Daisy's Back in Town (11 page)

Neither of them wanted to hurt Steven and they decided to wait until he left for college to be more open about their relationship. Steven had been accepted to the University of Washington, and after high school graduation, he planned to live with his sister and brother-in-law until he could afford his own apartment. Both Jack and Daisy planned to take classes at West Texas A&M, about seventy miles south. They'd planned to tell Steven that they were in love when he came home for Christmas that year.

Jack rose from the piano bench and moved into the dark kitchen. He flipped on the light and opened the refrigerator. He pushed aside a quart of milk and reached for a Lone Star instead.

Being with Daisy had been like having one long orgasm while on a roller coaster. Damn exciting, but not if you wanted some calm.

He popped the top off his beer and tossed it on the counter. Two weeks after he graduated from high school, his parents had been killed in a car wreck. They'd been out driving in their '59 Bonneville when a drunk driver hit them. That old Pontiac may have been built like a tank, but it hadn't been built with safety features. His father had been killed instantly. His mother died on the way to the hospital. And at the age of eighteen, he'd suddenly become responsible not only from himself but for Billy too.

Jack raised the bottle to his mouth and took a drink. Whenever he thought back on that time in his life, he had a hard time remembering details. He'd been torn up and confused and scared. And just plain raw. His whole life had changed in an instant, and it had seemed that the more he wanted space to think, the more clinging Daisy got. The more he pushed her away so he could breathe, the tighter she'd held on to him. He remembered the night he'd told her they needed time apart, that he needed time away from her to think. That he didn't want to see her for a while. She became hysterical. Then the next time he saw her, she was Steven's wife.

He recalled exactly what she'd been wearing that night. A blue sun dress with little white flowers. She and Steven had stood in his front yard and asked him to come outside. He remembered walking toward her and her looking so good to him that he'd wanted to grab her and hold her and tell her to stay with him forever.

Instead Steven told him that the two of them had married that afternoon. At first, he couldn't believe it. Daisy didn't love Steven. She loved him. But he'd taken one look at her guilty face and knew it was true. He grabbed her and told her she belonged to him, not Steven. He tried to kiss her and touch her and make her admit she loved him. Steven got between them, and Jack smashed his fist into Steven's face. They proceeded to beat the hell out of each other, but Steven Monroe had never been a fighter. He'd ended up taking the bad end of the beating.

Jack raised the beer to his mouth again and swallowed hard. The night he'd lost Daisy, he'd lost Steven too. He'd lost the girl he'd loved and craved and wanted to live with forever.

He'd lost his best friend. The boy who'd been by his side during every hair-brained adventure. Steven might have been a "you go first" kind of guy, but Jack had always known that Steven was right there behind him.

Backing him up. Ready to go next. Then in the course of one night, they were both gone and Jack was alone.

He'd learned a valuable lesson that night that he'd lost everything. He'd learned that no one could take from you what you didn't give them. No one could slice your insides up if you didn't hand them the knife. He didn't think that made him bitter, just a man who learned from mistakes. And it didn't make him one of those commitment-phobic guys Rhonda was always accusing him of being.

Hell, he might get married one day. Marriage wasn't something he'd ever rule out, but it wasn't something he was looking for either If it happened, it happened. He had a family. Billy and Rhonda and the girls were enough for him, but there was room in his life for someone else. He was only thirty-three. There was time.

Except Daisy. There would never be room for Daisy Monroe. Not only had she sliced up his insides, she'd stomped them into the ground. He would never allow Daisy into his life again.

No, he'd learned his lesson the first time.

Daisy shoved her tortoise-shell Vuarnet sunglasses onto the bridge of her nose and looked over at Lily, who concealed her eyes behind lavender Adrienne Vittadinis.

Like a cop on a stakeout, Lily backed her Ford Taurus in between a truck and a minivan and shoved the car into park. The last strain of "Earl Had to Die" wound to a close, and the dying notes of an electric keyboard filled the space between the two sisters. Normally, Daisy had nothing against the Dixie Chicks, in fact the had two of their CDs, but if Lily hit the back arrow on the car's stereo one more time, Daisy wasn't responsible for what the might do next.

