During that school year, he’d turned sixteen, a year older than Nathan was now. The two had the same dark coloring in hair and skin tone, and perhaps their noses were similar. She looked for other resemblances and found none.
That was also the year Jack had quit football because his father needed him after school in the garage. Up until his sophomore year, Jack had always been the first string quarterback. When he quit, Steven took over the position. As far as she recalled, he’d never had any hard feelings toward Steven, only a sadness that he could no longer play ball.
That was also the year she’d started to fall in love with him. Oh, she’d always loved Jack in the same way she’d loved Steven, but it seemed that one moment she’d been looking at him as she always had, and in the next everything changed.
On that particular day, he’d been waiting for Steven to finish football practice, sitting on the tailgate of his daddy’s old truck. She’d stayed after school to make posters for the homecoming dance and later saw him in the parking lot, sitting and watching instead of playing.
Perhaps it had been a trick of the light, an early fall sunset casting him in gold. She didn’t know, but she’d noticed more than his usual good looks. More than his lashes that were longer than hers. More than the slight stubble on his jaw. More than his arms folded across his chest and the defined balls of his biceps and the hard cord of muscle of his forearms. Jack did not lift weights. He lifted car engines.
“Hey there,” he said, and patted the tailgate next to him.
“What are you doing?” she asked as she sat. She placed her school books in her lap and looked out over the field as the Lovett Mustangs broke practice and the players jogged toward the locker room.
“Waiting for Steven.”
“Do you miss playing, Jack?”
“Nah, but I miss the pretty girls.” It was of course true that the football players did get the prettiest girls. But it wasn’t true that just because he no longer played, he didn’t get his share.
“Now you have to settle for the ugly ones,” she teased and looked at him out of the corner of her eye.
“Daisy, don’t you know there aren’t any truly ugly girls in Texas?”
He was so full of it. “Where’d you hear that?”
He shrugged. “It’s just a fact. Like the Alamo and the Rio Grande, is all.” He took her hand and brushed his thumb over her knuckles as he studied her fingers. “You’ll still be seen with me, though, won’t you?”
She turned her head and gazed more fully at him, all prepared with a flip answer, but he glanced up and something in his green eyes stopped her. For about half a second, she saw something, something in the way he looked back at her, something that made her think the answer was important to him. As if he wasn’t sure. She got a surprising glimpse inside of Jack that she’d never seen before. Maybe things didn’t bounce off him like he was superman. Maybe he felt things like everybody else. Maybe more.
Then he flashed her a smile and it was gone.
“Of course, Jack,” she said. “I’ll always be seen with you.”
“I knew I could count on you, buttercup.” For the first time, his voice slid inside her chest and warmed her up with hot tingles. It was all so incredible and fantastic and left her stunned. And it absolutely could not happen. She couldn’t fall in love with Jack. He was a friend, and she didn’t want to lose him. But even if he wasn’t her friend, she’d be an idiot to let it happen.
He squeezed her hand and stood. “Do you need a ride home?”
She looked up at him, standing in front of her with his hands shoved in the front pockets of his Levi’s, and nodded. Jack Parrish had many wonderful qualities. Being faithful to one girl wasn’t one of them. He’d shatter her heart like glass. If that happened, they couldn’t be friends anymore. And she’d miss him terribly.
By the time Steven walked out of the boy’s locker with his wet hair slicked back, she’d convinced herself that she wasn’t falling in love with Jack. He’d made her momentarily confused. Like when they’d been kids and would ride the merry-go-round too long. Jack used to spin it so fast that for a while after she couldn’t think or see straight.
But she was over it now. Thinking straight once again. Thank God. “Are y’all going somewhere?” she asked.
“We’re driving over to Chandler,” Jack answered, referring to a town the size of Lovett and about fifty miles to the west.
“Why?”
“There’s a ’69 Camaro Z-28 I want to look at.”
