The Daisy Children

by Sofia Grant

  Katie thanked him and went over to the refrigerator case, and sure enough, wrapped in plastic and labeled with a strip of tape and “1/2” written in a shaking hand were two plump, golden-brown thighs. Even through the plastic Katie could see that they had been perfectly fried, the breading crisp and cratered. She imagined the first bite, the icebox-cool crunch and the meat flavored with sage and buttermilk, the way she remembered it from a dozen family dinners at friends’ houses, made by Texas housewives who’d learned from their mothers. She thought about telling the clerk that a wildly popular fried chicken restaurant had opened up near her apartment in Boston, an outpost of the original location in Brooklyn, where a two-piece combo cost almost fifteen dollars, and left a ring of grease on the waxed paper and a feeling of lead in her stomach.

  “How much?” she said, hoping she could afford both pieces.

  “It’s, ah . . .” The young man looked toward the door, then down at the floor. When he looked up, he had a shy, pained expression on his face. “I forgot—when it gets close to eight, well, we just give it away. Saves us from having to throw it out.”

  Katie waited, uncertain she’d heard correctly, until understanding dawned on her. They didn’t give it away—he was lying and he wasn’t a very skilled liar. He felt sorry for her. Katie looked down at her blouse and discovered that in addition to the coffee stain it now bore several huge streaks of dirt, probably from the dusty house. She touched her hair; it was a greasy, knotted tangle. She hadn’t looked in a mirror since the airport, but after sleeping in the truck, her mascara probably ringed her eyes like those women she saw poking around the Dumpsters late at night. The heroin addicts.

  Oh my God—the boy thought she was a heroin addict.

  “That is just extremely nice of you,” she said in a quivery voice, laying her things down on the old rubber conveyer belt. She wasn’t about to challenge him, not after he’d overcome his embarrassment to make the offer in the first place. Up close, she could see that he’d dyed his hair himself—a telltale grayish band still ringed his hairline—and he was fighting a precarious battle with a ridge of acne along his jaw. His ears were pierced with six or seven cheap silver rings. A name tag pinned crookedly to his T-shirt said “Kyle.”

  Katie desperately wanted to explain—to make him understand that she’d been a victim of a crime, of bad luck, of circumstance, of Liam’s inadequate efforts to help—but as she unfolded the sweaty, damp bills and tried to smooth them out, Kyle carefully averted his eyes, pretending to be fascinated by a business card from a towing company taped to the cash register, all in an effort to preserve her dignity.

  Her heart broke a little and she thought of little Bomber, the nickname she’d privately given the baby she’d mistakenly believed she’d conceived, who she’d imagined playing lacrosse and taking immersion language lessons and having playdates with the delightful children of the nice moms she always saw in the park, with their fancy strollers and their sleek designer diaper bags. She’d wager that Kyle’s childhood had included none of those things—and yet somehow, a mother in New London had managed to raise an incredibly decent human.

  “Thank you, Kyle,” she said after he had placed her purchases carefully in a plain brown paper bag and folded the top over twice.

  He looked at her in surprise, then touched his name tag. “Oh yeah,” he said. “Thank you, ma’am. Have a nice evening. We could sure use a little rain, couldn’t we?”

  She was almost out the door when he called after her. “Don’t forget,” he said. “Come as close to eight as you can when you come back. Tomorrow’s brisket.”

  IT WASN’T UNTIL Katie got back to the house that she remembered the key on its soda-bottle keychain . . . lying on the kitchen table, where she had left it.

  “Fuck!” she exclaimed. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Was this no-good, terrible day ever going to end? She tried the doorknob—old, bronze, heavy and warm under her hand—and naturally, it didn’t budge.

  She felt tears threatening and swiped at them angrily with the back of her hand. The tiny spark of hope that had come to life in the grocery store sputtered out. She was thousands of miles from home and had just been mistaken for a vagrant, her only kin had no room at the inn, and now she’d managed to lock herself out of the only shelter she was going to find, at least until tomorrow. The exhaustion she’d been staving off hit her like a wall, and suddenly Katie wanted nothing more than to lie down and sleep until it was a new day, until she could start over again. She looked around the empty street in despair; with the way things were going, one of the neighbors would probably report her for trying to break into the house.

