Daisy's Back in Town

by Rachel Gibson

  Jack stopped in his tracks. The boy looked to be in his mid-teens and had a dog chain around his neck and one hanging down the side of his pants. He said something to Billy, then began walking toward Jack. Jack caught a glimpse of Billy’s bemused smile before he turned his attention to the boy. He took a drink of his coffee and lowered the mug.

  He’d always hired boys over the summer to sweep up or run for parts. But if this kid wanted a job, he was out of luck. Not so much because of the way he looked, but because he didn’t have the sense to dress better and leave the chains on his dog when he went job hunting.

  He had hair like a hedgehog, dark with white spikes on the ends. His bottom lip was pierced near one corner and his black T-shirt said anarchy in bloody red letters. He held a skateboard beneath one arm, and his jeans fit so loose, if he stood up straight, they’d fall down around his ankles.

  “Can I help you?” Jack asked as the kid came to stand in front of him.

  “Yeah. My mom told me you knew my dad?”

  Jack knew a lot of dads. “Who’s your mother?” he asked and took another drink of his coffee.

  “Daisy Monroe.”

  The coffee scalded the back of his throat and he lowered it. Daisy hadn’t left town.

  “I don’t know if she ever mentioned me. I’m . . .” his voice cracked and he swallowed hard. “I’m Nathan.”

  Whatever he’d expected Daisy and Steven’s kid to look like, this was not it. First off, he’d thought their child was much younger. “She mentioned she had a son, but I thought you were about five.”

  A frown pulled his dark brows, and he stared at Jack through clear blue eyes. He looked a little confused like he didn’t know how someone could mistake him with a five-year-old. “No. I’m fifteen.”

  The kid must have been conceived shortly after Steven and Daisy got married. The thought of Steven and Daisy together conjured up a long-buried animosity and bothered him more than it should have. More than it had a few days ago, before he’d made love to her on the trunk of the car just a few feet from where her son stood. Before he knew how good it was to be with her again. “I take it your mom is still in town?”

  “Yeah.” He stared at Jack as if he expected him to say something more. When he didn’t, the boy added, “We’re staying with my grandma until my aunt Lily gets better. My mom thinks that might take a week or so.”

  He’d wondered what had taken place to make Daisy run from his kitchen Saturday. “What happened to your aunt?”

  “She drove her car into Ronnie’s living room.”

  Damn, he guessed fighting in front of the Minute Mart hadn’t been enough revenge for Lily. “Is she going to be okay?”

  “I guess.”

  The grinder started once more and Jack showed Nathan into his office and shut the door against the noise. Even if Nathan had come dressed properly for a job interview, having Daisy’s kid work in his shop would be a nightmare. Seeing him would remind Jack of Daisy. And no matter how sweet that particular memory, it was over and best forgotten.

  “Your dad and I were good friends at one time. I was sorry to hear about his death.”

  Nathan set the tip of his skateboard by his black sneaker and leaned it against his leg. On closer inspection the underside of the board had a scantily dressed nurse painted on it. “Yeah. He was a good dad. I miss him a lot.”

  Jack had lost his father when he hadn’t been much older than Nathan. He knew what it was like. Giving the kid an application to take with him wouldn’t hurt. “Did he ever tell you about all the trouble he and I used to get into?”

  Nathan nodded and the fluorescent lighting shined on his lip ring. “He told me about you guys stealing rotten tomatoes and throwing them at cars.”

  Steven had been blond, like a California surfer. Maybe it was the hair, but this kid didn’t look like Steven had growing up. Not even a little bit. Didn’t look a whole lot like his mother either. Maybe around the mouth. Well, except for the lip ring. “We made a tree fort in his backyard. Did he tell you about that?”

  Nathan shook his head.

  “It took us one whole summer. We made it out of wood we scrounged and old cardboard boxes.” He smiled at the memory of them dragging home junk from miles away. “Your mom helped us, too. Then just when we finished, an F2 twister blew it all to hell.”

  Nathan laughed and motioned toward the door with his head. “Is that a ’Cuda 440-6 out there?”

