Chickie beamed and patted the oak mantel. “Isn’t it darling? And Daisy will have such fun fixing it up.” She leaned forward. “I know you men. You wouldn’t care where you lived, but Daisy needs something sweet and pretty.”
“Right,” Linc said and thought wrong. Daisy needed therapy and a full-time keeper, but that wasn’t his problem.
Chickie turned to gaze around at the oak woodwork again, obviously picturing Daisy dusting or doing other housewifely things, and Linc winced at how happy she looked. She still thought she was getting a surrogate daughter. He felt ashamed for leading her on. But Daisy would probably have been a great disappointment to Chickie, since he was fairly sure she never dusted. And he’d tell her eventually that Daisy wasn’t coming. He just couldn’t face the wailing at the moment. He’d tell her closer to fall, when school started and she was more distracted, although he wasn’t sure how that would work since she didn’t have anything to do with school. In fact, as far as he could see, Chickie’s problem was that she didn’t have anything to do at all.
Linc did. He hired a plumber to come in and fix the plumbing, and an electrician to come in and fix the wiring, and painters to paint the outside of the house (“Yellow with blue and white trim,” Chickie told him, “because that’s what Daisy would want,” and he went along with it because it was easier than arguing or explaining that Daisy was no longer in the picture), but he hunkered down to do everything else, drawing on the years he’d spent trying to keep his mother’s house from falling apart until there was enough money to move her to a better one. The irony occurred to him as he was sanding down a spackled patch: he’d finally gotten his two brothers through college and they had enough money to move her to a new home, but she’d refused to go. So he was still going back to Sidney—patching new cracks as they appeared, repainting and refinishing—only now in a giant leap forward, he had two old houses to keep going. That was not part of his plan at all, and it was all because of women: his mother who wouldn’t move, Chickie who had picked this house, and Daisy, who had inspired it.
The worst part was that Chickie was right; Daisy would have loved the house. As he worked patching and painting the walls, he could see her trailing her long skirts across the gleaming living room floor, dropping that awful hat in the high-ceilinged hall, shooting him that smile from the arched doorway into the kitchen, sitting on the solid oak stairs and explaining the world to him through the ornate railing. Once he found himself holding an imaginary argument with her as he painted, convincing her that it was practical to paint all the walls white. The really irritating thing about that hadn’t so much been that he caught himself doing it as it was that she’d been winning. Chickie didn’t help; she dropped by regularly with notes about curtains and rugs and the best place to buy bread, all beginning “Dear Daisy.” And it was his fault; he’d started it with that first dumb story he’d told about his fiancée. Everything Daisy had said about stories came back to him: the stories you told were unreal but not untrue; she wasn’t really there, but she was everywhere.
He sighed and kept on painting, and when he moved his chrome and leather furniture into the big old rooms, he knew what Daisy would say, and he had a feeling she was right, so it was a damn good thing she wasn’t there to say it.
“Linc moved out yesterday,” Julia told Daisy early in June.
“I know.” Daisy nodded toward a huge vase of gladioli, birds of paradise, and cattails sitting on the wobbly table near her door. “He sent me flowers.”
Julia squinted at the arrangement. “Obviously chosen with you in mind, I don’t think. Didn’t he get to know you at all in Prescott?”
“No.” Daisy tried to keep the melancholy out of her voice. “He didn’t want to. I think I made his teeth hurt.”
“Oh?” Julia shot her one of those Hello? glances. “Well, he’s not exactly your type either, is he?”
“No.” The melancholy was there for sure, and Daisy gave up. “He makes me crazy, if you want to know the truth. I mean, he’s just like my father, all orders and rules.”
“But …” Julia prompted.
“But I felt really good with him,” Daisy finished. “I felt safe. And he’s not exactly like my father. He never made me feel guilty or beholden or—well, okay, he did make me feel clueless, but not on purpose. Even though we were surrounded by all those people and telling that big story, I felt safe.” She met Julia’s eyes. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt safe, not since I caught on that my mother’s grip on reality wasn’t a good one. And I must have been about four, so it’s been a while.”