  The two windows flanking the front door were filthy and painted shut; she wasn’t getting in that way unless she broke the glass. If only she’d finished opening up the house as she’d planned, she could shimmy up and crawl over the sill. Maybe, just maybe, she could get in through a window in the back.

  In the dark, the shapes in the backyard looked menacing. The moonlight that had seemed so romantic earlier reflected off the mottled old glass of the kitchen window, distorting the view of the inside of the house. Katie gave the handle an experimental tug, but it didn’t budge.

  A movement out of the corner of her eye startled her, and she let out an involuntary yelp: a man was standing on the porch, setting something on the top step. He looked up and, in a surprising display of physical prowess, leaped over all three steps to land in a combat-ready stance, coiled and ready to attack. Just as quickly, his body relaxed and he stood.

  “Who the hell are you?” he demanded, in a voice that was as bitter as poison and as rough as burlap. Katie couldn’t make out his face in the dark; he was tall and solidly built and dressed in jeans and an old plaid shirt over a T-shirt, which, if Katie wasn’t mistaken, was wet, and clinging to his muscular torso.

  “Who are you?” she shot back. “This is my grandmother’s house.”

  “No it’s not,” he said. “I know Scarlett. You’re not her. What kind of bullshit is that?”

  “I didn’t say I was Scarlett,” Katie said, adrenaline draining out of her body, leaving her limp and light-headed. “Also, Margaret wasn’t Scarlett’s grandmother. She was her . . .” She tried to mentally untangle the relationship. “Her great-great-aunt or something.”

  She glanced at the object that he’d left on the porch; it looked like a bowl of dirt. The fact that he knew Scarlett did seem to make it unlikely that he was there to murder her. And at this point, Katie didn’t have the energy to muster a lot of suspicion. “Look, I haven’t eaten in hours, I didn’t get much sleep last night, and it has been one of the longest days of my life. I’m locked out of this house. Margaret really was my grandmother, and so Scarlett is my, uh, some sort of cousin—you can ask her next time you see her. You can call the cops if you want, or you can just go away and leave me alone.” She walked past him, giving him a wide berth, and sank down onto the top step of the porch. Up close, it looked like the metal bowl he’d left was full of the leftovers from a dinner of meatloaf and mashed potatoes, and she almost wondered if she should eat it herself.

  When the man didn’t budge, Katie unrolled the paper sack and said, “I’m going to eat my fried chicken now. I’d offer to share, but I’m pretty sure I need it worse than you do.”

  “Hold up,” he said. “Are you the one who was shoplifting down at the market?”

  Katie paused in the middle of unwrapping the plastic from a chicken thigh. “I was not shoplifting!”

  “Sorry.” He didn’t sound sorry. He came closer, looming over her, his torso at eye level. This close, she could smell him—stale sweat, which might also explain the damp shirt. “Kyle texted me that you were casing the place. Guess he caught you before you could rip them off.”

  Katie sighed. She hadn’t thought things could get worse, but even the one person she’d mistakenly thought was being friendly had only been checking her out because he thought she was a criminal.

  “Are you a cop?”


  He laughed. “No. More like . . . I caught Kyle tagging your grandmother’s house. Told him he could either get a job and buy some paint and fix it right, or deal with me. After that he, ah . . . well, he comes around sometimes. What can I say? Weird kid.”

  “I saw that,” Katie said, remembering the strange purple design. “What’s it supposed to be?”

  “I guess you could ask him, next time you get sticky fingers.”

  Katie rolled her eyes. There was nothing left to do but eat her chicken before some new disaster came along.

  “Oh God,” she moaned. It was perfect: delicately seasoned, the skin crispy and the texture perfect. She wished the hipster chef from the Brooklyn chain could be here now, with his spice rubs and ancho paste and Italian rotisserie, to see how it was really done. “So good,” she mumbled as she swallowed.

  “Kyle gave you that, didn’t he,” the man said indignantly.

  Katie shrugged. “Why are you still here? Can’t you just wander off the way you came and go make someone else miserable?”

