The Secret Hum of a Daisy

by Tracy Holczer

  The nylon rope was wet and splintery as I made sure the tarp was still tight over the bed of the truck. A broken plastic thread from the rope stabbed the palm of my hand. It bled.

  Grandma unlocked the rusted handle on the passenger side, and then dug two handkerchiefs out of her giant black purse, giving one to me. The other she used to blow her nose. I waited for her to move before climbing in, holding the handkerchief tight in my fist.

  When she got into the truck, she fished around in her purse again and came up with a Safeway plastic grocery bag. She nodded toward my pockets and set the bag on the seat between us.

  “For the dirt,” she said.

  • • •

  Mama died six days ago, and Grandma had tried to pick me up twice before, but I’d hidden from her. The threat of missing Mama’s funeral was what finally made me get into her truck. At least twenty times per day, I’d begged Mrs. Greene to let me stay. But Mrs. Greene had said the same thing each time. “She’s your grandma, Grace. You have to give it time. Everyone deserves a bit of time.”

  “What about what I deserve?”

  “You deserve to be loved. But sometimes, you can’t see what that looks like for yourself. You’ve got too much mad mixed up in there. Too much sorrow. After a few months, things will be different.” Mrs. Greene had put her hand on my leg and squeezed, holding tight longer than was necessary.

  Mama and I had lived with Mrs. Greene and Lacey for nine months, the longest we’d lived anywhere, and by the time we got there, I was tired. Tired of this adventure Mama said we were on, trying to find the perfect place to call home. For Mama, there was always a better job or a better place to live, better schools or less crime. A place with trees or, when she was sick of trees, a place with open fields or water or whatever it was that Mama needed to keep her spirits up. Mama told me that when we finally found home, it would hum. Like the daisies.

  I thought we’d finally found that place when we found Mrs. Greene. The wide and slow movement of the Sacramento River was a quick walk from Mrs. Greene’s back steps. The mountains were an hour’s drive, and the beach was just a little farther in the other direction. Mrs. Greene had taken us under her wing, both me and Mama, into a safe place that felt like home. But things always seemed to happen at some point or another to make Mama want to leave, and Mrs. Greene’s ended up being no different.

  Grandma drove down Main Street, past the small church we’d just left and the public school next to it. As we drove past the snow-globe storefronts, I saw a giant spoon hanging from a pole in front of a restaurant called the Spoons Souperie. I spun around in my seat and watched the spoon swing in the wind.

  “What is it?” Grandma said.

  “Nothing.”

  Mama had used spoons in all of her birds, claiming that a spoon was the utensil of comfort. She said it brought you soup on a cold day and stirred honey in your tea. Without spoons we couldn’t eat pudding or ice cream, and you could never hang a fork from your nose or ears.

  It confused me to think she might have been using them because they reminded her of home. Home being a place she never talked about.

  Thinking that was a question I couldn’t answer, I let it go as we came to a four-way stop where the land opened to rolling fields and cedars. There was a sign welcoming us to Gold Country, California. One of the only other pieces of information Grandma had shared with me was that Auburn Valley was on the National Register of Historic Places because of how much gold had been discovered here. She explained it was an even smaller town now than it was then because of some fires that had burned the place down a long time ago.

  After a short distance, she made a left on Ridge Road. She drove so slow, I almost could have walked faster.

  Try as I might to picture the house where Mama had lived, the only picture I came up with was the witch’s cottage from “Hansel and Gretel.” As much as I’d like to see Grandma as the witch in that cottage, she was actually pretty ordinary looking. No tinge of green or warts. Instead, she had silver hair with streaks the same blond as Mama’s pulled back into a loose knot, and she wore long gray skirts and tall black boots with flat heels, which didn’t do anything to hide the length of her legs. She had a tiny silver cross at her neck, the only delicate part of her, it seemed, and a habit of touching it, like it was a raft floating in the middle of our wide and deep silences.

  I’d written letters to Grandma when I was eight. Forbidden letters. The only thing in my life I kept secret from Mama. The letters started from a school assignment where we had to write to our grandparents. I asked questions you might ask a grandmother. How to make pie, for instance. Or knit. I was forever seeing grandmas out there making pie and knitting, and figured I had a right to know. There were plenty of angry letters too. I asked how she could turn her back on her own child, pregnant at seventeen.

  I’d written a total of twenty-seven letters and bundled them with string like a miniature stack of newspapers. I still carried them from place to place in my army duffel.

  “There’ll be some house rules, of course,” Grandma said as we drove. Her voice was low and husky like Mama’s.

  I continued to look out the foggy window.

  “Certain rooms are off-limits. Your Grandpa’s office right off the kitchen, my room. The kitchen is free to use as long as you clean up after yourself.”

  We passed a large wooden sign with letters branded into it that read BRANNIGAN. In the distance beyond the fence were two horses, one dark brown and the other whitish gray with darker gray splotches, like a stormy sky. They grazed, tails flapping. The gray one lifted her head and looked at us. She was beautiful, with a big round belly. Endless amounts of grass will do that to a horse, I figured.

