Of the three Whitsun girls, the habit had stuck only with Daisy. Once Poppy and Lilah outgrew playing in the Ruin and getting dunked by Wade and the Isherwood brothers, Daisy had been left on her own to rummage through the woods looking for mushrooms or shotgun brass from deer hunters, to follow animal tracks and scat, her imagination unsatisfied by housebound pleasures. The boys on Old Blackmun Road still were outside, but they now had BMX bikes and BB guns, then four-wheelers and shotguns, all of which Violet quietly sniffed at. Violet wanted the natural ideal, nothing more artificial in her version of Eden than the wooden gate around her vegetable garden.
Daisy had no low opinion about four-wheelers or guns. She only saw the Isherwood brothers and Wade Dunedin ripping around in the dirt, screaming and yelling, having fun. Even Wade’s religious cousins, the Haytches, who lived on the next farm over and passed their Sundays and Wednesday nights in an industrial chicken barn that had been turned into an evangelical church and posted up pro-life billboards on the edge of their property, had that kind of fun.
The older Whitsun girls had aged into dullness for Daisy. Poppy had no time for any of these retrograde country activities. She focused on her friends and her clothes, her sewing machine where she would experiment with things she’d found in the lost and found at Violet’s Unitarian church, adding ruffles, ripping out hems, pleating and embellishing and gathering. And Lilah recused herself from that kind of fun, claiming a delicacy that seemed to descend along with puberty. She preferred to knit scarves that went on too long, with too many colors, or read endlessly on the sofa, her fingers sorting through her strands of white-blond hair while she turned the pages.
Daisy stayed in the woods. She would watch the boys in the same way she’d track animal prints and try not to feel so cheated. She was sure that had Lilah and Poppy wanted to hang out, the boys would have welcomed them. But without her sister and cousin, Daisy was locked out of the boys and their possibilities.
Perhaps this was why she was fascinated with Hugh Isherwood. The same age as Poppy, he’d been a mighty senior when Daisy was a meek eighth grader. In the school hallways, he was the good-looking athlete, always up for a prank or a party, surrounded by pretty girls. When she’d worked at his mother’s strawberry patch, he’d been patient and kind, going out of his way to explain how to write out invoices and weigh the berry pails, giving her and the other kids rides on his four-wheeler from the barn to the fields. Twice he gave her a cold bottle of Gatorade, which she appreciated though she didn’t like Gatorade. She knew at that time it wasn’t politeness that made him do this; he and Poppy had dated briefly that spring, until Good Friday, when he’d gotten drunk and sent her a dick pic. Poppy, though no stranger to male attention, broke up with him immediately; she had a fussy side neither her mother nor her aunt could have predicted when it came to sex stuff. Poppy was fine with being admired, but the minute a boy got graphic about her body or his own, she was disgusted and over it. Whether this was due to the crudeness her midwife mother offered, with her talk of bloody breast milk and torn cunts, or her aunt Violet’s preference for sugarcoated euphemisms (“apple blossoms” instead of nipples) was difficult to determine.
Even with Wade’s truck long out of sight, Daisy kept running, dodging a series of gopher mounds. She made a shortcut across Old Blackmun Road toward the shelterbelt bordering the Isherwood farm, sweating as she passed over the coarse, dry grass and wilting wildflowers. Looping around a side yard full of parked cars and trucks, her sandals snapping over the sharp gravel of the driveway, she saw the Isherwoods’ front porch, where circles of people gathered, talking and drinking. Enamel milk buckets full of geraniums, glossy-red rocking chairs set apart by an empty wire-spool table, ferns dribbling from pots hanging from the eaves. No Hugh, though.
She hesitated, though the screen door was open wide. Talking to adults was not her strong suit, and she was nervous around Hugh’s father. Finally, she made herself push through the door.
Huddles of guests in Evie Isherwood’s pretty living room murmured over plates. Women’s voices, low and constant, streamed from the kitchen, followed by platters of vegetables and dip, crackers and cheese, Crock-Pots of barbecue meatballs, boxes of wine, bottles of whiskey and vodka. Everything a funeral goer could want to eat or drink. But no Hugh.
Daisy stepped through the sliding-glass door off the kitchen to the deck, where more people stood around the flower boxes of begonias spilling along the railings, then down the stairs to the patio, where Mr. Isherwood, his collar open and his tie off, sat next to his older son, Brian, along with Wade’s dad and some other men she didn’t know. Mr. Isherwood looked straight at her but didn’t say hello. The men around him talked softly, and when one turned toward her, as if to ask her something, she panicked and rushed away, her dress swirling up as she bolted down toward the barn and the duck pond, feeling their possible stares on the backs of her thighs. Poppy’s updo made her temples ache. As she ran through the Isherwoods’ waxy, well-watered grass, she unpinned the clip Poppy had speared to her scalp, letting her hair lick the sweat of her neck and shoulders.
This time of day, tracking prints was impossible. The sun glared on the bright white gravel, no shading, no subtle gradations, no scrapes or mussing of the brush to follow. She ran past the wildflower garden Mrs. Isherwood had planted after an old tractor rusted and killed all the grass; a riotous stripe of pink coneflowers, black-eyed Susans, blue hyssop, scarlet beebalm, milkweed, and purple foxglove. She hid behind the willow tree that once had a tire swing they’d fought over when they were younger. Now there was a red bench bookended with tire planters full of impatiens. She paused to sit, and then heard voices and splashing coming from the duck pond. Of course! She jumped up, surged toward the water, stopping when she saw cast-off jeans and suit coats, a bare leg scissoring through spokes of cattails. She doubled back toward the barn and whipped inside, scurrying up the hayloft ladder as if she was being chased. Once up in the loft, she squinted and stepped carefully, her eyes adjusting to the shade. The floor beneath her sandals squeaked as she shrugged through cobwebs toward the hayloft door, where she scanned the pond until she found Hugh, treading water in a circle, his shoulders tan and wide, his hair the color of corn.
Two other boys she’d never seen before swam with him; one with long dark hair, the other a scrawny redhead. She guessed they were Ganey cousins from Evie’s side of the family.
She tucked her skirt beneath her and sat down, keeping herself out of view. She remembered secreting herself up here when they were little kids; it was the place everyone wanted to claim first during a game of hide-and-seek. If you were fast enough, you pulled up the ladder behind you so nobody else could get to it. That was usually Hugh’s and Poppy’s move, because it took two to haul it up back then. Hugh, though not as mammoth as Wade, could probably haul anything he wanted now. And anyone. Except for Poppy.
She watched them swim. The splashing subsided, and they merely treaded water, squirted little streams through clenched palms, a trick Poppy had always tried to teach her but Daisy had never mastered. Poppy, who was not here, but still stuck in Daisy’s mind. Poppy and her perfect style and perfect grades. Poppy, a National Honor Society member and an All-Conference swimmer. Poppy, who could sew a skirt in half an hour with two yards of fabric, and walk out the door in it, looking smashingly chic. Poppy, the Whitsun girl who could do everything.