The Cinderella Deal - Jennifer Crusie [26]
“Right,” Linc said and thought wrong. Daisy needed therapy and a full-time keeper, but that wasn’t his problem.
Chickie turned to gaze around at the oak woodwork again, obviously picturing Daisy dusting or doing other housewifely things, and Linc winced at how happy she looked. She still thought she was getting a surrogate daughter. He felt ashamed for leading her on. But Daisy would probably have been a great disappointment to Chickie, since he was fairly sure she never dusted. And he’d tell her eventually that Daisy wasn’t coming. He just couldn’t face the wailing at the moment. He’d tell her closer to fall, when school started and she was more distracted, although he wasn’t sure how that would work since she didn’t have anything to do with school. In fact, as far as he could see, Chickie’s problem was that she didn’t have anything to do at all.
Linc did. He hired a plumber to come in and fix the plumbing, and an electrician to come in and fix the wiring, and painters to paint the outside of the house (“Yellow with blue and white trim,” Chickie told him, “because that’s what Daisy would want,” and he went along with it because it was easier than arguing or explaining that Daisy was no longer in the picture), but he hunkered down to do everything else, drawing on the years he’d spent trying to keep his mother’s house from falling apart until there was enough money to move her to a better one. The irony occurred to him as he was sanding down a spackled patch: he’d finally gotten his two brothers through college and they had enough money to move her to a new home, but she’d refused to go. So he was still going back to Sidney—patching new cracks as they appeared, repainting and refinishing—only now in a giant leap forward, he had two old houses to keep going. That was not part of his plan at all, and it was all because of women: his mother who wouldn’t move, Chickie who had picked this house, and Daisy, who had inspired it.
The worst part was that Chickie was right; Daisy would have loved the house. As he worked patching and painting the walls, he could see her trailing her long skirts across the gleaming living room floor, dropping that awful hat in the high-ceilinged hall, shooting him that smile from the arched doorway into the kitchen, sitting on the solid oak stairs and explaining the world to him through the ornate railing. Once he found himself holding an imaginary argument with her as he painted, convincing her that it was practical to paint all the walls white. The really irritating thing about that hadn’t so much been that he caught himself doing it as it was that she’d been winning. Chickie didn’t help; she dropped by regularly with notes about curtains and rugs and the best place to buy bread, all beginning “Dear Daisy.” And it was his fault; he’d started it with that first dumb story he’d told about his fiancée. Everything Daisy had said about stories came back to him: the stories you told were unreal but not untrue; she wasn’t really there, but she was everywhere.
He sighed and kept on painting, and when he moved his chrome and leather furniture into the big old rooms, he knew what Daisy would say, and he had a feeling she was right, so it was a damn good thing she wasn’t there to say it.
“Linc moved out yesterday,” Julia told Daisy early in June.
“I know.” Daisy nodded toward a huge vase of gladioli, birds of paradise, and cattails sitting on the wobbly table near her door. “He sent me flowers.”
Julia squinted at the arrangement. “Obviously chosen with you in mind, I don’t think. Didn’t he get to know you at all in Prescott?”
“No.” Daisy tried to keep the melancholy out of her voice. “He didn’t want to. I think I made his teeth hurt.”
“Oh?” Julia shot her one of those Hello? glances. “Well, he’s not exactly your type either, is he?”
“No.” The melancholy was there for sure, and Daisy gave