The Cinderella Deal - Jennifer Crusie [13]
“Ouch.”
“Yeah.” Daisy sighed. “But she still thinks it’s just this error he made, and sooner or later he’ll remember she’s his one true love.” She shrugged.
“Sooner or later? How long has it been?”
“Thirty-three years.”
“Your mother is nuts,” Linc said, and winced. “Sorry. I didn’t mean …”
“I don’t think she’s actually nuts,” Daisy said. “I think she’s just detached from reality. It’s a coping skill.” She met his eyes and read his mind. “I am not detached from reality. I’m perfectly capable of taking short vacations from it, but I always know how to get back.”
“Good. Try not to go on vacation this weekend. What do I call your mother?”
“Pansy.”
Linc looked appalled. “Why?”
“Because that’s her name.”
Linc shook his head in disbelief. “Okay. Your mother is Pansy. What’s she like?”
Daisy thought about her mother. What could you say about Pansy? “She’s little,” Daisy said finally. “Nothing like me. Blond. Cute. Southern. She’d go bananas for this ring.” Daisy narrowed her eyes at him. “She’d go bananas for you too. The big, dark, handsome Yankee come to steal her little magnolia away. Just like Rhett Butler.”
Linc looked quelling. “Frankly, my dear, I never thought of you as a magnolia.”
Daisy didn’t quell. “I never thought of you as a Killer Bee either. The things you find out when you’re engaged to someone. What’s your mother’s name?”
“Gertrude.”
“Gertrude? For real? Gertrude Blaise?”
“Her maiden name was Gertrude Schmidt.”
Daisy nodded. “A German. I knew it.” She sucked in her breath suddenly. “Oh, my God, I can’t possibly marry you.”
Linc put his sandwich down, alarmed. “Why?”
“My name.” Daisy invested the words with as much tragedy as possible.
“Daisy?”
“Daisy Blaise.” She made a retching face. “Disgusting.”
He grinned. “Cute. Sounds like a stripper.”
“Maybe that’s how we met.” Daisy perked up. “I was stripping and—”
“No.”
“Okay, then.” Daisy tried to make her voice reasonable. “How did we meet? We should meet cute.”
“No, we shouldn’t.” Linc pointed a finger at her. “Forget the fiction. We met because we live in the same building. We lie as little as possible.”
“That’s no good. I’ll think of something,” Daisy said, and Linc said, “No, you will not,” and went back to his sandwich.
“Okay.” Daisy pushed her empty plate away, prepared to concentrate. “Brothers or sisters?”
“Two brothers, Wilson and Kennedy. Wil and Ken.”
“Lincoln, Wilson, and Kennedy?”
“Dad believed in role models. What about you?”
“I believe in role models,” Daisy said, getting ready to tell him about Rosa Parks, and then she realized that he meant her family. “Oh. Two stepsisters. Melissa and Victoria. Very chic.”
“Got it.” Linc finished his sandwich and looked at his watch.
Am I boring you? Daisy thought, but all she said was “Anything else you need to know?”
“What do you do for a living?”
Exactly what it says on my card on the mailbox, Daisy wanted to say, but she repressed it. Being around Linc meant repressing a lot. She didn’t like it. “I paint and tell stories. Julia said you wrote a book once. What was it called?”
“The Nineteenth-Century Sporting Event as Social History.”
“Catchy title. Who’s going to play you in the movie?”
Linc looked at her with palpable calm. “Maybe I should just tell everyone in Prescott that you’re mute.”
Daisy grinned back. “I’ll be good.”
“Remember that. What do you paint?”
“Primitives.”
“Primitives?”
Daisy thought about explaining it to him, telling him about the women she painted in the smallest, simplest shapes possible, surrounding them with the tiny details of their lives so that the simplicity became complexity, the way that the simplicity of their lives became complex when you looked at their hopes and fears and dreams and stories. Then she looked at Linc sitting across from her, logical and reasonable, and decided to forget it. This was obviously a man not interested