The Cinderella Deal

by Jennifer Crusie

  wedding, “I wasn’t happy that you’d moved all my furniture upstairs, but you were right. That front room makes a nice study. I’m getting a lot done.”

  “Good.” Daisy looked past him, abstracted. “Do you have any objections to a blue dining room?”

  “No. What’s in the pot on the stove?”

  “Vegetable soup. Bread in the bread box. How about a peach living room?”

  “Fine.” He frowned as what she’d said reached him. “Peach? Oh, fine, I guess. Can I take some soup upstairs while I work?”

  Daisy flapped her hand at him while she stared into the dining room. “You can take it anywhere you want. When you meet with your students, will you be using the dining room?”

  Linc left her and headed for the kitchen and food. “I’ll be using my office at school.” He opened the bread box and rummaged to get under the two baked rounds of sourdough and wheat bread Daisy had brought home from the bakery. “Don’t we have any real bread?” he called to her.

  “That is real bread,” she called back. “The packaged stuff you eat is the fake kind. I think you should meet them here at the house. The other profs do. I asked Chickie.”

  Linc ignored her suggestion because he didn’t like it; the last thing he needed was his professional life slopping over into his personal life. “This stuff isn’t even sliced.”

  “You tear it. Sliced bread is for people with no imagination.”

  “That’s me.” He carried his tray through the door. “I’ll be in the study.”

  Daisy spent the eight days after her wedding working on the house, making slipcovers and curtains and painting furniture. She worked until two or three in the morning because she liked working at night, usually getting up at eleven the next morning, two hours after Linc had left for campus. Linc got up at six and ran for an hour, and then came back and worked in the quiet on his book before he left at nine. He was back by five and always in bed by eleven at the latest. They drifted by each other around dinner, checking with each other on concrete topics (“We’re out of milk,” “Your insurance agent called”), both so absorbed in what they were working on that they barely noticed each other.

  Linc told her that he was farther along in his book in eight days than he’d been in eight months. And Daisy had turned a desperation project into a work of art.

  She’d unpacked her finished paintings that the movers had stacked behind the couch. Daisy leaned a landscape with a girl dressed in peach against the wall in the living room and put a large blue still life in the dining room and considered them dispassionately. Then she went to work.

  She painted the living room pale peach, the hall pale yellow, and the dining room pale blue. She stenciled pale pink and yellow cabbage roses along the ceiling in the living room, and pink cabbage roses along the staircase wall in the hall. Then she free-painted pale blue daisies among the living room roses and white daisies in the hall. The whole effect was muted, faded as if with age. She’d already covered her upholstered furniture—some with the light flowered fabric, some with a coordinating dusty blue—and painted all the wood furniture white, picking out the detailing on the tables with peach and yellow. When the walls were done, she hung flowered draperies from rings on natural wood rods. In the dining room she painted a triple row of white checks along the edge of the ceiling to pick up the blue and white checked tablecloth in her big still life. She hung the still life over her old buffet, now also painted white, the edges trimmed with tiny white and blue checks, and hung blue and white checked curtains at the front windows. The curtains were all lined with white, so the house looked fine from the outside. Daisy was really proud of the linings; a month ago she wouldn’t have thought of it, and the house would have looked like a crazy quilt from the street.

  Her life was coming together, she thought on Monday night as she wandered through the three rooms she’d finished. The cats had settled in, and Jupiter was coming home tomorrow—she winced as she realized she still hadn’t told Linc—and the house had turned into a home. She stopped in the dining room, caught by the realization that they never ate there. Linc either ate while he talked to her, leaning against the kitchen sink, or he took a tray upstairs to the study. Now that the dining room was finished, they could eat like real people. Like Linc’s kind of people.

  “Look,” she said to him when he came down later looking for food. She pulled him out of the kitchen and into the dining room. “You don’t need to stand up by the sink anymore.”

  “It’s nice.” He looked around, not really seeing anything. “I like standing by the sink. We talk.”