"Do you see him anywhere?" Lily asked as the scanned the parking lot to a stucco apartment complex off Eldorado Street. Her hand lowered from the steering wheel, hovered, then she hit the back button.

"Damn it!" Daisy swore, driven to near madness. "That's the fifth time in a row you've played that song."

Lily looked across the seat at Daisy. Her brows lowered, and frown lines creased her forehead. "You're counting? That's warped."

"Me! I'm not the one wearing out 'Earl Had to Die' while parked outside my soon to be ex-husband's apartment."

"It's not his apartment. He's renting a house over on Locust Grove near the hospital. It's her apartment. Kelly the skank," Lily said and returned her attention to the complex.

The Chicks started with the first verse again, and Daisy leaned over and hit the off button. The car was blessedly silent. After leaving Showtime last night, Lily had taken a detour, passing Kelly's apartment. She'd driven past three times like some crazed stalker before dropping Daisy off at their mother's house.

This morning she showed up bright and early to drop Pippen off so she could "find a job." Daisy took one look at her sister's flat hair and wrinkled running sweats, and she knew something was up. She told Lily she was coming along. She pulled on a pair of jean shorts, a black T-shirt, and shoved her feet into flip-flops as she twisted her hair up onto the back of her head and secured it with a claw.

"How long have you been doing this?" she asked.

Lily's hands tightened on the gray steering wheel. "Awhile."

"Why?"

"I have to see them together."

"Why?" she asked again. "That's crazy."

Lily shrugged, but didn't take her gaze from the apartment complex.

"What are you going to do if you see them together? Run them down with your car?"

"Maybe."

She didn't think her sister would actually mow Ronnie down, but the fact that she was sitting here thinking about it was a bit worrisome. "Lily, you can't kill them."

"Maybe I'll just clip them with the bumper. Or ram Ronnie's balls so he'll be useless to his girlfriend."

"You can't ram Ronnie Darlington's balls. You'll go to jail."

"Maybe I won't get caught."

"You'll get caught The ex-wife always gets caught." She reached over and rubbed Lily's shoulder though her red jogging suit. "You have to stop doing this."

Lily shook her head as a tear slipped beneath her glasses and ran down her cheek. "Why does he get to be happy? Why does he just get to move on with his girlfriend and be happy while I feel like I have add eating a hole in my heart? He should have to feel what he's done to us, Daisy. He should suffer like Pippen and me."

"I know."

"No, you don't. No one has ever broken your heart. Steven died, he didn't run off with a woman and break your heart."

Daisy dropped her hand to the seat. "You don't think watching Steven die broke my heart?"

Lily looked over at Daisy and brushed the tears streaming down her cheeks. "Yes, I guess. But it's different.

Steven didn't leave you because he wanted to." She sucked in a deep breath and added, "You're lucky."

"What? That's a horrible thing to say."

"I don't mean that you're lucky Steven died, just that you don't have to think about Steven having sex with another woman. You don't have to wonder if he's kissing her and touching her and loving her."

"You're right. I have to think of him dead in the ground." She folded her arms beneath her breasts and stared at her sister. "I'm going to let that go because you're having a bad day." But she guessed she wasn't quite ready to let it go because she couldn't keep from adding, "I know you don't mean to be an insensitive brat. That's just the way you are."

"And I'm sure you don't mean to be so selfish.

That's just the way you are."

Daisy's mouth fell open. She was sitting in her sister's car to keep Lily from doing something stupid, and she was selfish. "Yeah right, and I want to sit here watching Ronnie's apartment because I have nothing better to do."

"Do you think I wanted to sit in Showtime last night while you stalked Jack Parrish?"

"It's not the same thing. It's important that I speak with Jack. You know that." She turned her head and looked out the passenger-side window at an old lady in a pink housecoat walking her beagle down the sidewalk. "And I'm not stalking him."

"I don't think he sees it that way."

No, he didn't. And after last night, she supposed he had reason to think that. Going to Showtime and crashing his niece's birthday party might not have been one of her brightest ideas, but she was running out of time. She only had a few more days, and if Jack hadn't lied to her about being out of town, she wouldn't have wasted four of those days already. She was under the gun and felt the pressure mounting.