Julia scrunched farther down in Daisy’s old flowered armchair, staring into space as she thought. “You’re right about Linc, but I think that’s what I didn’t like about him when I was with him. No challenge, no excitement. As long as Linc is around, nothing goes wrong.”
“Yeah.” Daisy thought about riding through the night beside Linc in his awful car, wrapped in darkness and safety. “I loved that.”
“Just that?”
Well, no. There was his body. Daisy stood up and went to the kitchen to distract herself. “Just that. Do you want some coffee?”
“I’d rather have the truth.”
Daisy exhaled loudly and turned back to her. “Okay, it was not just that. I was tempted by his body. Really, really tempted. I’m still dreaming about him. But that body is attached to a mind that thinks I’m a nightmare, and I couldn’t stand the constant disapproval even if he wanted to take me to Prescott, which he doesn’t, since he won’t even talk to me in the hall, and now he’s gone, so it’s not an issue, so do you want coffee?” She blinked hard and realized there were tears coming, so she turned and went to the kitchen without waiting for Julia’s answer.
It was just as well. Julia went for the jugular. “Would you have gone to Prescott if he’d asked?”
Daisy took a coffee cup down from the shelf and shut the cabinet door carefully. “I don’t know. Maybe.” She turned and waved her hand at her apartment. “This isn’t working for me. I need to reinvent myself if I’m going to grow as an artist. I can’t hold on to the past, and I can’t keep doing the same things. But it’s so hard here, always scrambling for money and trying to convince myself I’m good even though nobody else thinks so—”
“I think so.”
“—and now even just painting is hard.” Daisy slumped against the counter and tried to put into words the realization that had been growing in the back of her mind during the past year. “I’m stuck in the old me, and I don’t know how to get out. I just know the old me isn’t the real me anymore.”
“And Prescott would have made you reinvent yourself.” Julia nodded. “Well, sure, but it would have made you reinvent yourself into a lie.”
“Maybe not.” Daisy closed her eyes and pictured herself in Prescott in that little Victorian house, something that was pretty easy since she’d been doing it ever since she and Chickie had first driven down Tacoma Street. “The college is conservative, but the town isn’t. There was an art gallery. And a house, a really, really darling house, not an apartment. Maybe I could have reinvented myself into something real there.” The coffeemaker sputtered, and Prescott in the spring vanished back into her apartment: cluttered, stale, and everything her life was that she didn’t want it to be. “But it wouldn’t have worked, and it’s probably just a cop-out anyway.”
“Maybe not,” Julia said. “Linc’s a good guy. Maybe it would have worked.”
“Not in a million years,” Daisy said. “Now, do you want coffee or not?”
Julia took the coffee and tried to keep the conversation about Linc going, but Daisy had had enough. She stonewalled until Julia gave up in exasperation and left, which was no improvement since that gave Daisy more time to think about Prescott and Linc, which made her breathe a little faster, which made her angry. Stop it, she told herself. Especially stop thinking about how nice and solid he was with his arms around you and how gorgeous he looks with his shirt off. He’s probably slee
ping with Little Gertrude by now, the incestuous jerk.
That thought was a killer, and Daisy shoved Linc firmly out of her mind, telling herself that the last thing she needed in her life was another disapproving male, but as the summer wore on, it got harder and harder to paint, and she began to hate her apartment, feeling as if she were trapped in it with the corpse of her old life. Sometimes then, in the middle of the night, Linc would creep back into her thoughts, and she’d think, He wasn’t disapproving when he had his arms around me. And then she’d kick herself and try to forget him again.
In September, Linc went to Crawford’s office for an early morning meeting to discuss the curriculum committee he had been assigned to, but the first thing Crawford said when Linc was sitting across from him was “When’s Daisy coming? Chickie’s driving me crazy, asking every day. What’s the hold up?”
