49. Daisy
***Daisy***
From the top of the hill I could see the whole marina laid out below me, the docks, the boats, and Flynn standing at the end of the main dock with my little sister’s hands on his face and her mouth on his.
I’d driven the whole way rehearsing one question, and I never got to ask it.
Seeing Brooke and Tyler all over each other on social media had hurt my pride, but this hurt something deeper. My brain was already whispering that Brooke had been facing the hill, that she’d seen me before she did it, that the math didn’t work, but my body didn’t care about math.
“Shit. Shit. Shit.”
I ran. Not toward the golf cart, which would have been the sane thing, but down the road toward town, in yesterday’s dress, crying so hard the world went smeary. I heard Flynn shout my name behind me and it just made my legs go faster.
I’d made it maybe a quarter mile when a car slowed beside me its small, beat-up engine whining hard. The window buzzed down and a voice I hadn’t heard in over a month said, “Hey, D.”
Rat. Behind the wheel of the same smart car, wearing sunglasses that had definitely come from a gas station, completely unbothered by the sobbing woman speed-walking down the lake road.
“What are you doing here?” I hiccupped.
“Delivering takeout. I lost my rideshare account.” He waved a hand. “Allegations. I don’t want to get into it.”
I ripped the passenger door open and threw myself in. The whole car smelled like somebody else’s dinner.
“Whoa, whoa. I don’t do rideshare anymore, D. This is a food-service vehicle. There are regulations.”
“Drive. Drive, drive, drive!”
He drove. Then he glanced over at me with his gas station sunglasses and nodded slowly. “Damn, D. I knew we had a connection, but you gotta play it cooler than this.”
“No we don’t. You’re only eighteen and I will pay you in gas money.”
“Eighteen and a half,” he said, wounded, and that was when my ugly cry really arrived. My whole chest heaved, the kind of crying I’d be embarrassed about later. To his eternal credit, Rat just drove and let it happen, one hand on the wheel, nodding along like I was a song on the radio.
Somewhere between the marina and town I got the whole story out in pieces. Tyler. Brooke. The kitchen. The dock. All of it. Rat received this with the serenity of a monk who was also slightly high.
“So let me get this straight. You came up here for one brother, and you ended up with the other three.” He whistled. “Damn, D. Good for you. That’s a hall of fame summer. Miss D got her triple D!”
“Rat.”
“I’m serious. I’m proud of you. When I met you, you cried on a couch because of one mediocre guy. Look at you now. Crying in my smart car because of three quality ones. That’s growth.”
I laughed, which came out as a horrible wet honk, and then I found a paper bag by my feet and started stress-eating somebody’s egg rolls straight out of it.
“Those are Mrs. Kowalski’s,” Rat said, looking concerned.
“I’ll pay for them.”
“You better.” He reached into the console and produced a small baggie. “You want an edible? You seem like you need one. Friends and family discount.”
“Rat. The last time I ate one of your edibles, I said yes to a nanny job and ended up sleeping with my ex’s three brothers.”
He considered that. “That’s fair. My cookies have a legacy.” He put the baggie away. “So where are we going?”
“Just drive.”
He drove. The lake went by on one side and the pines on the other, and for a mile or so neither of us said anything, and then Rat asked the question I wasn’t ready to hear yet.
“Do you actually think your man’s into your sister?”
“No.”
The truth came out instantly. I heard myself say it and then I sat there holding Mrs. Kowalski’s second egg roll, stunned by my own mouth.
“Okay.” Rat nodded. “So why are we driving?”
“Because I...” I looked out the window. “Because I needed to run somewhere while my body caught up with my head.”
“Cool, cool.” He flipped his blinker on for no reason and turned it back off. “So this is like a feelings lap.”
A feelings lap. Eighteen and a half years old, gas station sunglasses, car full of lo mein and pot cookies, and he’d just become my best therapist. I wasn’t running from the truth. I was doing a lap while the truth parked itself.
That was when the trucks showed up revving behind us.
Flynn’s appeared in the side mirror first, coming fast, and then Wes’s behind it with Max riding shotgun, and Rat looked in the rearview and made a sound like a teakettle.
“D. D, we’re being followed. I did not sign up to be a getaway driver. My insurance situation is complicated.”
“Keep going.”
“Damn, woman. You really think my little smart car can take on those honkers?”
“Rat, please.”
“Okay, but if this ends in a police report, you’re my emergency contact now.”
The chase, if you could call it that, proceeded through Sweetwater at approximately nineteen miles an hour, past the amusement park and the ice cream shop, both trucks maintaining a respectful distance behind us like the world’s most polite kidnapping in reverse.
We might have gone on like that all day if we hadn’t come around the bend by the village green and met a family of ducks crossing the road with the unhurried confidence of creatures who had never once been late for anything.
Rat stood on the brakes. The smart car stopped. Flynn’s truck stopped behind us, mostly. There was a tap, gentle as a handshake, and Rat’s rear bumper, which had been living on borrowed time since Charlie’s four-wheeler hit it in June, simply gave up and fell off into the road.
For a second nobody moved. The ducks finished crossing.
Then everyone got out at once, and Rat walked back, surveyed the bumper lying in the road like a fallen soldier, took off his sunglasses, and held his hand out to Wes without saying one word.
Wes was already reaching for his wallet. “Every time my family gets within a hundred feet of this car, it costs me money.”
“Bumper. Emotional distress. Two egg rolls,” Rat itemized. “And Mrs. Kowalski’s food is getting cold, so let’s keep this moving.”
But I’d stopped listening, because Flynn was standing in front of me with his chest heaving, looking like a man who’d aged a decade in twenty minutes, and he gave it to me fast and plain.
“She saw you coming up the hill. She grabbed me and staged the whole thing for your benefit. I threw her in the lake. That’s the entire story, Daisy. ”
“You threw her sister in the lake?” Rat looked up from counting Wes’s money, delighted. “Respect.”
All three of them were watching me carefully now, braced for me to run again. I looked at Flynn’s wrecked face, and Wes’s wallet still open in his hand, and Max positioned quietly between me and the road like a guardrail, and I felt my body finally catch up to my head.
“I know,” I said. “I knew before I got in the car. I just needed a minute.”
“A feelings lap,” Rat clarified.
“I’m coming home.” My voice stayed steady, which surprised me more than anybody. “If that’s even what it is.”
The three of them traded a look over my head, one of those wordless brother conversations I’d been watching all summer, and Wes was the one who spoke.
“It is. And when we get back, the four of us need to have a talk.” He paused. “About our future.”
My stomach dropped straight through the road.
Our future. Fragments from the office door started circling like gulls, September, my name, all the sentences I hadn’t been able to hear.
A talk about our future could mean everything I wanted or everything I was afraid of, and standing in the middle of the road, I couldn’t tell which one was coming.
Rat loaded his bumper into the passenger seat like a friend he was driving to the airport, told the brothers with total solemnity to take care of me or he knew people, which nobody believed, and gave me a hug. He drove off with the bumper riding shotgun and Mrs. Kowalski’s cold dinner in the back.
I climbed into Flynn’s truck, and he got in beside me and didn’t start the engine right away. Behind us, Wes and Max pulled around to lead the way home, and the two trucks rolled through Sweetwater in a slow convoy.
Flynn reached over and took my hand, and I let him, and neither of us said a single word the whole way back. We were saving them all up.