We pulled up to Fulbright’s, which was crowded at this time of day. As we watched, two women in custodial uniforms walked in, still wobbly from their shifts at the nearby Grace of Mary hospital. Beyond the sign of dead fireflies, we could see that the booths were all full, and—
“No, no, absolutely not.”
Daisy shrank back in her seat, shaking her head and gripping the steering wheel so hard I thought her knuckles would crack straight through her thin skin.
“Jordan! Jordan, no, I just can’t … Please, please, I can’t, I’d rather just go home, I can’t. I can’t.”
“Won’t, you mean,” I snapped, but I slammed out of the roadster, my braids flying behind me.
I used my irritation to propel me through the door into the restaurant, ignoring the stares that I got. I always got stared at when I went out in Louisville. I’d be common as dirt in Chicago, but we weren’t in Chicago. I stood as if someone had slid a steel shaft down my spine, and I glared at the little girl sitting at the register. The woman who had talked to us a few nights ago was nowhere to be seen.
“I want a fish sandwich,” I said, daring her to make anything of it. I slid my quarter across the counter towards her, and she scraped it up to plunk it into the steel machine.
“Gimme a minute,” she said, and she went around back to the kitchen.
The seconds crept past, and I continued staring straight ahead, my face as still as stone, but aware that the back of my neck was as hot as if I had been out of doors all days.
“Hey, which one are you, Angie or Margaret?” came a voice from behind me. Angie and Margaret were the name of the Toy girls, and I ignored it, though later I wondered if I should have claimed one of them. It would have covered my tracks a bit, but as the woman had said, the Toy girls were apparently known to be a little too smart and good to be doing anything like this.
Finally, the girl came back with a paper bag folded neatly at the top. It was stamped with a surprisingly pretty flower design, and she handed it to me diffidently. I took it and stomped out, catching speculative looks out of the corner of my eyes.
I shouldn’t have worn my school uniform in, I thought with disgust. I could have gone around back, but of course Daisy pulled us up around front.
She was still waiting for me there, ducked down as if her car was at all inconspicuous in that neighborhood.
“Well?” she asked when I got in.
I opened up the bag to pull out my sandwich and also to spill out a jam jar filled with a green mash of herbs and a receipt for a new stove hood. On the back of the receipt were instructions written in a neat rolling hand.
Daisy took the jam jar and the receipt and stuffed them into her bag. I ate my sandwich, and we said no more as she drove.
We went back to Daisy’s house, and she sent the cook out for the day with a sweet smile and a fifty-cent piece. Her bandaged fingertips made her clumsy, so I brewed half the noxious sludge at first, in four cups of water as the receipt told us. The air took on a sharp green smell, and there was an odor underneath it that made my stomach twist, an earthy smell, one that brought to mind a garden after a wet winter.
Daisy downed it all at once, lifting her elbow like a soldier. I followed her up the stairs where she lay down in her canopied bed, and where I sat down at her desk to do my homework. I was an indifferent scholar. I got passing grades when I wanted to. School was more about simply going for me, which I had not been allowed to do until Mrs. Baker died.
“What’s the point of it all?” Daisy wondered. “What is the point of any of it?”
“If there weren’t any point, we wouldn’t have done any of this,” I said, and my voice was gentle enough that she laughed.
“True.”
I finished my math and went on to my geography. Daisy struck a match behind me, lighting a perfumed candle at her windowsill, and the room filled with the scent of lilac. Lying on her back, she drew the smoke to her hands, twisting it between her fingers like a bit of ribbon. If she were a boy, or a much more determined girl, she might have gone on to Yale or even to Oxford for instruction in the aetheric and alchemical arts, but she had been more than ready to be done with school by the time she graduated.