by Linda Howard
Now what?
Nothing, that was what. She had nothing else to do, no other ointments, none of the mysterious and sexy little squares of color or dark-colored pencils with which other women lined their eyes and darkened their lids. She could put on her lipstick, but why bother? It was virtually the same shade as her lips; the only way she could tell she had it on was by licking her lips and tasting. It had a slight bubble-gum flavor, just as it had when she was in junior high—“Oh, God!” she moaned aloud. She hadn’t changed her shade of lipstick since junior high!
“You’re pathetic,” she told her reflection, and this time her tone was angry. Cosmetic changes weren’t going to be enough.
She had to do something drastic.
Two gaily wrapped boxes were sitting on the kitchen table when Daisy went downstairs. Her mother had made Daisy’s favorite breakfast, pecan pancakes; a cup of coffee gently steamed beside the plate, waiting for her, which meant her mother had listened for her footsteps on the stairs before pouring the coffee. Tears stung her eyes as she stared at her mother and aunt; they were really two of the sweetest people in the world, and she loved them dearly.
“Happy birthday!” they both chimed, beaming at her.
“Thank you,” she said, managing a smile. At their urging, she sat down in her usual place and quickly opened the boxes. Please, God, not more seersucker, she silently prayed as she folded back the white tissue from her mother’s gift. She was almost afraid to look, afraid she wouldn’t be able to control her expression if it was seersucker—or flannel. Flannel was almost as bad.
It was . . . well, it wasn’t seersucker. Relief escaped in a quiet little gasp. She pulled the garment out of the box and held it up. “It’s a robe,” said her mother, as if she couldn’t see what it was.
“I. . . it’s so pretty,” Daisy said, getting teary-eyed again because it really was pretty—well, prettier than she had expected. It was just cotton, but it was a nice shade of pink, with a touch of lace around the collar and sleeves.
“I thought you needed something pretty,” her mother said, folding her hands.
“Here,” said Aunt Joella, pushing the other box toward Daisy. “Hurry up, or your pancakes will get cold.”
“Thank you, Mama,” Daisy said as she obediently opened the other box and peered at the contents. No seersucker here, either. She touched the fabric, lightly stroking her fingertips over the cool, sleek finish.
“Real silk,” Aunt Joella said proudly as Daisy pulled out the full-length slip. “Like I saw Marilyn Monroe wear in a movie once.”
The slip looked like something from the nineteen forties, both modest and sexy, the kind of thing daring young women wore as party dresses these days. Daisy had a mental image of herself sitting at a dressing table brushing her hair and wearing nothing but this elegant slip; a tall man came up behind her and put his hand on her bare shoulder. She tilted her head back and smiled at him, and he slowly moved his hand down under the silk, touching her breast as he bent to kiss her . . .
“Well, what do you think?” Aunt Joella asked, jerking Daisy out of her fantasy
“It’s beautiful,” Daisy said, and one of the tears she had been blinking back escaped to slide down her cheek. “You two are so sweet—”
“Not that sweet,” Aunt Joella interrupted, frowning at the tear. “Why are you crying?”
“Is something wrong?” her mother asked, reaching over to touch her hand.
Daisy drew a deep breath. “Not wrong. Just—I had an epiphany.”
Aunt Jo, who was sharper than any tack, shot her a narrow-eyed look. “Boy, I bet that hurt.”
“Jo.” Sending her sister an admonishing glance, Daisy’s mother took her daughter’s hands in hers. “Tell us what’s wrong, honey.”
Daisy took a deep breath, both to work up her courage and to control her tears. “I want to get married.”
The two sisters both blinked, and looked at each other, then back at her.
“Well, that’s wonderful,” her mother said. “To whom?”
“That’s the problem,” Daisy said. “No one wants to marry me.” Then the deep breath stopped working, and she had to bury her face in her hands to hide the way her unruly tear ducts were leaking.
There was a small silence, and she knew they were looking at each other again, communicating in that mental way sisters had.