  The man didn’t answer. His shoulders sagged, and he looked around. “In a minute,” he said.

  Then he whistled.

  Three notes—if Katie remembered correctly from her music theory class at Columbia, a perfect fifth. A compact, fast blur came shooting out of the shrubs bordering the yard and flew straight up the steps, then began wolfing down the food in the bowl. A dog, of unknowable lineage, perhaps thirty pounds of short legs and flopping ears and a blunt tail and a barrel chest and a coat that was sort of striped and sort of spotted. After it had taken a few gulps, it glared at Katie and snarled, its lips pulled back over its teeth, then resumed eating.

  “Wait—is that your dog?” Katie said, scooting away from it. She didn’t like dogs; she was more of a cat person, but had never owned one because she couldn’t bear the thought of sharing their tiny apartment with a litter box. “You feed your dog on my grandmother’s back porch?”

  The man shook his head in disgust. “If she really was your grandmother, you’d know.”

  Katie had almost polished off the first piece of chicken. She gnawed the last bit of meat from the bone and picked up the second piece, wishing she had a tall, cold glass of milk. “Know what?” she said with her mouth full.

  “Know that she was always feeding strays. She’d take care of them until they were healthy and then drive them to a no-kill shelter in Henderson.” After a moment he added, “This one only started coming around right before she had her stroke, so I had to take over.”

  Katie mulled that over for a moment. She doubted that he “had” to take over; any sane person would take this dog, who was emaciated and mangy, straight to the animal shelter—and not the no-kill one, either. It was probably diseased, and definitely a menace; if it did bite her, she’d probably spend the entire night being treated for rabies—if the doctor would even agree to treat her with no insurance card.

  “Who are you, anyway?” Katie asked.

  The man hooked his thumb over his shoulder at the house next door, a plain little white-sided cottage. “Neighbor. Jam Mifflin.”

  “Excuse me . . . Jam?”

  “Yeah.” His tone challenged her to make an issue of it.

  “Well, I’m Katie Garrett. My mother is Margaret’s daughter, Georgina.”

  “You’re the one from Boston?” He sounded skeptical. “No one thought you’d bother to come.”

  “Em, yes,” she admitted, stung. “You were friends with Margaret?”

  “Friends?” He laughed again, a clipped, humorless bark. “Not sure about that. Your grandmother was mean as a wasp and tough as stewed skunk—except with Scarlett. She adored Scarlett.”

  “Well, then why are you feeding her dog?”

  “That ain’t anybody’s dog,” he said with feeling. After a moment he added, “But it needs to eat, and I’m a dog trainer, and dumb enough not to pass up a challenge. Though if I was to make a bet on who was going to out-stubborn the other, I’d bet on Royal.”

  “Royal?”

  “Mutt can thank Margaret for that. How the hell she came up with that . . .” He ran his hand through his hair. “Look, if you’re really locked out, I guess I could let you in. I mean, it’ll be just one more bad decision in a series, I guess. Though it’s hard for me to believe you’re descended from Margaret if a little thing like that lock’s going to stop you.”

  Katie let that pass. “Listen, um, Jam, I’d be really, really grateful if you’d help me get in. You have a key?”

  He didn’t even bother to answer, but took his wallet out of his pocket and removed a credit card. He stepped over the dog, who stopped eating only long enough to snarl and snap, and jiggled the handle while he slipped the card between the door and the frame. A second later, he had it open.

  “Well, that was impressive,” Katie said. “Although one does wonder where you picked up that skill.”

  “Don’t bother inviting me in,” he said, ignoring her comment. “Royal and I were just leaving. And do yourself a favor—after you’re done robbing Margaret blind, keep on going and don’t even think about coming after me next—I’m armed, and I’ll shoot an intruder faster than you’ll know what hit you.”

  With that, he turned and jogged around the house at an easy clip. The dog took a last, hopeful lick at the bowl, growled one last time, and slunk off into the bushes.