Linc took a deep breath and dropped the bomb. “She’s not coming, sir. We had some problems over the summer, and we’ve decided it’s best to just go our separate ways.” It sounded lame and rehearsed, so he tried to look miserable, as if he missed Daisy dreadfully. When he thought about her, it wasn’t that hard. Those imaginary conversations were taking their toll.
“What?” Crawford leaned across his desk, glowering.
“It was just one of those things, sir.” Linc shrugged. “She wasn’t ready to get married. I lost her.”
Crawford thumped the desk. “Well, get her back, boy. A woman like that is one in a million.” Crawford leaned away and hooked his thumbs in his vest. “You bring her back and marry her here. Chickie wants to do the wedding in our backyard.” Crawford got a faraway smile on his face. It was ugly. “Daisy loved the gazebo, you know.”
This was bad. Chickie was obviously not the only one fantasizing about Daisy. “Yes, sir, she did, but I don’t think—”
Crawford shot him another slashing glare. “You sure don’t, boy, or you’d never have let her go. Now, you get out of here this afternoon. You want to fly? I’ll have Millie make your reservations. One going out and two coming back.” He pressed down on the intercom button. “Millie!”
“Uh,” Linc began, and Crawford glowered at him again and told his secretary to make plane reservations. He kept on glowering through the next ten minutes of Linc’s increasingly frantic explanations as to why bringing Daisy back was impractical, implausible, and impossible, until his secretary interrupted them with the ticket information.
“One out and two back, Dayton International at eleven,” she said, handing a memo with the ticket numbers to Linc. “Have a nice flight.”
Crawford glared at him. “Go.”
Booker found Linc standing in the hall, trying to figure out what to do next. “You look like a man who needs a drink.” Booker took his arm. “Come on.”
Linc opened his mouth to argue and then realized that Booker hadn’t said three words to him all summer. If he was offering a drink now, there was an agenda involved, so he shut up and followed the little man to his office.
Booker waved him to a chair and took a bottle from his bottom drawer. “How about Scotch.”
“Yeah. Sure.” Linc sank into the chair. “And a syringe.”
“Straight into the vein, is it?” Booker chuckled. “Well, I can’t say as I blame you. You’ve really got yourself in a mess.” He pulled two glasses out of the same drawer and kicked it shut with his shin.
Linc stopped thinking about how miserable he was. “How’d you know? I just got out of Crawford’s office.”
Booker pursed his lips and looked up at the ceiling. “Let me guess. You told him your engagement has been broken off, and he’s now sending you back to get—what’s her name—Rosie.”
“Daisy.”
“Daisy.” Booker nodded and poured. “Only you can’t, because you were never engaged to her in the first place.” He held out one of the glasses to Linc as he sat down in his desk chair.
Linc blinked once at him and took the glass from him. “How long have you known about Daisy?”
“Since the first interview.” Booker drank some Scotch, savoring it. “I asked you if you were married, and you said no, and Crawford had a heart attack, and I watched your fiancée born right before my eyes.” He looked at Linc over his horn-rimmed glasses. “You were pretty good, actually.”
Oh, yeah. So good Booker had nailed him at the beginning. Linc sighed. “Why didn’t you tell Crawford?”
“Because I wanted to hire you.” Booker set his glass down, exasperated. “I wanted a good teacher in the department, someone with research experience. Your publication is sterling and your teaching evaluations are even better. And you’re working on a new book, aren’t you?”
Linc gave up being surprised. “Yes. How’d you know?”
Booker shrugged. “Anybody we hired, I was going to have to live with for a long time. I looked into you.”
Linc went back to the obvious. “Then you knew I wasn’t engaged when you asked me.”
“I hadn’t heard about a fiancée, but I wasn’t asking about one either. I don’t give a damn whether you’re married or not. That’s Crawford’s question. I just asked you about it because it makes him happy.”
“You must have really enjoyed the weekend we spent here.” Linc tried to remember how Booker had reacted.