  Just past the horses, Grandma slowed and turned into a curved gravel driveway. Along the left edge, sun-bleached fence posts strung with rusted wire kept tall weeds from escaping a pasture, and the house sat at the top of a slight hill up ahead. There was a broken-down barn in the pasture, and a sturdy shed sitting off to the right. A thin metal smokestack poked out the top. Mama’s and my car, Daisy, was parked beside it.

  “Your sofa is in there,” Grandma said.

  “Is that your garage?”

  “Used to be your grandfather’s workshop.”

  I’d found a picture of Grandpa once, in one of Mama’s dresser drawers. He had silver and black hair, a big smile, and clearly loved the little girl who sat on his lap. Mama came into the room as I was looking at it, and took it carefully out of my hands. She told me three things before she put it away.

  She loved Grandpa almost as much as she loved me.

  He could build anything from a birdhouse to a skyscraper.

  He was a birder and took her everywhere he went in search of rare birds.

  She said that putting her junk-art birds together was her way of remembering.

  Mama never told me anything about Grandma except the fact that she’d sent her away when Mama had needed her most. I supposed she figured that was enough.

  Grandma drove up the gentle climb of the driveway and stopped in front of the house. There were two stories with attic windows on top, peeling sky-blue paint with white trim, also peeling, and a wood porch with two chairs covered in yellowed plastic and pine needles. Brass numbers hung on the front porch post, the middle number missing. I could tell from the tarnished outline that it had been the number 4. Piles of Tupperware and glass dishes covered in foil were set neatly beside the front door, a stack of firewood next to that.

  Grandma sighed. I climbed out of the truck, thinking about the impossibility of eating, when I heard it. It was coming from behind the house. Distant and soft.

  I couldn’t help but follow the sound, through the backyard garden, which looked like something from a magazine with its rock walls and graceful trees. I walked fast, then ran toward the thick forest at the back. The gray horse I’d seen in the front pa
sture was running along the fence line beside me and stopped as I went into the trees.

  “Where in heaven’s name . . . ,” Grandma called from somewhere behind me.

  Her words faded as the sound of water got louder. I moved through the thick trees, ankle deep in pine needles, their sharp points biting through my tights. There was a clearing. Then the river.

  It moved fast, sticks and torn branches rushing by. As I edged closer to the slippery rocks, I saw blond hair floating. Mermaid hair. Then gone. I sat down in a heap on the sand, trying to force the pictures out of my mind, but they played like a movie.

  A policeman putting a wool blanket around my shoulders, trying to take Mama’s hand from mine. How it took two of them to get me away from her. My hair dripping onto the scratchy wool of the blanket as I finally slumped against the policeman, resting my head on his shoulder. The edge of his badge in my ribs. How they asked me so many questions about what happened, and I couldn’t answer. Then I wouldn’t. I would never talk about that day.

  Grandma crouched beside me. Words tumbled around my mind, and I itched for my notebook and pencil, but they were in the duffel in the bed of Grandma’s truck.

  “It must have been . . . awful.”

  “Is this the Sacramento River?” I said.

  “It’s called the Bear up here.”

  There was nothing else to do but stand up on wobbly legs and get away from the river, wet branches slapping me in the face and neck as I ran back through the woods.

  Eventually, Grandma came around the house behind me, white mist puffing from her nose and mouth. She reached out a leather-gloved hand, but settled it on the rusted edge of the truck bed for support. She touched the cross at her neck.

  Mama had spent my lifetime staying away from this person. She’d gotten herself off a bus in a place she didn’t know and trusted a world of strangers could take better care of her than her own mother. I wasn’t about to do anything different.

  I paced beside the truck. “Mama said you sent her away, that you turned your back on us a long time ago.”

  Silence.

  “I know it’s true. I want to hear you say it.”

  Grandma took forever to answer. “Yes. I sent her away.”

  I stopped pacing. “Just like that?”

  “Nothing is just like that.”

  I went to work untying the rope holding down the tarp. I took one last look at the house, picked up the closest box, and headed toward Grandpa’s workshop.

  4

  Getting Stuck

  That Way

  Later that night, Grandma made threats about my staying in Grandpa’s shed, but we didn’t know each other well enough for them to have teeth. Short of slapping a padlock on the door, there wasn’t a thing she could do. She must have figured it out, too, because after getting rid of a few old containers of paint thinner, a saw blade, and two rat traps, she took her tall self out the door and left me alone.

  The workshop wasn’t a bad place to stay. There was a wood stove in the corner to keep me warm. Sort of. But at least I knew how to keep it running from the six months I’d had in King City with the Girl Scouts. A bucket took care of the drip from the ceiling. There were glass jars lined along the back wall that held nuts and bolts and other metal doodads in case I needed to fix something. It smelled like wood chips and oiled hinges. I didn’t care, though. As long as I had Mama’s quilt and sofa, I could stay out here forever.

  Best of all, I couldn’t hear the river.

  Trying to ignore the blasts of rain against the tin roof, I dug a flashlight out of one of the boxes and laid my sleeping bag and pillow on our flower-garden sofa. I took my latest notebook out of my duffel and climbed into the sleeping bag.