  “Yeah, it’s got the original 426 Hemi.”

  “Sweet. When I get a job, I’m gonna buy a Dodge Charger Daytona with a 426 Hemi.”

  Now it was Jack’s turn to laugh. He sat on the edge of his desk next to his Buick Riviera clock. He didn’t want to rain on the kid’s parade, but only about seventy Daytonas with a 426 Hemi had ever been produced. If he did manage to find one, it was going to run him about sixty grand. “Four-speed, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  He took a drink. Naturally. The kid had just narrowed his odds even further considering Dodge had only put out about twenty four-speeds.

  “I saw one once at a car show in Seattle.” Nathan swallowed and his voice cracked with excitement. “The Daytona held the closed-course-track speed record for thirteen years. Ford and Chevy couldn’t touch it.”

  Lord, he was just like Billy—and like Jack’s father, Ray, had been. Blinded by speed. Jack loved fast cars too, but not like those two. How had Steven and Daisy managed to produce a gear head?

  “Do you watch ‘Monster Garage’?”

  “Occasionally.” Billy was the “Monster Garage” fanatic.

  “Did you see the episode where they turned a NASCAR into a street sweeper?”

  “No, I missed that one.” But he’d heard all about it from Billy.

  “It was tight.”

  Tight? Jack supposed that meant good.

  Billy stuck his head in the door as Jack crossed his feet. “We’ve got a problem with the right-front rotor on that Plymouth.”

  There was always a problem with something, and Jack had learned not to sweat it long ago. “Billy come on in here and meet Steven and Daisy Monroe’s boy, Nathan.”

  Billy came farther into the office wearing his dark blue shirt that buttoned up the front and had a Parrish American Classic’s patch on the left breast pocket. Jack introduced them and they shook hands. Billy spoke first, “I was real sorry to hear about your dad. He was a good guy.”

  Nathan looked down at his shoes. “Yeah.”

  “Billy here loves ‘Monster Garage,’” Jack said and the two of them jumped into a discussion about which episodes were the best and which ones weren’t.

  “Turning that PT Cruiser into a wood chipper was lame,” Nathan said.

  “Jesse James wasn’t into that one until they started feedin’ stuffed animals through the chipper.”

  “Yeah, heh-heh-heh,” Nathan laughed, tilting his head back a bit. “They blew stuffing all over the place.”

  “Did you see the Barbie get stuck in there?” Billy’s eyes shined with humor and he laughed too, a rapid heh-heh-heh.

  Christ, Jack thought, Billy had finally found someone who loved to watch “Monster Garage” as much as he did.

  “Did you catch the episode with the Grim Reaper?” his brother asked.

  “Yeah, that would have been tight if it’d worked.”

  Billy shook his head. “They smoked the first belt and the pump got too hot before they even got any of the cylinders to move those hydraulic arms.”

  “I heard a theory that the hearse was haunted and that’s why the mission failed.”

  “The mission failed because the hydraulics failed.”

  “Did you see Jesse when the ambulance caught on fire?” Nathan asked, so excited his eyes shined with it. “That was cool.”

  “That’s my favorite episode.”

  “Did you see his wife screaming at him?”

  They both started to laugh at the same time. Billy’s voice was lower, but Jack couldn’t help but notice that
their laughter was real similar. The same heh-heh-heh sound, and they both tipped their heads back at the same angle. The longer he looked at the two of them standing side by side swapping “Monster Garage” moments, the clearer he saw beyond Nathan’s bizarre hair and the lip ring.

  Then within the span of a second, the world around Jack shifted and changed. The hair on the back of his neck rose and his scalp got tight. Time ground to a halt, cracked down the middle, and fell in halves.

  A half-second ago, everything had been okay in Jack’s life, and in the next it wasn’t. One half he’d been noticing his brother and Nathan laughing and sounding alike, and in the next he was looking at a fifteen-year-old version of his father, Ray Parrish. For half a second he’d been sitting on the edge of his desk and in the next he was standing with coffee down the front of his shirt, scalding his chest. “Christ!”