“A ’69?” She’d never understood Jack’s fascination with old cars. Or as he called them, “classics.” She preferred new cars with upholstery that didn’t snag her nylons. With Jack, it was more than just a case of not having money for a new car. Although he certainly didn’t. In that respect, she and Jack had a lot more in common than either did with Steven. Steven’s father was a lawyer and his family had money. His biggest responsibility was to maintain his grades. By contrast, her mother was a waitress who depended on survivor benefits from the government, and Jack’s family had a garage that never seemed to bring in a lot of money. She and Lily were responsible for keeping the house clean and starting supper, while Jack helped out in the family business. “Does the car run?” she asked.
“Not yet.”
Exactly.
“Hey, Daisy,” Steven said as he approached. “What are you doing at school so late?”
“Making homecoming posters. Are you going to the homecoming dance?”
“Yeah, I’m thinking about asking Marilee Donahue. Do you think she’ll go with me?” Steven smiled and there wasn’t a doubt that Marilee would say yes.
She shrugged. “Are you going, Jack?” she asked, although she was fairly sure she knew the answer.
“Nope. You know I only put on a suit when my mom forces me to for Sunday School and funerals.” He shut the tailgate and walked to the driver’s side. “And I hate to dance.”
Daisy suspected that it wasn’t so much that Jack hated to dance as much as he just didn’t know how to dance. And he’d always been the kind of person that if he didn’t do something well, he didn’t do it at all. “You could just wear a nice shirt and tie,” she told him, but for some reason, the fact that Jack wasn’t taking a girl to the school dance warmed her heart more than it should have, given that she was over her earlier confusion.
“Not a chance.” The three of them got into the old truck and Jack fired it up.
“Have you been asked yet?” Jack asked her as he drove from the parking lot with her sitting between them like always.
“Yes.” They were so weird about who she dated she didn’t want to say.
“Who?” Steven asked.
She looked straight ahead at the dashboard and the road beyond.
Steven hit her with his elbow. “Come on, Daisy Lee. Who asked you?”
“Matt Flegel.”
“You’re going with Bug?”
“He doesn’t like to be called that anymore.”
Jack looked at Steven over the top of her head.
“What’s wrong with Bug . . . I mean Matt?” She held up a hand before either could answer. “Forget I asked. I don’t care what y’all think. I like Matt.”
“He gets around a lot.”
“He’s the wrong kind of boy for you,” Jack added.
She folded her arms and was silent the rest of the way home. The pair of them were serial daters, and that was putting it nicely. She wasn’t about to listen to their opinion, and if there ever was a “wrong kind of boy” for her or any girl, it was Jack. Which made her doubly glad she wasn’t really falling in love with him.
She spent the rest of her sophomore year dating boys that neither Steven nor Jack approved of, but she didn’t care. Like most girls her age, she learned how to make out and drive boys crazy. And more important, she learned where to stop before things went too far. As a result, she developed a reputation for being a tease. Which she didn’t think was fair at all. Boys kissed her. She
kissed them back. As far as she could tell, a girl was either a prude, which meant she didn’t kiss at all. A tease, meaning she kissed and perhaps a bit more, or was a slut. And everyone knew what that meant.
That summer, she’d let Erik Marks touch her breast on the outside of her T-shirt. Jack and Steven heard about it and made a special trip over to her house to talk to her. She’d gotten mad and slammed the front door in their faces.
The hypocrites.
She made varsity cheerleader her junior year. Her hair had grown out to her shoulders and she got a spiral perm. Steven was still in football and basketball, and of course, student government. Jack was racing his Camaro on the flat Texas roads, and she was still telling herself that she wasn’t attracted to him. She told herself that she loved him but she wasn’t in love with him, and that her heart didn’t pinch when he drove by with his arm around some girl. He was her friend, just as he’d always been. Nothing more. And she wouldn’t allow herself to feel anything more either.