  I hadn’t written anything in the six days since Mama died, and the words were scratching at me in the way they always did. I hoped to find the end of that string inside myself—the string that tended to work itself into knots—and pull it straight. That was how the words felt sometimes as I wrote them down. Like I was taking something scrambled and unscrambling it.

  My need for words was because of Mama. Not only did she give me my first journal, but every night of my life, as I’d drift off to sleep, she’d whisper Robert Frost poems into the quiet. I mostly didn’t understand what the poems meant, but the rhythms gave me a feeling of comfort and they made me want to come up with my own sets of words. Mama told me I knew a lot for a kid, having moved around as much as we had, and that it was the living more than the poetry that made me smart. The last couple of years, she looked a little sad when she said it, like she wished my smarts had come a different way.

  I settled back on the sofa and tried to let my mind drift toward something good. Something that might give me a few minutes of comfort. As I closed my eyes, though, the only thing I could see was Mama when I found her, and I would never write about that. Not ever.

  It felt like the knots inside were about to cut off my circulation, so I read the last entry in my composition book to give me a place to start.

  Riding the Bus

  The smell of plastic seats

  and Mr. Jenkins whistling like a bird

  instead of saying hello,

  his mustache curving around puckered lips.

  Which made Lacey and me giggle

  every time

  because we couldn’t picture

  a Mrs. Jenkins smooching those lips.

  We’d walk to the middle of the bus

  making small kissing sounds

  against the backs of our hands

  while Mr. Jenkins’ birdcall

  followed us into the smooth green seat.

  A good way to start the day.

  It was weird to think how the girl who wrote that was gone. Like so gone, I could put up a missing-person poster. Then I realized all ten of my notebooks were Before, and what I was about to write would be After.

  I couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t talk about it or write about it or think about it. Ever. Maybe if I kept After from happening, I could keep Mama close somehow.

  I tucked deep into the sleeping bag, scared of the darkness just beyond the reach of my light, and brought Robert Frost with me. I read his words out loud, like Mama always did.

  And when I come to the garden ground,

  The whir of sober birds

  Up from the tangle of withered weeds

  Is sadder than any words.

  • • •

  Eventually the sound of my lonely voice was worse than the quiet, so I put the book away and shut off the flashlight. As I lay there, wide-awake, I felt the knots of my unwritten words pull even tighter.

  For the first time, I worried about getting stuck that way.

  5

  Zombification

  After ten days of trying to talk me into the house, Grandma tossed up her hands and said the word “independent” as though it were a curse word. But Mama always told me I was stubborn as a rusted hinge, so Grandma was no match. She hadn’t bothered me yet today, anyway. Maybe she took Sundays off. Besides, I wasn’t going anywhere unless it was with Mrs. Greene.

  I checked my watch—8:17. Mrs. Greene and Lacey were set to come at nine o’clock. I’d been calling every day and night since I got here just to make sure.

  I fished out Mama’s cracked eyebrow-plucking mirror and patted my hair. I hadn’t washed or brushed it since Mama’s funeral. It was a glory of tangles, as Mama would have said. I unzipped her makeup bag and carefully opened her charcoal eye shadow. I touched my finger to the soft powder and rubbed a bit of it under each eye, trying to do it the way Mama had last Halloween when I’d been a zombie.

  Next, I took out my biggest pair of jeans and cinched them with a belt. I found a ratty T-shirt Mama had used for sleeping and put it on over my ratty training bra that I’d trained myself right out of at least two months ago. I stood back f
or the full effect.

  I looked awful and I hadn’t been eating, and if that wasn’t enough to worry Mrs. Greene right into taking me with her, then I’d have to keep going with Plan B—driving Grandma crazy enough that she’d let me go of her own free will.

  I practiced my zombie walk, just for good measure.

  It was 8:21. Enough time to do another sweep through Mama’s room in the house before they got here.

  • • •

  Not wanting Grandma to see me, I tiptoed around the side of the house and hid behind a thick cedar to make sure she was in the garden. I’d been spying since I got here and I’d discovered a few things that, if I were writing in my notebook, I would write in my notebook. Instead, I had to keep it all floating around my mind, which was stressful. Like standing in a room full of bouncing Ping-Pong balls.

  She didn’t sleep. This I’d discovered when I tiptoed into the house the first night to snoop and found her reading by the fire in the living room. She asked me to join her, but I didn’t. Each night after that, I went later and later, but still found her sitting in the same broken-down rocking chair.

  She barely left the garden, even when it was cold and misty. She was constantly moving things around—trimming, digging, pulling—and she stormed everywhere she went. I wasn’t sure if her storming was her way of being sad, a permanent condition, or something brought on by my being here. Considering she’d had twelve years to get used to Mama’s being gone, her not wanting me here seemed a whole lot easier to believe.

  She didn’t talk on the phone or have anyone over or go for walks or make lists or pie like a normal grandma. She didn’t ask if I brushed my teeth or combed my hair, if I had on clean underwear, or if I’d eaten the trays of food she’d left for me. She didn’t ask about Mama, not that I would have told her, or whether or not I liked oatmeal for breakfast, which I didn’t.