  “What’s the matter?” Billy asked.

  He didn’t take his gaze from Nathan. He looked at the shape of his face and nose, and there was no turning back the clock to a few seconds ago. He was definitely looking at a young version of his father. It was so obvious, he didn’t know why it had taken him so long to see it. “You didn’t come here for a job, did you?”

  Nathan’s smile fell and he picked up his skateboard. “No.”

  Suddenly, it all made perfect sense. Daisy’s insistence that they talk. That she had something to tell him. Something she couldn’t talk about on the phone or in a letter or at Showtime Pizza. Something important like a son. He felt like someone had kicked him in the stomach. “When is your birthday?”

  “I’ve got to go now.”

  He reached out and grabbed Nathan’s arm. “Tell me.”

  Nathan’s eyes got wide and he dropped his skateboard. He tried to back up, but Jack didn’t let go. He couldn’t.

  “December,” he finally answered.

  Jack pulled him even closer. “And you’re fifteen aren’t you?”

  He could see Nathan’s throat work as he tried to swallow. “Yes,” he said just above a whisper.

  On some level Jack knew he frightened Nathan and that he should let go. He should calm down, but he couldn’t. Thoughts raced through his head until it felt like something was squeezing his brain. “Son of a bitch.”

  Billy grabbed a hold of Jack’s shoulder and stepped between him and Nathan. “What’s the matter with you? Have you lost your mind?”

  Yes. He’d lost his mind. He let go and Nathan took off so fast, it was like he’d never been there. Except that his skateboard was still on the floor. Nurse-side up.

  Jack stared after him. “Didn’t you see it, Billy?”

  “All I see is you acting crazy.”

  He shook his head and turned to his brother. “He looks like dad.”

  “Who?”

  “Nathan. Daisy’s son.”

  “Daisy and Steven’s son.”

  Jack pointed to the empty doorway. “Did he look like Steven to you?”

  “I don’t really remember what Steven looked like, to tell you the truth.”

  “Not like our dad.” He set the mug on his desk. He had a son. No. Impossible. He’d always used contraceptives. But not always with Daisy. They’d been young and stupid and still believed nothing bad would ever affect them. “She was pregnant when she left and she didn’t tell me.”

  Billy put his hands up. “Wait, I never even knew the two of you were involved back then. And even if you were, how do you know he’s your kid?”

  “You’re not listening to me.” He scrubbed his face with his hands. “There’s a picture. A picture of dad when he graduated high school. He looks just like that kid.” He dropped his hand to his sides. “That’s why she’s here,” he spoke his thoughts out loud as if they made better sense that way, when in reality, they made no sense at all. “To tell me about him.”

  “This is crazy. He’s fifteen.”

  Yes. It was crazy. Crazy as hell to think he had a fifteen-year-old son. A son he’d never known about because he’d never been told. “I’m right, Billy.”

  Billy stepped in front of him and looked him in the eye. “You better make damn sure you’re right before you go grabbing that kid and scaring him again. You don’t know for sure he’s yours, but even if he is, he might not know it.”

  Billy was right. “I didn’t mean to scare him.”

  Movement beyond Billy caught Jack’s attention and he looked through the open doorway at Penny. He pushed by his brother and said on his way past the secretary, “I’m going out for a while.”

  He walked out the back of the garage, across the driveway, to his house. He went straight to a spare room that used to belong to Billy and he opened the closet crammed with boxes. He pulled out one after the other and dumped them on the floor. Old trophies and magazines, keepsakes from his and Billy’s childhood that their mother had carefully packed away, fell everywhere.

  “What are we looking for?” Billy asked as he picked up a box.

  Jack hadn’t even realized Billy had followed. “Mom and Dad’s old wedding album. The picture is in their wedding album.”