  Chapter Fourteen

  August 1963

  Give me that,” Margaret said, holding out her hand and holding in her temper. Georgina gazed up at her with enormous cornflower-blue eyes and not an ounce of guile, and then she ran out of the room, tottering barefoot on her chubby legs out the open screen door.

  Margaret leaned against the doorframe for support. She was tired—more tired than she’d ever been. When she’d finally gone to the doctor, giving in to Hank’s pleas after trying for months to convince herself that her fatigue would go away on its own, he’d given her a painful injection and instructed her to eat liver three times a week. He’d promised she’d be feeling better soon.

  But that was nearly a month ago.

  There was something worse than her exhaustion, something worse than her loneliness in this wretched cottage that they still, after nearly four and a half years, had not managed to escape; something even worse than trying to get from one week to the next on the handfuls of bills that Hank handed over, sometimes still smelling of motor oil and cigarettes from his pockets.

  The terrible secret that was weighing Margaret down was that she wished she had never had a child.

  Not always, certainly. Not even most of the time. But on afternoons like this—the mercury in the thermometer that some former tenant of the cottage had mounted on the window frame in the kitchen had risen steadily all morning and now hovered around ninety-five after lunch—all she wanted was a swim in the pool at her parents’ club and a cool glass of lemonade and a beautiful dress to change into for dinner. She longed for the days when babies belonged to other girls, when they were tucked neatly into carriages to be admired and cooed over, and then taken away when they fussed.

  Georgina had been a happy infant, sleeping through the night at three months, smiling for both her mama and her daddy. At eighteen months, she’d turned into a spectacular flirt, apt to peek between her hands at strangers in the market, or pull up her skirt shyly at church. She copied everything Margaret did, pretending to read the newspaper or put on lipstick or cook in the kitchen, stacking pots on top of each other on the floor that Margaret could never quite get clean.

  On her second birthday, however, when Margaret put a wedge of buttermilk cake on a saucer and set it in front of her, Georgina had smiled merrily, picked up the plate, and dropped it on the floor, to the accompaniment of gales of laughter. When Margaret had scolded her, she had screamed for her daddy in a shrill volume that Margaret had never heard before. Hank, in a rare good mood, asked Margaret if she’d pinched their daughter and then paraded her around the house on his shoulders while Margaret
cleaned up the mess.

  “The terrible twos,” the other mothers told her at the park on days when Hank drove her into town, rolling their eyes when Margaret swore that Georgina had always been an angel. But Margaret had seen them with her own eyes, the little scamps who put mud pies down each other’s shirt and teased their siblings and pulled the tails of dogs and cried, cried, cried at the slightest provocation. It was different with Georgina: for reasons entirely her own, she seemed to have simply decided one day to wage a war on her mother, one that was going on its third year. She threw her toys on the floor, smeared her dinner in her hair, pulled Margaret’s dresses off the hangers when she tried to take a bath. As she got older, she sassed back and refused to do as she was told and invented new forms of mischief seemingly every day. Today, she’d gotten into Margaret’s jewelry box and taken the brooch her parents had given her for her eighteenth birthday, one of the only good pieces she still owned after selling off most of them one by one when there wasn’t enough money to pay the bills.

  And now Georgina was running through the backyard to the edge of the sorghum field. If she dropped the brooch among the feathery orange stalks, Margaret would never be able to find it. The thought made her nearly hysterical with anger and frustration.

  She yanked off her apron and went running after her daughter, but Georgina was moving with incredible speed, dashing over the tricycle she’d upended on the lawn, heading straight for the plants, which were taller than she was.

  Margaret let out an inhuman roar and launched herself at her daughter, managing to snatch the hem of her sundress. Georgina went down hard, Margaret twisting her ankle and nearly falling on top of her; out of the corner of her eye she saw the flash of gold as the brooch went spinning through the air and fell into the grass.

  Georgina started screaming, incomprehensible angry shrieks, and Margaret smacked her.

  She hadn’t meant to; it hadn’t felt like her palm that smacked against Georgina’s plump, smooth cheek, whipping her head to the side and leaving an angry red mark. She was shocked into silence—or no, her head lolled listlessly, like a doll’s, and Margaret gasped: Had she knocked her unconscious? Broken her neck?