The Cinderella Deal Read online

  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