“I don’t need to talk about that, either.”
“Did you talk to Hugh at all?”
“I said hello to him.”
“So did everyone else,” Daisy said.
“Why do I have to talk to him so much more than you guys, then?”
Lilah twitched, scratching at her upper arm, where a bruise threaded with little bits of red was blooming under the sleeve of her dress.
“Um, his mother died,” Lilah said, her voice low. Daisy felt her sister’s body cinch, and she wondered where the bruise had come from. Lilah had never been the rough-and-tumble type.
“Don’t act like I owe him something,” Poppy said. She clicked something on her phone, and grinned. “We weren’t married. Fucking hell.”
“We grew up with him,” Lilah said. “His whole family. It’s not just that you went out with him for a while. That’s not what I’m saying. We’re neighbors.”
“Look,” Poppy said, putting down her phone. “I know all that. I do. But just because his mother died doesn’t mean I suddenly feel different about him and what he did. He’s not suddenly forgiven because there was a death in the family and . . .” She trailed off and began digging in her handbag.
A second later, Wade popped back behind the wheel with a giant cup of Coke. He handed Lilah a bottle of apple juice and Daisy again felt squashed against her family. “Any other stops before home?”
“Can you stop at Marshall’s, please,” Poppy said, sealing gloss on her lips.
“What are we doing there?” Wade asked.
“We’re not doing anything,” Poppy said. “You guys go home; I’ll catch up later.”
“What about the reception?” Wade was incredulous.
“I’ll get a ride, don’t worry,” Poppy said.
Wade sucked on his Coke, reversing the truck with his right arm spread around Lilah, who rolled the condensation from her juice bottle between her palms and against her neck. All week, the temperatures had been in the upper nineties; it had been the hottest summer on record, everyone said, along with a short, nonexistent spring. No rain, no April showers. Just sun and heat, beating everyone down into a torpor. All along Old Blackmun Road, the corn sprouts were defeated in dry brown fields; here in town, the heat rose in witchy glimmers off the asphalt.
A block from Marshall’s, Wade stopped at a light and Poppy said, “Right here’s fine!” She jumped out, rushing through the crosswalk in her stacked black sandals, her long tan legs flashing as she sprinted toward the restaurant, where someone was waving to her from a patio table. Daisy immediately slid into the vacated spot.
“Who the fuck’s she meeting?” Wade asked as they waited for the light to change.
“Probably Perry Coughlin,” Lilah said while lazily shaking up her juice.
“Fucking cake-eater,” Wade grumbled. The light turned green and he floored it. “What the fuck’s he doing back?”
“He’s lifeguarding at the Y this summer,” Daisy said. She and Poppy had seen him at lap swim last week; Daisy waited forever while they talked on the pool deck.
“That fucking kid,” Wade said, exiting off the ramp to the highway. “Annoys the piss out of me.”
“He’s two years older than you,” Lilah said. “How can he be a kid?”
Wade shook his head. The mood in the truck was now sour. Even Lilah trying to resume the whole that-is-so-metal conversation didn’t help. While she didn’t care that Poppy ditched them—Poppy’s absence this past year had been something she had very easily, and happily, adjusted to—Daisy still felt the weight of the day pressing on her. She had never been to a funeral before; she had never seen so many people she knew crying at one time. But there was something unreal about the funeral: Mrs. Isherwood was dead, but there was no coffin, no body. Just a picture of her in a red shirt, with red lips, her blond hair curling down her shoulders, gold necklaces glittering around her collarbone. Daisy had worked for Mrs. Isherwood last summer at the pick-your-own berry patch she ran, and she would have worked for her again, if not for the car accident that left her brain dead this March. After a lot of tests and family fighting, she was removed from life support a few weeks ago; the berries, untended, grew wayward and were now rotting atop the straw they’d carefully pitched over them last fall. Mr. Isherwood told neighbors to pick what they wanted; he didn’t care. Daisy picked a bucket but couldn’t bring herself to eat them.
Lilah cracked open her juice and began gulping it until it splattered onto the front of her yellow dress—another thing Poppy disliked, but Lilah refused to wear black for any reason and her updo was her only concession to Poppy’s sense of propriety.
“Easy does it, Jesus!” Wade said, laughing.
“It’s so good, though!” Lilah said, wiping her mouth. Instantly, the mood in the cab changed back to good. Lilah’s powers in situations like this always fascinated Daisy, especially since most of the year her sister had been in a gloomy funk. Moping around, sleeping constantly, crying in the bathtub with the door locked so no one could pee, doctor appointments and hushed conversations, arguments between her and Violet that stopped whenever Daisy came into the room. Refusing to take even ibuprofen when she had bad cramps, and just silently weeping as she lay on the sofa, insisting she was fine and it was natural this way. Only when the weather warmed up did Lilah’s good mood return and Daisy realize how tense everything had been, for so long.
“I need to stop at home first,” Lilah said when Wade turned onto Old Blackmun Road. “I need to change out of this dress.”
Daisy felt a pinch of impatience. She wanted to get out of Wade’s truck. She was thirsty and a little hungry. And she wanted to see Hugh Isherwood. Selfishly, she wanted to see what he would act like, now that the funeral was over. What would his face look like, in the house his mother would never enter again? Would he cry more or pretend to be jolly like Wade had in the truck? She wanted to see for herself, and quickly, before her mother showed up and prodded her to say hello to someone, to meet somebody else. She wanted to see, and then she wanted to go off in the woods, hide, go somewhere that she could think about these things without anyone looking at her, somewhere she didn’t need to be concerned about the expression on her face.
So, when Wade pulled into the end of their drive and gently nudged Lilah on the arm, asking her where she got that bruise, Daisy hopped out of the cab and took off in a run.
“Hey!” he shouted, just as Lilah called her name. But she didn’t look back. Winding around the big maple in the front of the house, its heavy widow-makers drooping as if they too were sapped by the heat, Daisy crossed into the woods toward the Ruin. This was what they had always called the shell of the house with its crumbling chimney, where they’d played every spring as soon as the ground was dry. Violet and Carna gave them old blankets and towels—scraps from Grandma Whitsun’s old quilt shop—and all these would be hung up on sticks and weighted down by rocks to make curtains and forts and awnings and separate rooms. They were often joined by other kids who lived along Old Blackmun Road, morning games that would turn into runs in the sprinkler and swimming in the Isherwoods’ duck pond, ending in barefoot dinners of grilled hot dogs while Violet and Evie Isherwood clustered around the patio drinking wine. That type of play pleased both mothers, though Mrs. Isherwood had always been adamant about her boys playing outdoors so as to keep her house clean, while Violet valued her girls having the sun on their backs and their feet in the dirt.