Her mother cleared her throat. “I’m not quite certain I understand. Is there someone in particular to whom you’re referring?”
Bless her mother’s heart, she was an English teacher to the core. She was the only person Daisy knew who actually said whom—well, except for herself. The acorn hadn’t fallen far from the mother oak. Even when her mother was upset, her phrasing remained exact.
Daisy shook her head, and wiped the tears away so she could face them again. “No, I’m not suffering from unrequited love. But I want to get married and have babies before I get too old, and the only way that’s going to happen is if I make some major changes.”
“What sort of major changes?” Aunt Jo asked warily.
“Look at me!” Daisy indicated herself from head to foot. “I’m boring, and I’m mousy. Who’s going to look at me twice? Even poor Wally Herndon wasn’t interested. I have to make some major changes to me.”
She took a deep breath. “I need to spruce myself up. I need to make men look at me. I need to start going places where I’m likely to meet single men, such as nightclubs and dances.” She paused, expecting objections, but was met with only silence. She took another deep breath and blurted out the biggie: “I need to get my own place to live.” Then she waited.
Another sisterly glance was exchanged. The moment stretched out, and Daisy’s nerves stretched along with it. What would she do if they strenuously objected? Could she hold out against them? The problem was that she loved them and wanted them to be happy, she didn’t want to upset them or make them ashamed of her.
They both turned back to her with identical broad smiles on their faces.
“Well, it’s about time,” Aunt Jo said.
“We’ll help,” her mother said, beaming.
TWO
Daisy drove to work on automatic pilot. Luckily she had no stop signs to worry about and only one traffic light: one of the benefits of small-town life. She lived only five blocks from the library and, to save the environment, often walked to work if the weather was good, but the rain was still pouring down and during the summer the heat always got the best of her conscience anyway.
Her brain fizzed with plans, and before she put her purse in the bottom drawer of her desk, she took out the sheet of paper on which she had scribbled the items she needed to tackle, to study them again. Her mother and Aunt Jo had been bubbling with excitement, adding their own ideas, and after careful thought they had all agreed that she should take care of the big-ticket items first. She had a healthy balance in her checking account, due to living with her mother and Aunt Jo and sharing expenses with them, not that the groceries and utilities ever amounted to that much, and the old house was long since paid for. Her car was an eight-year-old Ford, financed for three years, so she hadn’t even had a car payment for the past five years. The salary of a small-town librarian wasn’t great, even though she was director of the library, which was a glorified title that didn’t amount to anything, since the mayor’s office retained hiring and firing authority; she got to choose which books the library bought with its less-than-impressive budget, and that was about it. But when you put at least half, sometimes more, of even an unimpressive salary into savings every year, it added up. She had even begun investing in the stock market, after carefully researching her chosen companies on the Internet, and done very well, if she did say so herself. Not that Warren Buffett had any reason for jealousy, but she was proud of her nest egg.
The bottom line was, she could easily afford a place of her own. However, there weren’t very many places available for rent in Hillsboro, Alabama. She could always move to one of the larg
er towns, Scottsboro or Fort Payne, but she wanted to stay close. Her sister had already moved to Huntsville, and though that wasn’t really all that far, about an hour’s drive, it still wasn’t the same as living in the same town. Besides, Temple Nolan, the mayor, had a real obsession about hiring only Hillsboro citizens for municipal jobs, a policy that Daisy approved of. She could hardly ask him to make an exception in her case. She would just have to find some place here in Hillsboro to live.
Hillsboro had only a small weekly newspaper that came out every Friday, but last week’s edition was still on her desk. She folded it open to the advertisement section—one page—and quickly scanned down the columns. She noticed that someone had found a calico cat over on Vine Street, and Mrs. Washburn was looking for someone to help take care of her father-in-law, who was ninety-eight and liked to take off his clothes at the oddest times, such as when anyone else was around. Rentals, rentals . . . She found the small section and quickly skimmed down it. There were eight listings, more than she had expected.