“Almost as much as I enjoyed hearing what your book was about. Nineteenth-century birth control as subversive feminism. Crawford’s going to have a coronary when he finds out.” Booker laughed. “I’m going to enjoy that.”
Linc thought about getting annoyed and decided it wasn’t worth it. “Not if I’m not here to write it.”
Booker waved that off. “You’ll be here. You signed a contract. And Crawford will forgive all when you get what’s-her-name, Daisy, back here.”
Nobody was listening to him. “What’s-her-name isn’t coming back here.”
“You won’t make full professor without her.” Booker leaned back in his chair. “Crawford likes faculty wives. Especially attractive faculty wives. And he has grave suspicions about single men in their thirties.”
Linc rolled his eyes.
“I know,” Booker said. He stretched out his hand and snagged the bottle again. “I told you, he’s a fool. But he’s a powerful fool. Get her back.”
Suppose she did come back … Linc sipped his Scotch and let himself openly consider the idea for the first time, hating how much he liked it. There were many good reasons why the whole thing was a bad idea, reasons that mainly featured Daisy’s mouth and Daisy’s body, but the truth was, he missed her. He wanted to show her Prescott and the house and watch her face and see her smile and—
Booker picked up the phone. “I’ll call you a cab.”
Daisy carefully painted in the tiny pink dress that made Rosa Parks stand out like a beacon on the crowded bus. She moved the brush back to the china plate she was using as a palette and picked up a deeper rose to paint in the pleats in Rosa’s skirt, and then she stopped and sighed. Liz twitched an ear at her sigh, and Annie jerked her head around, but nothing else changed. Daisy stared at the painting, one she really believed in, one she really wanted to do, one she really didn’t want to do. Part of her genius was her attention to detail, but it was the part of her genius that was starting to make her nuts. She suddenly wanted to paint Rosa large, in big, juicy slashes of paint, but that would have been ridiculous. She couldn’t tell detailed stories in big, juicy slashes, and stories were her life. Except she didn’t like her life anymore. I need a change, she cried silently, but it was the same old cry and there was no change coming, so she took a deep breath and painted the first pleat.
Then she heard the outer door slam shut, and seconds later somebody pounded on her door.
Liz and Annie both looked at her. “Maybe this is it,” she said to them. “Maybe we’re getting a new life.” She put down her brush and went to answer the knock.
He was thinner than she remembered, but he had the same handsome face, the same tapering hips, the same st
ereo he’d stolen from her months before. “I don’t believe this,” she said, and slumped against the doorframe. “Derek, what are you doing here?”
“Hello, baby.” Derek beamed at her and held up the stereo with the two small speakers stacked on top. “I brought you this.”
“Thank you.” Daisy took the stereo stack from him. “Now, good-bye,” she said, and tried to shut the door with her hip.
Derek blocked it with his foot. “That’s all? No, Derek, sweetheart, honey, baby, I missed you? No, God, it’s good to see you? No, come on in and take off your clothes?”
“No.” Daisy was still trying to close the door. “I’m trying to move in a new direction, not backtrack. Go away.” She gave up on the door and went to put the stereo down, and when she turned around, he was in the apartment, looking winsome and contrite and truly annoying.
“I want to come back, Daisy,” he said with all the fake sincerity he was capable of.
And I had a relationship with this? Daisy mentally kicked herself and then moved on. “I don’t want you back, Derek. The stereo is still welcome, of course, but you’re not. Go away.”
“You’re a hard woman, Daisy.” Derek grinned at her and kicked the door closed behind him. “That’s one of the million things I loved about you.” He opened his arms to her. “Come on, you don’t mean it.”
“Sure, I do.” Daisy detoured around him and opened the door again. “Get out. I’m not interested.”
Derek leaned toward her, obviously ready to deal the ace up his sleeve. “Daisy, the band cut a record. I’m going to be rich.” He stood back to enjoy her reaction.
The Cinderella Deal Page 7