  He looked lonely standing there, and she wanted to hold him, just go up and put her arms around him and comfort him. Stop it, she told herself. He’d just been working too hard. She patted his arm. “We should do more things together. Maybe.”

  He brightened at the thought. “Run with me tomorrow.”

  “Run?” Daisy said, appalled.

  Linc nodded, suddenly enthusiastic. “You don’t get enough exercise. It’ll be good for you. Come on, we’ll go get you shoes and sweats now. The stores don’t close until nine.” He picked up his coat.

  “Run?” Daisy tried to stall. “I don’t know, Linc—”

  He was already getting his keys. “Come on.” He looked so happy that she followed him out to the car without protest. She’d been thinking more of going to the movies or out for pizza, but she should have known he’d think of something that involved pain and suffering for a good cause. There was a lot of martyr in Linc.

  There was a lot of martyr in her too, Daisy thought as she dragged her body out of bed the next morning after only four hours of sleep. The things she’d do to save a fake marriage.

  Linc showed her how to warm up and then set off with her at a gentle jog. They fell into a pace in which he would run down a side street, across a block and up the next street to meet her so that he was still getting the workout he was used to but she could keep up. Daisy slowed to a walk every time he got out of sight, trying to keep her heart from exploding. It was on one of these blocks that she met Art coming out of his house to pick up his paper.

  “What are you doing?” he asked. “Your face looks like a tomato.”

  Daisy stopped and tried to breathe. “Jogging. My husband’s trying to keep me healthy.”

  Art frowned. “Does he have a lot of insurance on you? It looks more like he’s trying to kill you.”

  “No, no.” Daisy leaned on him for a moment to rest. “This is good for me.” She looked up and saw Linc jogging toward them. “Oh, no. I have to run again.”

  She meant it as a joke, but Art stiffened as he watched Linc run toward them, and she saw Linc through Art’s eyes, a big, broad, frowning, dark-haired guy in black sweats.

  “He’s really nice,” she said, and then Linc came up and said “Wimp” to her.

  Daisy nodded. “I am. You’ll just have to face it. This is Art Francis, the vet.”

  Linc offered his hand. “Something wrong with Annie or Liz?”

  “Annie and Liz?” Art asked.

  “Annie and Liz are our cats,” Daisy said.

  “No,” Art said. “I’ve got Jupiter.”

  “Jupiter?” Linc asked.

  Daisy bit her lip. “A dog got hit by a car.”

  Linc closed his eyes. “Of course. You would.”

  “It’s a very small dog.” Daisy put her hand on his arm, anxious about Jupiter’s future. “He won’t bother you.”

  “Daisy, you can have anything you want, including a damaged dog,” Linc said, and his exasperation was so clear that Art took a step closer to her. “Can we finish this run now? You really shouldn’t stop in the middle of exercise.”

  “My heart was going to explode.” Daisy clutched at him, panting a little. “I would have had a heart attack right here in the street. You would have had to pick up my stiffening body and carry me home, pretending to be grief-stricken, and then you would have had to listen to Chickie, Pansy, and Gertrude fight ov
er the flowers for the funeral and the color of my shroud. Julia would have cracked corpse jokes, Evan would have said that I looked pretty good although, of course, I was dead, and Crawford would have thought about necrophilia. I just did you a big favor by stopping.”

  Art stared at her, and Linc sighed. “She’s not nuts,” he said to Art. “She just has these narrative fits where reality recedes.”

  “I know she’s not nuts,” Art said shortly, and turned away from him to talk to Daisy. “Keep coming to the clinic. You’re really good at exercising the animals. They like you.”

  “Oh, good.” Daisy beamed at him. “I have so much fun there.”

  She’d flashed her megawatt without thinking, and Art smiled back, mesmerized. Linc scowled at Art, so she grabbed his arm and tugged him toward the street.

  “I’ll come by for Jupiter this afternoon,” she said to Art. “Come on, Linc. Your pulse rate’s dropping.”

  “Who is that guy?” Linc easily kept pace with her as she ran down the street.

