The Secret Hum of a Daisy (13 page)

“I've started over so many times. I don't want to do it again.”

“That isn't a good enough reason to stay.”

She was right. I loved her. Lacey too. But they weren't my family. I thought how easily a mother and daughter fit together and how anyone else just sort of hung there, like an extra thumb. It suddenly occurred to me that maybe we'd clicked—me and Mama, Lacey and Mrs. Greene—because we walked the same kind of road, one without fathers or husbands. But without Mama there, I was the extra thumb. I started to cry.

Mrs. Greene came over and put her arms around me.

“I always figured everything was Grandma's fault—Mama moving over and over, trying to find a place to fit—but it doesn't feel true anymore.”

“What feels true?”

“I don't know. But I do know that Grandma didn't want me.”

Mrs. Greene sat me on an ottoman and kneeled down in front of me. “What your grandma didn't want was the situation. There's a big difference.”

She smoothed my most stubborn cowlick as I pulled a scrap of pink felt out of a nearby pile and used it to wipe my nose. I had no idea what to do. I felt like one of Mama's birds before she put it together, all pieces and parts in a jumble.

“What feels true?” she asked again.

I closed my eyes. I didn't want to say it. I didn't want to say that I wanted to give Grandma a chance.

Goo Bless

You

Lacey moped
around as I packed. When Grandma showed up, Lacey disappeared. I looked everywhere, calling, but couldn't find her.

I said good-bye to Mrs. Greene quickly, like ripping off a bandage, and then walked down the front path to where Granny Smith was parked at the curb, Grandma sitting behind the wheel. She wore a sky-blue scarf that made me think of summer and things to come. As I reached the truck, Elvis Presley started blasting from the Fabric Wonderland window.

“
I'LL HAVE A BAHLUUUUE CHRISTMAS WITHOUT YOUUUU.
”

“It's only May!” I called.

The volume turned up.

“
I'LL BE SO BAHLUUUUE JUST THINKING AHAHABOUT YOUUUU.
”

It was hard not to smile as I climbed into the truck, the familiar mix of vinyl, dirt, and gasoline filling my nose. I felt like two whole and entirely different people, one who wanted to stay and one who wanted to go.

Mrs. Greene said, “Send me some poems. Good ones. Can't just be hanging anything on my refrigerator.”

“I told you. They aren't for refrigerators.”

“Too bad. I don't have much to show off in this world, except for you and Lacey.”

Of course Lacey came running out the front door at the last minute, flinging herself at my window. I rolled it down. She'd thrown her hair up into a ponytail this morning, not taking the care with it that she usually did.

“You are smart and funny and you don't need me here reminding you all the time,” I said, hugging her through the window. “And you need to stop helping Mrs. Flute with the kindergartners all the time. Stick with Jill and Carrie. They're sweet.”

“Okay.”

It was the most sad and pathetic
okay
in the history of the world. As Grandma pulled onto the road, I expected Lacey to come hollering after us, the way they do in the movies. She didn't. She and Mrs. Greene stood there on the curb, getting smaller and smaller as we drove away.

• • •

Grandma was quiet. We passed fields of swaying emerald grass and trees as we left Sacramento. In one of those fields, set far off the road against a bent-up chain-link fence, were giant red plastic letters. The kind you might see in front of a church declaring
JESUS SAVES!
Only bigger. They spelled out
GOO BLESS YOU
. I felt a little spot of warmth for whoever put those letters out. How they weren't about to let a missing
D
get in their way.

“Did you bring Daisy back to your house?” I said as we climbed the hill.

“I did.” She adjusted the rearview mirror. “Why did you name her Daisy anyway?”

“Mama said she looked just like a dog turd, and so we had to call her something nice.”

This brought the first laugh I'd heard out of Grandma. She squeaked a little when she laughed and I saw she had the same crooked tooth as Mama. I couldn't help but laugh too.

