The Cinderella Deal Read online

  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 distracted, 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 fiancée. 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.

  He sighed and kept on painting, and when he moved his chrome and leather furniture into the big old rooms, he knew what Daisy would say, and he had a feeling she was right, so it was a damn good thing she wasn’t there to say it.

  “Linc moved out yesterday,” Julia told Daisy early in June.

  “I know.” Daisy nodded toward a huge vase of gladioli, birds of paradise, and cattails sitting on the wobbly table near her door. “He sent me flowers.”

  Julia squinted at the arrangement. “Obviously chosen with you in mind, I don’t think. Didn’t he get to know you at all in Prescott?”

  “No.” Daisy tried to keep the melancholy out of her voice. “He didn’t want to. I think I made his teeth hurt.”

  “Oh?” Julia shot her one of those Hello? glances. “Well, he’s not exactly your type either, is he?”

  “No.” The melancholy was there for sure, and Daisy gave up. “He makes me crazy, if you want to know the truth. I mean, he’s just like my father, all orders and rules.”

  “But …” Julia prompted.

  “But I felt really good with him,” Daisy finished. “I felt safe. And he’s not exactly like my father. He never made me feel guilty or beholden or—well, okay, he did make me feel clueless, but not on purpose. Even though we were surrounded by all those people and telling that big story, I felt safe.” She met Julia’s eyes. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt safe, not since I caught on that my mother’s grip on reality wasn’t a good one. And I must have been about four, so it’s been a while.”

  Julia scrunched farther down in Daisy’s old flowered armchair, staring into space as she thought. “You’re right about Linc, but I think that’s what I didn’t like about him when I was with him. No challenge, no excitement. As long as Linc is around, nothing goes wrong.”

  “Yeah.” Daisy thought about riding through the night beside Linc in his awful car, wrapped in darkness and safety. “I loved that.”

  “Just that?”

  Well, no. There was his body. Daisy stood up and went to the kitchen to distract herself. “Just that. Do you want some coffee?”

  “I’d rather have the truth.”

  Daisy exhaled loudly and turned back to her. “Okay, it was not just that. I was tempted by his body. Really, really tempted. I’m still dreaming about him. But that body is attached to a mind that thinks I’m a nightmare, and I couldn’t stand the constant disapproval even if he wanted to take me to Prescott, which he doesn’t, since he won’t even talk to me in the hall, and now he’s gone, so it’s not an issue, so do you want coffee?” She blinked hard and realized there were tears coming, so she turned and went to the kitchen without waiting for Julia’s answer.

  It was just as well. Julia went for the jugular. “Would you have gone to Prescott if he’d asked?”

  Daisy took a coffee cup down from the shelf and shut the cabinet door carefully. “I don’t know. Maybe.” She turned and waved her hand at her apartment. “This isn’t working for me. I need to reinvent myself if I’m going to grow as an artist. I can’t hold on to the past, and I can’t keep doing the same things. But it’s so hard here, always scrambling for money and trying to convince myself I’m good even though nobody else thinks so—”

  “I think so.”

  “—and now even just painting is hard.” Daisy slumped against the counter and tried to put into words the realization that had been growing in the back of her mind during the past year. “I’m stuck in the old me, and I don’t know how to get out. I just know the old me isn’t the real me anymore.”

  “And Prescott would have made you reinvent yourself.” Julia nodded. “Well, sure, but it would have made you reinvent yourself into a lie.”

  “Maybe not.” Daisy closed her eyes and pictured herself in Prescott in that little Victorian house, something that was pretty easy since she’d been doing it ever since she and Chickie had first driven down Tacoma Street. “The college is conservative, but the town isn’t. There was an art gallery. And a house, a really, really darling house, not an apartment. Maybe I could have reinvented myself into something real there.” The coffeemaker sputtered, and Prescott in the spring vanished back into her apartment: cluttered, stale, and everything her life was that she didn’t want it to be. “But it wouldn’t have worked, and it’s probably just a cop-out anyway.”

  “Maybe not,” Julia said. “Linc’s a good guy. Maybe it would have worked.”

  “Not in a million years,” Daisy said. “Now, do you want coffee or not?”

  Julia took the coffee and tried to keep the conversation about Linc going, but Daisy had had enough. She stonewalled until Julia gave up in exasperation and left, which was no improvement since that gave Daisy more time to think about Prescott and Linc, which made her breathe a little faster, which made her angry. Stop it, she told herself. Especially stop thinking about how nice and solid he was with his arms around you and how gorgeous he looks with his shirt off. He’s probably slee