  “He’s the vet.” Daisy puffed hard as she ran. “You know, I think I’m getting the hang of this.”

  “I don’t like the way he looks at you. Stop smiling at him.”

  “Hey.” Daisy frowned as hard as possible while panting her lungs out. “He’s my friend.”

  Linc snorted. “He wants to be more than your friend.”

  “What do you care?”

  “We just got married four days ago. It looks bad.”

  “Wait a minute.” She stopped suddenly, and he had to turn around and jog back to her. “I called the university Friday and you were out for lunch. With Caroline.”

  “So?”

  Daisy put her hands on her hips. Part of the Cinderella deal was that they played fair. “So if you can have lunch with Caroline, I can exercise dogs with Art.”

  Linc scowled. “It’s not the same thing.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Art wants to exercise a lot more than dogs with you.”

  “And Caroline doesn’t with you?”

  Linc waved that away. “That’s different.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’ll say no.”

  “Will you?”

  “Yes.” He looked insulted. “Hell, yes. We’ve only been married four days. What kind of creep would I be if I cheated on you already?”

  Already? For some reason this conversation was not turning out the way she’d planned. “So when are you planning on cheating? In June?”

  Linc turned suddenly wary, as if he’d seen where things were going and didn’t like it either. “I don’t know. I’m not, I guess. Why are we having this dumb conversation?”

  “Because you won’t let me exercise the animals at Art’s.”

  “Then go,” he snapped. “I don’t care. Just stay away from Art.”

  Daisy stuck her chin out. “I intend to. I have enough problems living with one man who doesn’t even notice that I’ve redecorated the entire downstairs of his house—”

  “What?”

  “—I don’t need to start sleeping with another one.”

  She took off running down the street, and he watched her before he followed.

  She’s right, he thought as he steadily gained on her. What she does is none of my business as long as she’s discreet.

  But if he touches her, I’m breaking his fingers.

  After Linc left, Daisy walked through the downstairs, studying the colors and the values and the proportions of everything she was doing, trying to make sure it balanced, that it was interesting and new and different without being so far out that it humiliated Linc. The living room, dining room, and hall were done, but she wasn’t happy with them.

  “It’s ordinary,” she told Julia on the phone. “It’s very pretty, but it’s ordinary. Daisy Flattery wouldn’t live here.”

  “That’s because you’re pleasing Linc. Get some paint, go in there, and please Daisy. What have you painted on canvas lately?”

  “Nothing. I’ve just done walls and furniture.”

  “Well, there you are. Do some canvases for the walls. Better yet, do some canvases for you.”

  Daisy thought about it. She was tired of walls and patterns; it was time to get back to stories. “You’re right. I’ll lock the bedroom doors so all that these people will see upstairs is the bathroom. Everything else is done down here except for the kitchen. Maybe I’ll go crazy in the kitchen. And I’ll do some collages. There’s a great secondhand place near the college that has a box full of lace and embroidery I could use to do a collage for the hall. And I’ll paint. I’ve got a lot of stories I’ve thought of here that I want to paint. This is a wonderful place. You’ve got to come stay soon.”

  “I will,” Julia said. “How’s Linc?”

  “Fine. He seems happy and his book is going well.”

  “I mean, how are Linc and you?”

  Daisy thought about their morning jogs. “We’re fine.”

  “After that kiss at the wedding, I thought you’d be more than fine.”

  Daisy tried to brush her off. “I think that was a fluke. He’s not much interested. He likes little blondes, remember?”

  “Yeah, but he married a bouncing brunette,” Julia said dryly.

  “He didn’t have much choice.”

  Julia’s snort was loud on the line. “Linc always has a choice. He’s the most controlled guy I’ve ever met. If he married you, he wanted to.”

  Daisy felt a flare of hope. “Maybe.”

  “So how’s Evan?” Julia’s voice was carefully casual.

  “Evan? Depressed, how else would Evan be?”

  “Oh.”

  Daisy tried to remember something about Evan to share. “Come to think of it, he has seemed more depressed than usual. He mentioned you the other day. He said you had an interesting sense of humor.”

