The Cinderella Deal - Jennifer Crusie [51]
“Daisy?” Linc gritted his teeth to keep from saying something tactless like Please don’t let people know how weird you are, but Daisy read his mind anyway and flushed.
“I know. I’m supposed to lie low. But these are our neighbors. We have to be neighborly.”
He thought about saying, no, we don’t, but telling Daisy not to be neighborly was like telling Jupiter not to get fleas. They both meant well, but they just naturally attracted other living beings to them.
Then Evan came to him at school and asked if it was all right that he was dropping by the yellow house three or four times a week in the afternoon. He assured Linc his attentions were honorable, and Linc nodded, bemused by the thought of Evan seducing Daisy. Crawford mentioned that Chickie sure enjoyed having lunch with Daisy every day, and shortly after that Booker told him that Lacey was coming over in the afternoons to help Daisy paint ivy leaves in the bathroom so she could learn to do them in her dining room. “Do I want ivy in my dining room?” Booker asked him, and Linc said, “If Lacey wants it there, do you have a choice?”
He’d also lost his grip on keeping his professional and personal lives separate. Daisy argued with him about bringing his tutorial students home to work in the dining room like the other professors did, and he finally gave in just to end the argument. After that, students regularly stopped by and used the dining room as a study table, checking out the cookie jar to see if Daisy had felt like baking, baking themselves if she hadn’t. Linc worried that they’d bother her, cut into her painting time, but she told him that she liked them, and that they were very respectful of her work.
Olivia, one of the students, told Linc, “You think they’re just pretty pictures, but they have whole lives in them, wonderful lives of weird women who do something strong and important and dangerous. And they’re always true.” She’d stopped for a moment and then said, “You’ve probably already noticed this, but they’re all like Daisy.”
“I hadn’t noticed,” Linc had said a little stiffly. There was something so intimate about Daisy’s painting that discussing it with a student seemed wrong, invasive, personal, and Olivia had looked at him sadly before she went back to the study table.
Even though he was aware of what was going on, Linc didn’t realize the extent to which his house and his wife had become part of the fabric of Prescott, until a phone call sent him home unexpectedly one Tuesday in late November.
He met Chickie coming out the door.
“Hello, darling.” She hugged him and then stepped aside so he could get through the front door. “Daisy’s with Lacey upstairs painting the bathroom.”
Linc knew there was something different about Chickie, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. He watched her walk out to the sidewalk and realized she wasn’t swaying. She wasn’t drunk. It was the first time he’d seen her completely sober.
He shook his head and went inside.
Two of his students, Olivia and Larry, were working over their notes on World War II at the dining room table while Liz sprawled across Olivia’s lap and Annie batted at Larry’s pen. He started to tell Annie to get off the table, but Andrew, another student, came out of the kitchen with a bowl.
“Decide now. Nuts in the chocolate chips or not?”
“Nuts,” said a voice from the living room, and he turned to see Tracy, yet another student, lying on the couch with Jupiter on his back on top of her. She was scratching his stomach slowly, and Jupiter looked as if he were in ecstasy.
“You’ll probably break a tooth.” Evan came out of the kitchen behind Andrew, holding an apple. “Shell pieces. There’s always a risk.”
There were too many people in his house. Linc looked around a little frantically. “Is Daisy here?”
“Upstairs with Lacey in the bathroom.” Olivia waved her hand toward the stairs. “They’re finishing the ivy today. It looks super.”
“She’s going to do the kitchen in trompe l’oeil.” Tracy sat up. “She said she’d teach me.”
“Have you seen