One address was familiar, and she dismissed that rental immediately, it was an upstairs room in Beulah Wilson’s house, and everyone in town knew Beulah invaded her boarders’ privacy whenever she liked, searching the rooms as if she were a drug dog sniffing out tons of cocaine, then gossiping with her cronies about whatever she found. That was how the whole town knew Miss Mavis Dixon had a box full of early Playgirl magazines, but Miss Mavis was so hateful and generally disliked that everyone agreed that the centerfolds were as close as she was ever likely to get to male genitalia.
No way would Daisy ever live in Beulah Wilson’s house.
That left seven possibilities.
“Vine Street,” she muttered, reading the next listing. That would probably be the Simmonses’ small apartment over their detached garage. Hmm, that wouldn’t be a bad choice at all. The rent would be very reasonable, it was a good neighborhood, and she would have privacy because Edith Simmons was a widow who had severe arthritis in her knees and could never climb the stairs to snoop. Everyone knew she hired someone to clean her house because she couldn’t cope with all the stooping.
Daisy circled the ad, then quickly read the others. There were two empty condos in Forrest Hills over on the highway, but the rent was high and the condos were ugly. They were possibles, but she’d look at them only if Mrs. Simmons had already rented her garage apartment. There was a house on Lassiter Avenue, but the address wasn’t familiar. She swiveled her chair to locate Lassiter Avenue on her city map, and immediately dropped that ad from consideration, because the address was in the rougher section of town. She didn’t know exactly how rough, but imagined Hillsboro had its share of the criminal element.
The remaining three ads were also undesirable. One side of a duplex was available, but it was available on a regular basis, because the trashy Farris family lived in the other side and no one else could put up with the screaming and cussing for very long. Another house was too far away, almost at Fort Payne. The last ad was for a mobile home, and it, too, was on the bad side of town.
Quickly she dialed Mrs. Simmons’s number, hoping the apartment was still available, since the newspaper was already four days old.
The phone rang and rang, but it took Mrs. Simmons a while to get anywhere, so Daisy was patient. Varney, the son, had given his mother a cordless phone once so she could keep it with her and wouldn’t have to walk anywhere to answer it, but she was set in her ways and considered it a nuisance to carry the phone with her all day, so she accidentally dropped it in the toilet, and that was that. Mrs. Simmons resumed use of her land-line phone, and Varney saw the wisdom of not buying her another cordless to drown.
“Hello?” Mrs. Simmons’s voice was as creaky as her knees.
“Hello, Mrs. Simmons. This is Daisy Minor. How are you today?”
“Just fine, dear. This rain makes my joints hurt, but we need it, so I guess I shouldn’t complain. How’s your mama, and your aunt Joella?”
“They’re fine, too. They’re busy canning tomatoes and okra from the garden.”
“I don’t do much canning anymore,” Mrs. Simmons creaked. “Last year Timmie”—Timmie was Varney’s wife—“brought me some pears and we made pear preserves, but I don’t even try to have a garden. My old knees just aren’t up to it.”
“You might think about knee-replacement surgery,” Daisy suggested. She felt honor-bound to try, though she knew Varney and Timmie had been making the same suggestion for years, to no avail.
“Why, Mertis Bainbridge had that done, and she said she’d never go through that again. She’s had nothing but trouble with it”
Mertis Bainbridge was a hypochondriac, and a general complainer to boot. If someone gave her a car, she’d complain about having to buy gas for it. Daisy refrained from pointing that out, because Mertis was one of Mrs. Simmons’s best friends.
“Everyone is different,” she said diplomatically. “You’re much tougher than Mertis, so you might have better results.” Mrs. Simmons liked being told how strong she was, to be able to endure such pain.
“Well, I’ll think about it.”
She wouldn’t do any such thing, but Daisy had satisfied the social requirements; she moved on to the purpose to her call. “The reason I called was to see about the apartment over your garage. Have you rented it yet?”
“Not yet, dear. Do you know someone who might be interested?”
“I’m interested for myself. Would it be all right if I came over at lunch and looked at it?”