"Did you see how he was with Billy's little girls?" she asked. Watching him walk toward her with those two girls clinging to him, she'd felt a surprising little pinch in her heart. "He was really good with them, and you could see that they really love him. You can't fake something like that with kids."

"Did it make you think you should have stuck around and not married Steven?"

Daisy sank down in her seat and looked out the front. "No, but it made me realize that when I tell him about Nathan, he's probably going to be a lot angrier with me than I'd figured. Not that! thought he wouldn't be, but there's always been a part of me that hoped he'd understand." She took the claw out of her hair and leaned her head back against the seat. "Jack wasn't ready for a family. He'd just lost his mother and father, he wouldn't have been able to handle the news that I was pregnant. I did the right thing."

"But...?" Lily prompted.

"But I've never let myself wonder what kind of father he would have made." She tossed the claw onto the center console. "I've never let myself think about that."

"And now you're thinking about it?"

"Yeah." Although it was probably best not to, she couldn't help but think about it.

The door to an upstairs apartment opened and Ronnie stepped out with one of his arms around a dark-haired woman. Daisy had only met Ronnie twice, when he and Lily visited Seattle, but Daisy recognized him. He was good-looking with strategically disarrayed blond hair and a gee-shucks smile that fooled some women. Unlike Lily, Daisy had never been impressed, much less fooled.

"Turn off the car," Daisy told her sister. This morning, Ronnie's Stetson shaded his face and cast a shadow on the shoulders of his red cowboy shirt. He wore a belt buckle the size of a dessert plate and his wranglers were so tight they looked painted on.

"I'm not going to run him down."

"Turn it off Lily." They were too far away for Daisy to get a good look at Kelly's face, but even at this distance, she could see that her hair was pulled up on top of her head in a ponytail and that she had a big behind covered in black spandex shorts.

The engine shut off and Daisy reached over and took the keys from the ignition. She grabbed Lily's arm to keep her from opening the door.

"He's not worth it, Lily."

The two moved to a white monster truck with metallic red flames blazing down the sides. Ronnie helped "Kelly the skank" up into the truck, then he fired up the Ford and the two of them took off. Anger for her sister burned in Daisy's stomach as she watched them drive out of the parking lot. Lily covered her mouth but a high-pitch keening leaked through her fingers. Daisy reached across the center console and pulled her sister into her arms the best that she could.

"Lily, he's not worth your tears," she said as she smoothed her hair.

"I still love him so-ho much. Why can-can't he love me-me?" Lily cried. Daisy held her and felt her heart breaking too. What kind of worthless man abandoned his wife and child? What kind of A-moral A-hole ran around with another woman and emptied the family's bank account so he wouldn't have to pay for his child?

The more Daisy thought about it, the angrier she got. Somehow, Ronnie would have to pay for hurting her sister.

"Honey, have you thought of maybe getting some counseling?" she asked her sister.

"I don't want to ta-talk about it with a stranger. It's too-too humiliating." After that her sentences became incoherent, and she mostly sounded like a distressed dolphin.

"Let me drive us home," Daisy said. Lily nodded and while Daisy ran around to the other side of the car, Lily crawled to the passenger seat. "Do you want a Dr. Pepper?" Daisy asked as they drove out of the parking lot. "It might help your raw throat."

Lily wiped her nose on her sleeve and nodded. "Eee-hee," she managed.

She drove to the Minute Mart and pulled into a slot in front of the store. She pocketed the keys in case Lily got ideas, grabbed a five from her purse, and put her sunglasses on the dashboard. "I'll be right back," she told Lily and opened the door. Once inside the store, she filled up a twenty-four-ounce cup with Dr. Pepper, sealed the top with a lid and grabbed a straw. When Lily calmed down, she'd talk to her about her lawyer and see what he was doing to help her.

"Good morning," the clerk said, his green uniform hung on his bony shoulders. His name tag said he was Chuck and that she should have a nice day. She doubted that was possible now.