  “Oh.”

  Hello? Daisy raised her eyebrows at the phone. Evan and Julia? Well, stranger things had happened. She and Linc, for example.

  “Come visit soon,” she said to Julia.

  “Go paint. I’ll come when you’ve got a show ready for that gallery. Have you gone down there yet?”

  “No, and it’ll be a good long time yet before I do,” Daisy said, but after she’d hung up she went upstairs happier than she’d been before. I’ll start to paint again, she told herself, as soon as I’ve picked up Jupiter.

  Jupiter was not a hit at first. He barked a lot, and developed a fondness for Linc that bordered on the pathological since Linc’s first words on seeing him were “That’s the most disgusting-looking animal I’ve ever seen.”

  Jupiter had only one eye, so he looked as if he were permanently winking. His tail was bent down at a right angle, he limped, and because he’d lost teeth on one side of his mouth, his tongue tended to hang out that side when he panted.

  “I think he’s darling.” Daisy’s heart bled for him every time she saw him. “Poor baby.”

  “Poor baby, my butt.” Linc glared down at the little dog. “This is the luckiest dog in Prescott. You’re a mess,” he said to the dog. “We should put you out on the street with a cup to beg.”

  “Linc.”

  “He could sell pencils. We’d make a fortune.”

  “Ignore him, baby.” Daisy patted Jupiter’s head, but Jupiter ignored her instead and attached himself to Linc. At first Linc would yell at her to come get the dog when it would sneak into his room, but on Friday, Daisy heard him talking to it when she went past his study door to go to her studio.

  “You’re worthless. Here. Have a biscuit.”

  A biscuit? He’d bought dog biscuits for Jupiter? The world was coming to an end.

  She knocked on the door. “Do you want me to get Jupiter out of there?”

  “No,” Linc said from behind the door. “He just sneaks back in. This is a worthless dog.”

  “Yes, Linc,” she said, and went away laughing silently.

  On Saturday, Linc came downstairs to get the house
ready for the party and finally noticed Daisy had redecorated.

  “This looks great,” he said as he wandered from room to room. “I mean, it really does. Did you do all this? It’s sort of colorful, but great.” He stopped in front of the painting on the mantel. It was painted in Daisy’s primitive style of tiny vivid brushstrokes, and it showed a Victorian house sitting in what looked like a lush green jungle populated by a lot of unblinking leaf-green eyes. A girl in a bright peach dress stood in the foreground, looking pensive.

  “There’s a lot of detail here.” Linc leaned in for a closer look. “You can see in the windows of the house and—” His voice broke off.

  “Do you like it? This is one of my favorites.”

  “There’s a headless body on the couch in the downstairs room.” Linc turned to look at her. “You painted a headless body on a couch?”

  Daisy nodded. “It’s Lizzie Borden’s house. It really is. I found a photograph. They had a picture of the body too. It’s not really headless. Almost, but not quite.”

  Be open-minded, Linc told himself. It was the least he owed her, but he was still thrown. Headless bodies? “Lizzie Borden.”

  “That’s her father on the couch. Her stepmother’s in the upstairs bedroom. If you look really hard, you can see her feet at the edge of the windowsill.”

  Linc nodded, coping. “Her feet.”

  “You do know the story? ‘Lizzie Borden took an ax and’—”

  “I know the story.” Linc’s resolve broke. “Whatever possessed you to paint it?”

  “Probably my father and stepmother,” Daisy said grimly.

  Linc changed the subject. “Why is she looking so calm?”

  “Well, nobody knows for sure if she did it. So she’s either standing there innocently while someone evil frames her for the crime, or she’s planning her defense. You choose.”

  They stood together and looked at the painting for a while, and Linc realized that even though he was still thrown, he liked the painting. There was something about it that was so Daisy, bright and colorful and passionate with strange things hidden inside. Amazing. “Does every one of your paintings have a story?” he asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Daisy said blithely. “The one in the dining room is based on the legend of Etain.”