• • •

As Grandma drove back through town, I took in the now-familiar redbrick of the old buildings, the huge metal spoon hanging outside Spoons, Margery's red shop awning, and Lafollette's, the place where Mama and Daddy almost made their way into a different life. Instead of feeling a dark and pressing sadness, though, I was starting to feel like maybe I could belong here. It surprised me, that feeling, and I wished it carried over to Grandma. But it didn't.

“Can I stop and talk to Margery?” I said.

Grandma slowed and parked in front of Spoons. “Go ahead. I'll have some coffee and wait.”

“You can go on. I'll walk.”

“I'd rather wait.” She angled the rearview mirror down and checked her face, fidgeting with the hair that had come loose from her bun. She touched a finger to her lips.

I climbed out of the car as a short, plump woman rushed out of Spoons and hurried across the street into Threads.

“Take your time,” Grandma said as she shut and locked her door. I saw Sheriff Bergum through the window sitting at the counter in Spoons. So that was why she'd been primping. If she'd been Mama, I would have made little smooching noises, but I didn't think Grandma would take too kindly to that.

I followed the lady into the shop, where she was already explaining to Margery, in accelerating tones, how her bra strap had busted while she was eating a bowl of split pea soup, and the weight of her unhinged ladyhood came flying down and knocked her bowl all over herself. She was teary and full of exclamations, and Margery calmed her down with an oatmeal raisin cookie from the bakery next door and a new 18 Hour bra, whatever that was. I was only wearing mine for nine, tops.

As she was helping Soup Lady, I went around the store, touching things. Silky pajamas, lacy bras, fluffy bathrobes. It was a cozy place to be.

“Your mama used to design my windows,” Margery said once the lady had left. Her muumuu was a much softer batch of colors today, and it made me think of Mrs. Greene, how the color of her clothes matched the color of her mood. Maybe Margery was like that too.

“Really?”

Her hair was curly, just past her shoulders, mostly silver with threads of walnut brown. She tossed it behind her shoulders. “Once she and your dad started spending time together, she took over my window. She'd combine her art with different antiques and place the slippers and hosiery just so. Like they were meant to be together. People would gather around when she was designing. One time we even had this fancy photographer come all the way from San Francisco to take pictures of her displays. It was great for business.”

“Lou told me she used to steal her spoons.”

“Ha!” Margery said. She reached into a low drawer behind her and pulled out a handful of bent spoons. “She sure did. I always thought I might give it a try, put stuff together the way she used to and make something pretty, but I wasn't any good at it.”

I fanned the spoons in a circle, bowls facing out so that it looked like a daisy, and thought about Mama's daisy meadow. How I felt certain I'd find the next clue at Spoons.

“Looks like you have the knack,” Margery said.

“Not like Mama.”

“So what's your knack?”

I didn't want to talk about writing. Instead, I asked my own question. “Did Mama and Grandma ever get along?”

She got up from the zebra-print chair and went over to her bureau of pictures. She pulled one out and handed me a picture of a girl my age and a woman who looked like Mama. I took a sharp breath realizing it was Mama and Grandma.

“They were as different from each other as a monkey is from a pinecone, so that didn't help. Miranda isn't soft around the edges, and people like that can be hard to love. But she loved your mama something fierce.”

I set the picture back on the dresser. “Mama said that love was an action, not a word. If Grandma loved Mama so much, she never would have sent her away.”

“Sometimes we lose pieces of who we are in times of great sorrow and distress. And then we have to find a way to get them back. Your grandma lost so much of herself when your grandpa died and then when your mama got off that bus.” She shook her head.

The truth of that finally hit me—how much Grandma had lost. Her husband and then her daughter. Her granddaughter. I thought about her sitting in her living room by the fire day after day, waiting for her daughter to come home, waiting for a phone call or a letter that never came. For years.

“I think that's why your mama left too. She lost herself. Some people think space is the answer, that somehow in the wide-open they might stumble into answers. Soon enough it's just easier to stay gone.”

It should have made me angry, her saying that. But it didn't. Because it was true.

“I've got something for you,” Margery finally said. She went through the red velvet curtain behind the counter.

I heard shuffling and then she came out with a small, hard plastic suitcase and set it on the counter.

