The Cinderella Deal (9 page)

“Hold on.” Linc patted her shoulder a little frantically. “I will get you out, I swear, but it will take some time. We’ll have to say good-bye. Can you stand it another fifteen minutes?”

“Just about.”

It took them half an hour before they’d said all their good-byes and the Crawfords would let them go. Daisy figured that unless Linc did something incredibly stupid, he was in. Then she saw him with Caroline again, holding her hand, looking into her eyes, saying good-bye. Laying the groundwork for laying Caroline next year. Well, the hell with them both. They deserved each other.

And then she turned and saw the expression on Chickie’s face as Chickie watched them.

Chickie must have watched her husband with a lot of women
, Daisy thought.
And Chickie hasn’t attached to Linc, she’s attached to me. The daughter she never had
.

Linc, you dummy.

Daisy moved up beside Chickie and sighed. “It’s so sad.”

Chickie put her arm around Daisy and glared in Line’s direction. “Men!”

Daisy looked surprised. “Oh, no. He’s not interested in Caroline that way. It’s just that she looks like his little sister. His little sister… Gertrude.”

Chickie stopped, taken aback. “Oh?”

“You see…” Daisy leaned closer as her mind raced ahead. “He adored her, and she died very young.”

“Oh, no.” Chickie was horrified.

Daisy got a faraway look in her eye. “They loved each other very much. He called her his little cupcake. She called him”—Daisy’s imagination faltered. What the hell had she called him—“Honest Abe. After the president. Lincoln, you know?”

She saw Chickie frown and decided to retrench a little. “As a joke. She called him that as a joke. They joked around a lot.”

Chickie nodded.

Daisy tried to recapture the thread of her story. “And then one day—” She paused. How was she going to kill off this nauseating little creep? Disease? Murder? Act of God? How would she like Caroline to go? “She was hit by a truck.”

“Oh, my heavens.” Chickie’s hand went to her mouth.

It was a good thing Chickie was so full of gin. This was not one of Daisy’s best efforts. “And so, Linc is just naturally drawn to be kind to small blondes because they remind him of his little cupcake. Little Gertrude.”

“Oh.” Chickie clutched at her, touched.

Linc finally let go of Little Gertrude’s hand and turned to find them watching him. Chickie sniffled. Daisy wiggled her fingers at him.

He walked over to them and took Daisy’s hand. “Well, it’s midnight, so I’ve got to get Cinderella home.”

Chickie clutched his arm. “You poor, poor boy.”

Linc looked at the gin glass in Chickie’s other hand and nodded. “Absolutely. We’ll see you tomorrow.”

He put his arm around Daisy and pulled her out the door.

“What was that all about?” he asked Daisy as they went out to the car.

Daisy beamed at him. “I’ll tell you later, but it’s nothing to worry about.” Linc looked at her warily, and she added, “Unless you were hoping to sleep with Caroline someday. That would be bad.”

“Daisy—” Linc said, but then Crawford joined them and cut him off.

Daisy got into the car and smiled all the way back to the motel.

Half an hour later Daisy came out of the motel bathroom wearing an oversize white T-shirt and saw Linc sitting on the opposite bed with his shirt off.
Merciful heavens,
she thought, and then she stopped thinking in words and went to pictures. Moving pictures.

He scowled at her across her bed. “Why can’t I sleep with Caroline someday?”

So much for fantasy; he was still obsessing on the overbred blonde. “Because she reminds you of your poor dear sister Gertrude.” Daisy pulled back the covers and climbed into her bed. “Chickie would consider it incest.”

Linc tensed, wariness in every beautiful muscle. “I don’t have a sister named Gertrude.”

Daisy nodded, enjoying his torment. If she had to look at his body and suffer, then he should have to look into her mind and do the same. It was only fair. “I know. She died young. Tragically. She—”

“Daisy!”

Daisy stuck her chin out. “That’s why you hold hands with blond midgets instead of paying attention to your fiancee. I had to explain to Chickie because she thought you were cheating on me in front of me. The way Crawford probably does with her. Understand?”

Linc froze. “Oh.”

“You used to call her your little cupcake. She called you Honest Abe.”

Linc looked confused. “Chickie?”

“No, dear Little Gertrude.”

Linc started to laugh, and Daisy had to grin with him. “And Chickie bought this?” he asked her.

Daisy’s grin faded as she remembered. “She was drunk. She drinks way too much, but it’s because she’s so unhappy. She’d stop if she had somebody to talk to.”

Line’s grin disappeared too. “Did she tell you that? How much did you talk? What did you tell her? What did you do this afternoon?”

Daisy stuck her chin out. “We just looked at Prescott. But I can tell. She’s a good person, she’s just so, so lonely.”

Linc leaned forward. “Don’t get caught up in this story. It’s not true, remember?”

“I know,” Daisy said.

He stood up to get ready for bed, and she closed her eyes because he was so near. “I appreciate everything you did today, don’t think I don’t,” he told her. “I know that you were the deciding factor. You got me this job, and I appreciate it.”

How much?
she thought, and considered asking him to show it, but only for a second. Then sanity returned, and she said, “My pleasure,” and rolled away from him before she did anything dumb.

Once they were on the plane the next day, they both relaxed. “You did it.” Daisy leaned her head back and sighed. “I can’t believe it. You did it. I’m so proud,” she said, and he felt warm because he had done well, which had happened before, and because somebody was proud of him for it, which hadn’t happened in a long time. She looked at him with pride and affection and friendship, and he was a little sorry that it was all over. They’d reached The End, and they’d both live happily ever after apart, the only way people as different as they were could live happily ever after. Daisy would go back to dressing like a leaky Magic Marker, and he would go to Prescott.

Prescott.

He was really going. Because of Daisy.

“Let me give you something to thank you.” He took her hand and squeezed it. “You can have anything you want.”

Daisy hesitated long enough that he bent to see her face better, and then she turned to him. She pulled her hand from his grasp and tugged the daisy ring off her finger and handed it to him, smiling up at him at the same time, which took some of the sting off the move, although not enough. His hand closed around the ring automatically.

“Just promise me that I’ll never have to see Crawford again,” Daisy said.

“You’ve got it,” Linc said as the sapphire in the ring cut into his palm. “That I can promise.”

Linc spent the rest of the spring finishing up loose ends at the university and getting ready to move. He saw Daisy in the apartment foyer and thought about asking her out for pizza or something else mundane that wouldn’t signal “date,” but it seemed better to just keep nodding and moving past her so that he wouldn’t get caught up in the story again. Daisy was a hard habit to kick, he’d discovered, even after only three days. She was sloppy and round and uncontrolled, and she brought warmth and chaos into his life, and he was having a hard time forgetting her. Especially in the middle of the night when he’d remember the motel room. Sometimes the only thing that got him through those middle-of-the-nights was the memory of how awful she could be. She’d brought him more anxiety in the three days he’d spent with her than all the other women he’d ever known put together. But she’d also brought him Prescott. He sent her flowers to thank her before he left. Then he packed and moved to Ohio.

He bought a small Victorian house Chickie found for him on Tacoma Street about a mile from campus. Linc preferred a more modern look to his housing, but this place had been rented to students for forty years and needed a lot of repair, so it was a bargain, or at least as much of a bargain as any house could be in a college town. The structure was solid and the rooms were airy and the holes in the walls could be fixed with spackle and paint. “I can’t thank you enough,” he told Chickie when she’d shown him through it. “You found me a great deal.”

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 dis tracted, 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 fiancee. 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.