“Poking out a fish eye isn’t metal,” Poppy said. “You dissect a perch in ninth grade; the eye pops out like a little ball of rubber cement. It’s gross, not gory.”
Daisy thought Poppy had a point, but she knew Wade was just trying to be nice to them, and there were plenty of people in the town of Hogestyn who didn’t bother. The Whitsun girls were more accustomed to giving help than receiving it, but not today. Wade had invited Poppy and her mother, Carna, to sit in their pew; when Daisy and Lilah trailed behind with their mother, Violet, who, though she wasn’t in charge of the service in this church, had been with the Isherwoods helping out behind the scenes all morning, Wade stood up and ushered them all farther down the row. He handed Violet a program and offered sticks of spearmint gum and pushed hymnals toward them when it was time to sing; he put his arm along the back row of the wooden pew. He did all this, though Poppy made it clear she didn’t like him, and Lilah acted like a space case the whole time, and Violet murmured little dorky hmms and ahhs while the pastor spoke, as if she were being talked to, singularly, and Carna looked sea green, like one of her migraines was coming on. Wade asked his father to drive Carna and Violet home once they were done collecting the flowers for the family, and Wade took on their daughters as his own responsibility.
“What kind of bear should it be?” Lilah asked.
“Who cares?” Poppy said. “They’re all nine-hundred-pound carnivores. They’re all scary as hell.”
“A full-grown bear, though,” Wade added, turning toward the SuperAmerica across from the Dollar Tree, where the guy selling fireworks under a big tarp in the parking lot was doing a brisk business despite the ungodly heat. It was the last week in June, and he’d been there two weeks. Poppy lowered her sunglasses and muttered something snobby about the people lining up to buy sparklers and spinners; she disapproved of fireworks.
“Make it a polar bear,” Daisy said, feeling that she could use a blast of the arctic right now.
“Why are we stopping?” Poppy snapped.
“Eagles and polar bears are in the same ecosystem,” Lilah said. “So that would work, I think. Poppy, can you look it up?”
Poppy didn’t answer, though she was scrolling through her messages, and obviously had enough bars. Daisy marveled at how Poppy could be so mean and get away with it. It was probably because everyone thought she was so beautiful. But Daisy had never seen this. Poppy was tall and her body was strong and sure in lots of places, slight in others. But her thighs were thick from swimming, her calves long but not especially curved, her nose was too snubbed, her skin prone to breakouts. Even her blond hair, thick as the pages of a textbook, was starting to darken as Carna’s had. Poppy’s beauty was not constant; it was far from irresistible.
For Daisy, who had spent her entire life observing her older cousin, living with her as a sister, sharing bathtubs and bedtime stories and closets of hand-me-down clothes, the truth was that people were captivated by Poppy merely because she intended them to be. This was because Poppy, more than anything, was smart. She was calm yet sharp, poised but ultracompetent. When Violet and little Lilah had come to live with Violet’s older sister, Carna, Poppy was five, and Daisy still in her mother’s belly. The story their mothers liked to tell was how that first night, when she had learned that not just Lilah would be moving into her room, but another little baby, Poppy cried and cried. Her attic domain in the house on Old Blackmun Road, painted sweet yellows and lavenders, would be invaded by two others. But the tears didn’t last. Soon she ruled over Lilah’s wayward naughtiness and delighted in ordering her younger cousin’s days with picture books and cups of carrot sticks and laces of yarn they held between their fingers in complicated twists. Once Daisy came along, Poppy was as inevitable as a brick wall. A force of discipline beside Lilah’s silliness, a bright line underscoring the wavy haze of Violet’s fuzzy Unitarian theology and the thick slap of Carna’s blood-and-guts reality as a nurse-midwife.
It was within these competing realms that Daisy had grown up, and this entire summer, she found herself running from them toward the creek at the bottom of the ravine behind their house every single morning. With the return of an all-knowing Poppy from her first year of college, there was no room in the Whitsun house for anything beyond blatant disobedience or bland compliance. The house was stuffed with opinions and proclamations and defensiveness for any given stance; Violet wanted to endlessly discuss these differences, while Carna worked to tamp down rage. The past year had been difficult, sure, but the return of the eldest Whitsun girl, who couldn’t stop complaining about the slow internet and shit cell reception, brought with it more tension and conflict than her absence had.
Wade parked at the SuperAmerica and left the truck running so the air-conditioning stayed on. “You want something to drink?” he asked, and while Daisy was thirsty, it seemed like he was only really asking Lilah.
“Apple juice?” Lilah said.
“You got it.” He slammed the driver’s door and the whole truck trembled.
“What the fuck?” Poppy said. “I can’t believe this shit! We’re what? Fifteen minutes from home, but he has to stop to get something to drink now?”
“You’re such a Crabby Abby,” Lilah said.
Poppy sighed and kept texting. Daisy cracked her neck. Even without Wade in the cab, it was still cramped. She wished she could take down her hair; the bobby pins were jabbing into her scalp. But Poppy had forced updos on all of them, including Carna, who always wore her hair loose; undoing all of Poppy’s careful work right now would annoy her even more.
“What is taking him so fucking long?” Poppy hissed. “There’s barely anyone even here!”
“Who are you texting?” Lilah asked.
“Nobody.” Daisy glanced at Poppy’s phone screen: a blue background with a graphic of a glum-looking woman moping over a block of text full of long chemical-sounding words she didn’t recognize.
“God, Daisy.” Poppy tipped the phone away. “Mind your business already.”
“Is it your mom? Or our mom?” Lilah continued.
“No. Why do you care?”
“I don’t know!” Lilah said. “Just wondering! Maybe they needed something; Aunt Carna was getting a headache and—”
“Jesus!” Poppy scowled. “She has medication for that; she just needs to take it. It sucks, but she doesn’t need me to be involved. What do you expect me to do about any of it?”
“Nothing, obviously,” Lilah said. “I’m just asking. Wondering. Can’t we talk? Tell each other things?”
“I didn’t realize we were allowed to talk about things that aren’t metal.”
“We can talk about anything you want,” Lilah said. “What did you think about the funeral?”