Daisy's Back in Town (24 page)

Instead Louella said, "Well aren't you kind to ask. I'm feeling just fine."

"Glad to hear it, ma'am."

Daisy could almost feel her mother staring a hole in the back of her head. Since she already felt like an idiot for fighting with Jack on the front lawn, she refused to turn around and receive her mother's meaningful glare. "Did Nathan hear us?" she asked.

"No. We couldn't hear you inside, but we did see you two going at it."

"Great," Daisy whispered.

She heard the front door shut behind her mother, and she dropped her hand and looked up at Jack. "We have to get along."

He shook his head. Even with bad-hat hair, he managed to look good. "Not going to happen."

"Then we're going to have to fake it. For Nathan's sake."

"Wet I'll tell you something, buttercup," he said as he stuck his hat back on his head. "I just don't think I'm that good at lying."

His recent lie about a trip to Tallahassee came to mind. "Right. -

A frown wrinkled his brows. "Not as good as you, anyway."

She stood on the bottom step and looked into his face. "Do you think Nathan will want to stay here with you knowing that you hate me?" She didn't wait for him to answer. "He likes to act all grown up. He likes to think that I baby him, but the fact is, he still needs me."

The furrow in his forehead smoothed. "Are you saying you're going to let him stay for the summer?"

She didn't think she had a choice. She'd talk to Nathan, and if he really wanted to work in Jack's garage and get to know him, Daisy wouldn't stand in his way. "If that's what he wants - but I won't leave him here alone with you. I left him with relatives in Seattle for less than two weeks, and he couldn't handle it."

She let out a deep breath and thought out loud. "He only brought a backpack full of clothes. I have the one suitcase. Neither one of us would last the summer on what we brought." She was going to have to make a trip home to Seattle to get some of their things.

Jack folded his arms over his wide chest and smiled. He'd won this round and he knew it.

"You have to promise, no more fighting."

"Agreed."

"We have to get along."

"In front of Nathan."

But Daisy wasn't through with him. "You have to pretend to like me."

He tilted his head back and the shadow from his hat slid from his nose, over his lips, to his chin. "Don't push your luck."

Daisy added water to the vase of fresh-cut lilies and returned it to the spot on the stand next to her sister's hospital bed. Daisy disliked the cloying scent of lilies. They reminded her of death. "I'm not going to be here when you go home tomorrow," she said and reached for the vase filled with peach tulips and white roses.

"Are you and Nathan going home?" Lily asked as she reached for the lime Jell-O on her dinner tray.

"Just me, and just for a few days." Daisy moved to the sink and added water to the vase. "It seems we're going to stay the summer" Lily didn't say anything and Daisy looked over her shoulder at her sister. She had a white bandage covering the stitches on her forehead. One eye was black and blue, the other green and yellow. Her top lip was still a little swollen, her left forearm was bandaged and her right ankle and foot were in some sort of traction cast.

"What happened?" Lily finally asked. "Did you tell Jack about Nathan?"

"Not exactly." She set the vase next to the other and sat in a chair beside Lily's bed. "Nathan kind of told him,"

she answered, then filled her sister in on the rest. "I tried to tell Jack how sorry I am, but he isn't ready to hear it."

Lily turned her head on the pillow and her blue eyes gazed out from all the color on her face. "I'm sorry is just two words, Daisy. They don't mean anything unless you really mean them. Ronnie used to tell me he was sorry every time he cheated, but what he really meant was that he was sorry he got caught again. Sometimes sorry isn't enough."

From outside the room, Dr. Williams was paged to star-line four; inside, Daisy got a real good glimpse into suffering on the other side, from the person feeling the most pain.

"Yes, I know." She wrapped her hands around the wooden arms of the chair. "That's mostly why I've agreed to stay for the summer. I owe Jack. I may have done things for what I thought were the right reasons, but I shouldn't have waited fifteen years to tell Jack about Nathan. I have a lot of guilt about that."

"Don't let guilt make you crazy." Lily set her Jell-O back on the fray. "Remember the night we went to Slim Clem's?"

"Of course."

"I slept with Buddy Calhoun that night."