“Go ahead, open it,” she said. She reached one plump hand up and pushed at the fuzzy hairs at her temple.

I flipped the tarnished brass latch and opened the lid. It was an old-fashioned typewriter with a folder of typed pages wedged into the lid. I ran my finger along the pages, flipping them. It was a collection of poems and what looked like short stories.

“It was your father's. His own father had been a writer and your dad wanted to be one too.”

I took a step back from the typewriter—stumbled was more like it—as I put a hand up to my mouth. I wanted to jump up and down and spin around. My father had been a writer too.

“He wrote mostly poetry, but kept ideas for a novel.”

I smiled. “I have his book of Robert Frost.”

“I always wondered where that ended up,” Margery said. “That book had belonged to his father, your granddad. I think he read it to keep himself close to his parents after they'd died.”

“Mama used to read me poems from that book. Every night.”

“Did she tell you what those poems were about?”

“She didn't like to look for the meaning stuff. She told me to enjoy the words and not worry about what they meant.”

“That's a good thing to do sometimes. But sometimes, you want to know the meaning of a thing. Your dad loved those poems because he thought they were about a boy going out into the world and finding his way, coming home a man. They brought him comfort because they reminded him of his father, but also because the words gave him confidence, making him feel that he'd find his own way, no matter what.”

Words started to trickle into my mind from different Frost poems.

. . . I left you in the morning . . .

. . . Now close the windows and hush all the fields . . .

. . . Give a heart to the hopeless fight . . .

“I had hoped your mama took it with her when she left, but I always wondered why she didn't take the typewriter too.”

“Probably because a book was easier to take from place to place.”

By reading me the poems, Mama said she was filling me up with my father in the only way she could. She was planting words inside my empty places, hoping something would take root and grow. But she never told me he was a poet. That he wanted to write novels. She didn't take his work or his typewriter, things I would have cherished. She didn't tell me stories about him, and I was starting to see that her efforts weren't good enough. She should have set aside some of her own aches and pains so that I wouldn't have so many of my own.

After a while, I asked, “What was his favorite kind of soup?”

“Minestrone.”

“What about music? Did he like listening to music?”

“He liked to dance.”

I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, he was there in the corner of the room, and so was I, small, my feet on top of his as he danced me around in circles. Where he'd always been this flat image I'd carried around in my pocket, suddenly he was here, right in this room, inside me in a way I hadn't felt before.

He had been someone I would have loved, and I didn't realize what a relief that was until I felt it, through and through. And he would have loved me. I let myself fill up with it, fill up with the knowing that Margery was here and I could ask her anything. Forever.

“Did you help Mama and Daddy get to the Greyhound that night?”

Margery fidgeted with the edge of her sleeve. “Your grandma never forgave me, and I can't say I blame her. Your mama was just seventeen. But I knew your grandparents wanted to send her away and I didn't believe that was right. Scotty had already lost so much. Not many days go by that I don't think about what might have happened if I'd helped them figure things out differently.”

Just like the pieces of Mama's cranes, each of us was a piece in her life, and her death. But maybe that's how it was with everything. If you were going to let yourself be connected to people, you had to be willing to take chances.

“Is he buried here somewhere?”

“In the same cemetery as your mama.”

I thought about that for a minute. The foreverness of it. It was why I hadn't visited Mama's grave. I just didn't want to see the grass growing over her body, her name engraved in stone.

“Do you think Mama would have wanted me living with Grandma?”

“I don't know, Grace.”

Mrs. Greene's didn't feel like the right place anymore, but neither did Grandma's. I thought about my signpost cranes and the clues that were left, still thinking Mama was trying to help. To show me where I belonged.

“Can I take these?” I gestured to the spoons.

“Make something pretty,” she said, and came around the counter to give me a hug. She was only an inch or so taller than I was and I let my head rest on her shoulder. She smelled like the bakery next door.

I pulled away.

“Home is in your hands, Grace.” She gestured around her store and then gave me a bag for the spoons. “Sometimes you have to make a place for yourself.”

I gave her another hug, tight around her waist, and took off for Spoons and whatever clue Mama had waiting.