“Why, I suppose. Let me just check with your mother. I’ll call you right back. You’re at work, aren’t you?”
Daisy blinked. Had she just heard what she thought she’d heard? “Excuse me?” she said politely. “Why do you need to check with my mother?”
“Why, to see if it’s okay with her, of course. I couldn’t let you rent my apartment without her permission.”
The words slapped her in the face. “Her permission?” she choked. “I’m thirty-four years old. I don’t need permission to live anywhere I choose.”
“You may have argued with her, dear, but I couldn’t hurt Evelyn’s feelings that way.”
“We didn’t argue,” Daisy protested. Her throat had grown so tight she could barely speak. My god, did the whole town consider her so hopeless that she couldn’t do anything without her mother’s permission? No wonder she never had any dates! Humiliation mingled with anger that Mrs. Simmons wouldn’t even think Daisy would be insulted. “On second thought, Mrs. Simmons, I don’t think the apartment would be right for me. I’m sorry to bother you.” It was rude, but she hung up without the usual good-byes. Mrs. Simmons would probably tell all her friends how abrupt Daisy had been and that she was having a disagreement with her mother, but she couldn’t help that. And Mrs. Simmons might not snoop in the apartment, but she would certainly monitor all of Daisy’s comings and goings and feel obligated to report them back to her mother. Not that Daisy intended to do anything bad, but still. . .!
The humiliation burned inside her. Was this how all their friends and acquaintances saw her, as someone incapable of making a decision on her own? She had always considered herself an intelligent, responsible, self-supporting woman, but Mrs. Simmons, who had known her all her life, certainly didn’t!
This move was way, way too late. She should have done it ten years ago. Back then, changing her image would have been easy. Now she felt as if she needed an act of Congress—and a permission slip from her mother!—to change the way people saw her.
Maybe it would work out better not to live in Mrs. Simmons’s garage apartment, anyway. She would be out of her mother’s house, yes, but still under “supervision.” If she wanted to change her image, she had to give the impression of complete freedom.
The ugly condos were looking better by the minute.
She dialed the number in the ad. Again, the phone rang and rang. She wondered if the condo manager had arthritic knees, too.
“Hello.” The voice was male, and
sleepy.
“I’m sorry, did I wake you?” Daisy glanced at the clock over her desk; ten after nine. What kind of manager slept this late?
“S’ all right.”
“I’m calling about the rental listing—”
“Sorry. The last one was rented yesterday.” The man hung up.
Well, damn.
Frustrated, she stared down at the newspaper. She was left with the house on Lassiter Avenue, the duplex containing the Farrises, and the mobile home on the bad side of town. The duplex was unthinkable.
She couldn’t back down now, or she’d never be able to face herself in the mirror again. She had to see this through. Maybe the mobile home or the Lassiter Avenue house wouldn’t be too bad. She didn’t mind a run-down neighborhood, so long as it wasn’t dangerous, with drug dealers lurking on every corner and shots ringing out in the night.
She was pretty sure if there had been any shots ringing out in Hillsboro, night or day, she’d have heard about it.
The discreet little bell over the door rang as someone entered the library. Daisy got up and smoothed her skirt, not that the action would help its looks any. She was the only one working until noon, because they seldom had anyone in during the morning. Most of their traffic was in the afternoon, after school was out, though of course during the summer that pattern changed. The bulk of people still came in the afternoon, maybe because they were too busy doing other stuff during the relatively cool mornings. Kendra Owens came in at twelve and worked until the library closed at nine, plus Shannon Ivey worked part-time from five until nine, so Kendra was never alone there at night. The only one who was alone for any length of time was Daisy, but she figured the greater responsibility was hers.
“Anyone here?” a deep voice boomed, before she could step out of her small office behind the checkout desk.
Daisy took two hurried steps into view, a little outraged that anyone would shout in a library, even if there weren’t any other patrons present at the moment. Seeing who the newcomer was, she checked briefly, then said briskly, “Yes, of course. There’s no need to yell.”
