t you?”

  Just like she was a kid again, Daisy felt her eyes glaze over. Her mother had always had a tendency to ramble on forever about people Daisy didn’t know, had never met, and didn’t give a rat’s about. Growing up, she and Lily had been involuntary victims, trapped into listening to the hottest gossip going around the diner, which usually wasn’t all that hot. It didn’t matter how often they hinted that they didn’t care about so-and-so’s new Buick, arthritis or yummy homemade cookies, Louella was like a needle stuck in a record groove and absolutely couldn’t stop until she came to the end.

  She shook her head and said a weak, “No.”

  “Sure you do,” her mother said. “She had those really bad buck teeth. Looked just like a little beaver.”

  “Oh yeah,” she said although she didn’t have the foggiest. There were quite a few kids in west Texas with buck teeth.

  Daisy slid from behind the table and stood. While her mother talked about Amanda and her yard art, Daisy walked to the sink and rinsed her mug. She glanced up at the purple and green stained-glass frame making patterns on the sill. She’d taken the photo in the picture frame. It was Steven and Nathan on Nathan’s fourth birthday, and she’d used a wide-angle lens to distort the closeup shot. Both wore party hats and were grinning like lunatics fresh from the asylum, their eyes huge. She’d taken it when she first started photography classes and was experimenting. They’d all been so happy then.

  A frown creased her brow and she looked away. She didn’t want to think about the past today. She didn’t want to get sucked into the emotional morass of it. She put the mug in the dishwasher and her gaze fell on a grocery list clipped in a clothespin recipe holder.

  “. . . but of course you didn’t live here then,” her mother was saying. “That was the year a twister took out Red Cooley’s trailer.”

  “Are you going to the store?” she interrupted.

  “I need a few things,” her mother answered as she rose from the table and put the bread away. “After church tomorrow, Lily Belle and Pippen are coming over for Sunday dinner, and I thought we’d have a nice ham.”

  Lily was three years younger than Daisy, and Pippen was her two-year-old son. Lily’s husband had run off with a cowgirl, and they were in the process of a messy divorce. She was having a difficult time, and as a result, men in general were on Lily’s hit list. “I’ll go to Albertsons for you,” she offered. That way she could choose something beside ham. She’d never been a big pork fan, and after Steven’s funeral, a lot of well-meaning people had dropped off baked hams. Some of them were still in her freezer in Seattle.

  She took a shower then dressed in a pair of jeans and a blue T-shirt. She dried her hair and put on a little makeup. With the list in her back pocket, she jumped in her mother’s Cadillac. The car had several dents up and down each side due to her mother being nearsighted. A flamingo air freshener hung from the rearview mirror, and the Caddie whined when she turned corners.

  Inside Albertsons, the Muzak of choice was Barry Manilow’s “Mandy,” an abomination in any state, but especially Texas. She tossed a box of tea bags and a can of coffee into her cart, then she headed for the meat section. She was in the mood for steak and grabbed a package of three rib-eyes.

  “Well hey, Daisy. I heard you were back in town.”

  Daisy glanced up from her steaks. The woman in front of her looked slightly familiar. Her hair was pinned up in big pink rollers, and she held a big can of Super Hold Aqua Net in one hand and a pack of bobby pins in the other.

  It took Daisy a few seconds to place a name with the face. “You’re Shay Brewton, Sylvia’s little sister.” Daisy and Sylvia had been on the same cheerleader squad at Lovett High. They’d been good friends but had lost touch when Daisy and Steven had moved away. “How’s Sylvia?”

  “She’s good. She lives in Houston now with her husband and kids.”

  “Houston?” She set the steaks back in the case and placed her foot on the bottom rung of the cart. “Shoot. I’m sorry she moved away. I’d hoped to look her up before I left.”

  “She’s in town this weekend for my wedding.”

  Daisy smiled. “You’re getting married? When? To whom?”

  “I’m marrying Jimmy Calhoun over at Whiley Baptist Church. Tonight at six.”

  “Jimmy Calhoun?” She’d gone all through school with Jimmy. He’d had flaming red hair and a silver tooth. There were six Calhoun boys; all of them trouble. If she’d had to lay odds, she would have bet the lot of them were living in Huntsville with prison tattoos by now.

  Shay laughed. “Don’t look at me like I’ve come off my spool.”

  Daisy hadn’t realized her mouth was hanging open and she snapped it shut. “Congratulations, I’m sure you’ll be very happy,” she said.

  “Come to my reception afterwards over at the country club. It starts at eight.”

  “Crash your wedding?”

  “It’s going to be a big party. Lots of food and liquor, and we hired Jed and the Rippers to play music for us. Sylvia will be there, and I know she’d just love to see you. Mom and Daddy, too.”

  Mrs. Brewton had been an adviser for the squad. Mr. Brewton had made his own liquor in the back shed. Daisy knew from experience that it could eat a hole in your esophagus. “Maybe I will.”

  Shay nodded. “Good, I’ll tell her I ran into you and that you’re coming to the reception. She’ll be tickled.”

  Daisy hadn’t brought anything to wear to a wedding reception. The only dress she’d brought was a white tank, and it really wasn’t appropriate. Maybe she’d just send a gift. “Are you registered anywhere?”

  “Oh,
don’t worry about that.” She smiled. “But yes, I am. Donna’s Gifts on Fifth.”

  Of course. Everyone registered at Donna’s.

  “See ya tonight,” Shay said as she moved away.

  Daisy watched her disappear around a corner and she smiled again. Little Shay Brewton was marrying wild Jimmy Calhoun. Growing up, there really hadn’t been any boys more insane than Jimmy and his brothers.

  Except maybe Jack.

  Jack had always been wrapped crazy. It had never been enough for him to race his bike as fast as it would go; he had to lift his hands from the handle bars, or stand on the seat. It wasn’t enough to chase dust devils; he had to play outside when the weather service predicted an F1 tornado. He thought he was invincible, like superman.

  Steven had been more daredevil than Daisy, but even he hadn’t attempted half the stuff Jack had. He’d never jumped from his roof into a pile of leaves and broken his leg. Or put a motorcycle engine on a homemade go-cart and driven around town as if he were at Talladega.

  Jack had done that. He’d done it even though he knew his dad would whoop his butt. And Ray Parrish had, but it’d been worth it to Jack.

  Steven Monroe had always been the safe one—dependable—while Jack had raced through life full throttle as if his hair was on fire.

  Hanging around with the craziest boy in school had been a lot of fun. Getting romantically involved with him had been a huge mistake.

  One in which she and Steven and Jack had all paid a high price.

  Chapter 3

  The Lovett Country Club sat on the edge of an eighteen-hole golf course. Elm trees lined the drive from the gates to the entrance of the building. Visitors had to walk across a bridge to get to the front doors. A stream ran beneath the bridge and emptied into a pond filled with koi, their red and white bodies swaying in the slow current.