All that changed a few weeks before Christmas her senior year when she got asked to the Christmas prom by J.T. Sanders. J. T. was gorgeous and drove a new Jeep Wrangler. Black. Daisy worked nights at the Wild Coyote Diner, and she’d managed to save enough money to buy the prefect dress. White satin. Sleeveless with tiny rhinestones on the tight fitting bodice and tulle skirt. It was the most beautiful thing she’d ever owned. The night before the dance, she picked up J. T.’s boutonniere on her dinner break. When she got home, he called and canceled. He said his grandmother died and that he had to go to her funeral in Amarillo. Everyone knew that he’d actually started dating another girl the week before. Daisy had been dumped. Flat.
And everyone knew it.
The Saturday of the prom, Daisy worked the lunch shift at the Wild Coyote. She kept it together and acted like she wasn’t humiliated. She pretended she wasn’t sad or hurt. She joked with her co-workers about J.T. being a loser anyway.
No one bought it. Getting dumped the night before the prom with some lame-o excuse was the worst thing that could ever happen to any girl.
And everyone knew it.
After her shift, she went home and locked herself in her room. With her dress hanging on her closet door, she threw herself on her bed and had a nice long cry. At four, her mother stuck her head in the room and asked if she wanted some mint chocolate chip ice cream. She didn’t. Lily made her a cowboy pie sandwich, but she couldn’t eat it.
At five-thirty Jack knocked on her bedroom door, but she wouldn’t let him in. Her face was splotchy and her eyes puffy, and she didn’t want him to see her that way.
“Daisy Lee,” he called through the door. “Come out of there.”
She sat up on her bed and pulled a Kleenex from the box. “Go away, Jack.”
“Open up.”
“No.” She blew her nose.
“I have something for you.”
She stared at the door. “What?”
“I can’t tell you. I have to show you.”
“I look really bad.”
“I don’t care.”
Well she did. She slipped from the bed and opened the door a crack. She stuck her hand out. “What is it?” He didn’t answer and she was forced to peer out the crack. Jack stood in the hall, the light from her sister’s bedroom shining on him like a dark angel or at the very least a choirboy. He wore his navy blue Sunday suit, and a cream-colored shirt. A red tie hung loose around his neck. “What’s going on, Jack? Did you go to a funeral?”
He laughed and brought his hand out from behind his back. He laid a wrist corsage of white and pink roses in her palm. “Will you go to the prom with me?”
“You hate school dances,” she said through the crack.
“I know.”
She brought the corsage to her nose and breathed deep. Her nose was clogged so it wasn’t that deep. She bit her bottom lip to keep it from trembling. And as she looked at him, standing in the hall of her house, wearing a suit he hated and asking her to a dance he loathed, she fell helplessly in love with Jack Parrish. It expanded her heart and flooded her chest and scared her to death. All those years of fighting it faded away to nothing.
She’d fallen in love with Jack and there hadn’t been anything she could do about it.
That night Jack kissed her for the first time. Or rather, she’d kissed him. During the dance, while she’d been falling in love for the first time in her life, he treated her as he always had, as a friend. While he made her whole body feel hot and alive, he’d stayed cool. It had all been wonderful and awful, and after the prom, when he walked her to her front door, she wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him.
At first he stood with his hands to his side. Then he grasped her shoulders through her coat and pushed her away, angry.
“What are you doing?”
“Kiss me, Jack.” If he rejected her, she was sure she’d just die right there. On the porch.
His grip tightened and he brought her forward and pressed his warm lips to her forehead.
“No, don’t treat me like a friend.” She swallowed hard past the ache in her chest. “Please,” she whispered as she looked up at him. “I want you to kiss me like you do other girls. I want you to touch me like you do other girls, too.”
He pulled back and his green gaze slid to her mouth. “Don’t tease me, Daisy. I don’t like it.”
“I’m not teasing you.” She ran her hand across the shoulder of his jacket to the side of his neck. “Please, Jack.”
Then as if he didn’t want to kiss her, but he couldn’t fight it any longer, he slowly lowered his mouth to her. This time the touch of his lips stole her breath. She tilted her head back and sank into his chest. Until that moment, she’d thought she knew what it was like to kiss a boy. Jack showed her she hadn’t a clue. The kiss was hot and wet and filled with so much hunger that it changed her forever.