Daisy was too stunned to speak.

"He came over after I got home and we hooked up. He was real sweet and the sex was great. But after he left, I started to feel guilty, like I was cheating on my marriage. Ronnie had cheated on me for years, left Pippen and me for another woman, and I was feeling guilty" She scratched her forehead next to the bandage. "It was crazy, and I got so mad I drove over to his house. He wasn't home, but I drove up and down his street waiting for him, getting madder and madder. I don't remember much after that, but I guess I got so mad, I drove my car into his front room."

"Lily." She stood and walked to the bed. "What are you saying? Not to let guilt make me that insane, or I should probably expect Jack's Mustang to plow through mother's front room?"

"Neither. I don't know. I just know that I want to feel normal again." She pushed the tray away. "Can you scratch my big toe?"

Daisy moved to the end of the bed scratched her sister's toe. Lily's ankle was huge.

"What did you tell the police about the accident?"

"That I was going to see Ronnie about child support and I must have gotten one of my bad migraines and accidently hit the gas instead of the brake."

"They bought it?"

She shrugged. "I went to school with Neal Flegel. He never did like Ronnie very much. He gave me a ticket for failure to control speed. My insurance is paying for the damage to the house, but I'm sure the premiums will go so high I won't be able to drive for a while."

Which Daisy figured was probably a blessing.

"Have you given any more thought about counseling? - "Yeah, I've thought about it. Might not be a bad thing."

Lily reached for the controls and lowered the bed. "But I think running my car into Ronnie's put things into perspective for me."

That sounded healthy.

"No man is worth making me feel so bad about myself. When I'm not being crazy, I'm a pretty nice person."

Daisy smiled. "Dam right."

"Ronnie isn't worth spit, let alone worth me."

"Nope."

"I'm going to concentrate on getting better and raising Pippen. I'm over feeling bad about Ronnie. I don't need a man in my life to make me feel important."

"That's true." Lily really did sound as if she were on the road to complete mental health.

"Why should I base my self-worth on a man who counts his hard-ons as personal growth?"

Daisy laughed. "You shouldn't."

Lily pulled off a piece of tape holding a cotton ball to the inside of her elbow. "Men are the scum of the earth and should be killed."

Well, maybe not complete mental health.

Chapter Fourteen

Jack watched his son as Billy showed him how to remove the crankshaft from the Hemi 426. Since he'd picked Nathan up at the high school that first day, he'd been trying not to stare. He didn't want to scare the kid again, but after three days of him working in the garage, he was finding it more difficult not to study him. Even with his hedgehog hair and lip ring, Nathan resembled the Parrish side of the family even more than Jack did himself.

Jack rolled up his sleeves, grabbed a socket, and removed the few remaining bolts. He didn't work on actual restoration as much as he used to. Mostly he spent his time making deals or chasing parts all over the country.

Running the business side while Billy was in charge of the labor side, but for the last three days, he'd been spending a lot more time in the garage with the mechanics.

"The lobes are retarded," Billy said as he inspected the camshaft. "Just like we thought."

"What does that mean?" Nathan asked.

"It means they're warped," he answered.

"And it means that the valves stay open too long or not long enough and the engine loses power," Jack added.

Nathan looked up at him from across the big V8, and there was a hesitance in his eyes that Jack hated to see there. He kept his gaze on his son as he spoke, "The replacement should be here by the time you and Billy are ready to rebuild."

My son.

Billy handed the shaft to Nathan, and he held it up to study the lobes. "What do we do with this old one?"

"Toss it in the scrap-metal Dumpster I showed you outside," Billy told him.

As Jack watched Nathan move from the garage, his blue coveralls baggy in the butt, he thought he should feel more than he did for the boy. Something more than a lump in his throat and an avid curiosity. He should feel a connection to Nathan. A connection like he'd had with his own father, but he didn't.

Nathan was connecting with Billy, though. He'd watched them work side by side all week. Nathan seemed to feel comfortable with the other mechanics who worked in the garage, too. But around Jack, he was more quiet and reserved.

That night over a bottle of Lone Star in Billy's backyard, he talked to Billy about it.