  They found the album in the fifth box they opened. The outside was covered in lace and silk flowers, the girly stuff his mother had favored. The lace had yellowed, the flowers flattened; Jack flipped it open. Inside, the pages had lost their stickiness and the photographs behind the loose cellophane slid together. The picture Jack searched for fell at his feet, and he knelt to pick up the black-and-white photo of his father at the age of seventeen. In one corner of the picture, his father had written in faded black ink, To my favorite girl Carolee, Love Ray.

  Jack stood and stared at the photo. He hadn’t imagined it. Give his father hedgehog hair and a lip ring, and he’d look a hell of a lot like Nathan Monroe. Only he wasn’t Nathan Monroe. He was a Parrish.

  Billy came to stand behind Jack and he looked over his shoulder. His low whistle sounded louder than usual in the empty room. “Do you think Steven knew?”

  Jack shrugged. She’d been three months pregnant; at some point Steven had to have known. He walked out of the bedroom and down the hall into the kitchen. He opened a cabinet and pulled Steven’s letter from where he’d place it Saturday. With the photograph of his father still in one hand, he tore open the envelope and read:

  Jack,

  Please excuse my handwriting and misspellings. As my illness progresses it gets more difficult for me to concentrate. It is my hope that you never see this letter. That I will beat this disease and tell you these things in person once I am well again. If not, I want to write down my thoughts before I am unable.

  Let me begin by saying simply that I have missed you, Jack. I don’t know if you have missed me or forgiven me, but I have missed my buddy. There have been many times in the past fifteen years when I have wanted to call and talk to you. Many times I have laughed by myself thinking of the things we used to do. The other day I saw two boys riding their bikes in the rain and I remembered the many times we used to ride our bikes in real toad-stranglers. Riding around Lovett, finding the deepest puddles to ride through. Or the times sitting on my mother’s sofa, watching the old Andy Griffith shows, and laughing our asses off when Barney locked himself in jail. I think that is when I miss you the most, when I laugh alone. And I know it is my fault. There have been many times I have felt the loneliness of losing you, my friend.

  I have never forgotten the last time we saw each other and the horrible things we said. I married Daisy, and you loved her. But I loved her too, Jack. I still do. After all these years I love her as much as the day I married her. I know she loves me. I know she has always loved me, and yet some times she gets a very far away look in her eyes, and I wonder if she is thinking about you. I wonder if she is thinking that she is sorry she chose to come with me to Seattle. I wonder if she thinks what her life might have been like with you, and I wonder if she still loves you like she did. If it is any consolation, then know that I have suffered a bit of hell, because I know how much she loved
you once and perhaps still does.

  The night we left Lovett, Daisy was three months pregnant with your child. She’s no doubt told you all of this by now. When she came to me and told me she was carrying your baby, she was very afraid and believed that you didn’t love her any longer. I let her believe it even though I knew it probably wasn’t true. She believed not telling you about the baby was for the best. She didn’t think you could handle the pressure of having a child at that time in your life. I let her believe that too. I told her she was right, that you couldn’t, but I knew it wasn’t true. I knew you could do anything you set your mind to doing. So I married her and took her away from you. I know that I should regret what I did, but I can’t. I don’t regret one day that I have spent with her and Nathan. But I do regret the way in which things were done and not telling you about Nathan sooner.

  Nathan is a good boy. He is a lot like you. Fearless and impatient and buries everything deep. I know that Daisy will do her absolute best to raise him, but I believe he needs you. It has been my pleasure to raise him, and of all my regrets in this life, and there are many, I regret that I will not get to see him grow into a man. I would have liked to have seen that.

  In closing, I ask that you forgive me, Jack. I know that is perhaps asking too much of you, but I’m asking anyway. I am asking so you can let go of the bitterness and go on with your life. On a purely selfish level, I am asking with the hope that you will forgive me so that I can die with a clearer conscience. And so that when I see you on the other side, we can embrace as friends once more. If you can’t forgive me, I understand. I don’t know that I could ever forgive you if I were in your place. I took a lot from you, Jack. But maybe you can occasionally look back and laugh at the good times we had together.

  Steven

  The letter and photograph of his father fell to the counter as Jack struggled to catch his breath. His insides felt sliced up, just like they had fifteen years ago.