Even now, after all these years, Daisy remembered standing on her mother’s porch as Jack turned her world inside out. She’d clung to him as he’d fed her those liquid kisses that had made her breasts ache and her body tremble. His hands had never moved from her shoulders, but he’d made her crave his touch. She’d wanted him to touch her all over. Instead he’d walked away, leaving her stunned and wanting more.
Chapter 5
The next day, Daisy called Jack but he didn’t pick up. The longer she put off telling him about Nathan, the harder it was going to get. She knew that, having already put if off for fifteen years. But what she hadn’t realized before she’d arrived was that the longer she put it off, the more memories of her life in this town would drag her back into the past. Before she’d arrived, the plan had been to tell Jack, give him Steven’s letter, and deal with the fallout: if not easy, at least straightforward. Now, it didn’t seem real straightforward either. But it had to be done. She was leaving in seven days.
Before noon, she tried Jack’s number two more times, but he didn’t answer. She figured he was probably not answering on purpose. She went to church with her mother, and afterward, they had an early dinner with Lily and Pippen. Phillip “Pippen” Darlington was two and had a blond mullet because his mother couldn’t bear to cut the curls at the nape of his neck. He had huge blue eyes like Lily, and he loved Thomas the Tank Engine. He also loved wearing his faux coonskin cap and shouting NO! loud enough to be heard into the next county. He hated food with texture, spiders, and his Velcro Barney sneakers.
Daisy looked at him sitting in his high chair at her mother’s dinner table and tried not to frown as he poured grape Kool-Aid from his Tommy Tippy cup into his baked potato. Daisy’s mother and Lily sat across the table from her and didn’t seem to mind that Pippen was making a disgusting mess.
“He’s a rat bastard!” Lily was telling her, referring, of course, to her soon to be ex-husband, The Rat Bastard Ronald Darlington. “A few months before he ran off with his jailbait girlfriend, he took all the money out of our accounts and put it somewhere.”
Louella nodded her he
ad sadly. “Probably in Mexico.” Growing up, if either had uttered the word “bastard” at the dinner table, they’d have been sent from the room.
“What is your attorney doing about that?” Daisy asked
“There isn’t a lot he can do. We can prove the money was in the account, but not where it went. The judge can order him to give me half, but that doesn’t mean he will. And for years, Ronnie was paid under the table in order to avoid paying the IRS, so it looks like he only makes twenty thousand a year instead of seventy-five.” Lily sliced a piece of meat with a vengeance. Even though they were sisters and had grown up together, they weren’t very close. Growing up, they’d mostly fought or ignored each other. Lily had been in middle school when Daisy had moved away, and they’d never really maintained a relationship after that. Losing Steven had made her realize how important her family was to her. She needed to work on her relationship with her sister.
“He said that if I tell the IRS about it,” Lily continued, “he’ll fight for custody of Pippen. What can I do?”
When both her mother and Lily stared at her, Daisy realized it wasn’t a rhetorical question. There were dark circles under Lily’s eyes as if she hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in a long time. Her blond hair was cut short and framed her pretty face with soft curls, but at the moment, she looked anything but soft. No, she looked scared as hell. “You’re asking me? How should I know?”
“Darren Monroe is a lawyer,” her mother provided.
“Steven’s father is retired and living in Arizona. And besides, he was a criminal defense attorney; Steven designed computer software programs. I know nothing about the family courts.” She recognized the fear in Lily’s blue eyes. It was the fear of being suddenly alone with the responsibility of raising a child. But unlike Daisy, Lily wasn’t financially secure, nor did she have a career to fall back on. Not that Daisy’s career had ever provided a huge income, but she was a good photographer and had connections. If she had to support herself and Nathan on her income alone, she could. Lily had been a stay-home wife and a mom, which was admirable but weren’t marketable skills. She was terrified. “I’ll try to think up something,” Daisy said, although she had troubles of her own and was only here for a week now.
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