"I don't think Nathan likes me much," he said as he watched Lacy and Amy Lynn play on the big jungle gym Billy had built for them last summer. It was around seven o'clock and shade from two oaks crept halfway across the lawn to the patio where he and Billy sat. "He seems to like you a lot more than me."

"I think he's just more nervous around you."

The two brothers sat on Adirondack chairs, legs stretched out in front of them, their cowboy boots crossed at the ankles. Jack wore a jean shirt with the arms cut off while Billy had on a wife-beater. Rhonda had taken the baby with her to some sort of makeup party and had left Billy in charge of the older girls.

"I don't know what I can do to make him more comfortable," Jack said as he raised the bottle to his lips and took a drink.

"For starters, you can stop staring daggers at his mother when she comes and picks him up, like you did today."

That afternoon was the first time he'd seen Daisy since they'd had it out in her momma's front yard. She'd been in Seattle for a few days and he hadn't known she was back until she showed up. Just as he hadn't known he looked at her any certain way.

"And when he brings up his dad," Billy continued, "you can quit getting so pissed off."

"Steven isn't his dad." Jack looked at his brother and said, "I never say anything bad about him."

"You don't have to. Whenever Nathan brings him up and you're around, your eyes get hard and you make that sound through your teeth like you're an air hose." Billy sat forward and yelled across the yard. "Lacy, don't walk in front of your sister like that when she's swingin'. She's likely to kick you in the head again."

Jack set his bottle on the arm of the chair. "Does Nathan talk about Steven when I'm not around?"

"Yeah." Billy sat back. "It sounds like before Steven got sick, they used to do a lot together!”

Jack caught himself making that air-hose noise Billy was talking about. He was jealous. Jealous of a dead man and jealous of his own brother. He didn't like the feeling one bit.

"I know you're angry; and you have every right, but you need to remember that Nathan loved Steven. Right or wrong, sounds like Steven was a good daddy to him."

"Steven didn't have the right to be good, bad or indifferent. He and Daisy took off together. They got married and kept my son from me for fifteen years."

"Which are you more pissed off about? That Daisy didn't tell you about Nathan, or that she chose Steven and not you all those years ago?"

"That she took Nathan." Of course that was worse, but the two were so connected, he couldn't separate them.

"You look at her like you hate her now, but I saw the way you were looking at her at Lacy's birthday party. You were eye-eatin' her the second you sat down."

Had he? Probably "I used to have a real thing for her, growing up," he confessed as he watched Amy Lynn jump from the swing and land on her feet.

"I read Steven's letter, and it sounds to me like you both had a 'thing' for Daisy Brooks. Sounds like you both loved her."

There was no use denying it. "Since about the eighth grade, I guess. Maybe even before that." As he watched Amy Lynn get back in her swing, he thought back to before the night Steven and Daisy had married. "Being with her was like... racing down the old highway pushing a hundred and fifty. You know that feeling you get when you're balls-to-the-wall? Your heart's up in your throat and adrenaline is crawling across your skin and making your hair stand up?"

"Yeah, I know."

"It was like that." Jack shook his head, then reached for his beer. He'd never talked to anyone about Daisy before. "I was crazy about her, but we used to fight a lot. She was so jealous, and I would throw a fit if any other boy even looked at her"

Billy leaned forward in his chair again. "Amy Lynn, don't swing so high." He sat back and said, "Well, you must have made up a time or two or else she wouldn't have ended up pregnant."

Jack recalled with perfect clarity the many limes he'd made love to her in the backseat of his car, standing up somewhere with her legs around his waist, or in her bedroom while her mom worked late. "I think we used to fight just so we could make up in the backseat of my Camaro."

"Sounds like teenage hormones," Billy said, looking over at Jack though his clear blue eyes as if things had been that simple.

"It was more than just hormones." He'd been with girls before Daisy, but with her, it had been more than just getting off. Last Saturday on the back of the Custom Lancer proved that she could still make him feel that way.

After all these years. Of course, that had been before he'd found out about Nathan. Now all he felt for her was a biting anger. He took a drink, and rested the bottle on the top of his right thigh. "I thought she was it for me.