21. Penn
Chapter 21
Penn
"But what about the children?" Noelle sets down a stack of books, turning wide eyes on me. She looks like one of those vicious animals that draw a person in by making themselves look innocent and sweet, and then they bite your face off when you get close. Like a honey badger.
"So here's the thing," I say, trying to be delicate. "I'm not planning on being in Olive Township for much longer. I mean, I came here to see what was going on with the Bellamy house, understand what it needs, and then decide if I was going to try and fix it up before I sell it or sell it as is, but at the end of the day, I'm here to sell that house and then go back to where I live in San Diego."
"And you're planning on accomplishing all that within the next month?"
"And help me, too?" Daisy asks, getting in on it. "How are you going to help me with my place, make big decisions about the Bellamy house, and get out of here before the one month mark?"
I cross my arms, staring down at Daisy. Why is she on Noelle's side about this? She should be neutral. "I could leave your home in a state of distress, damsel."
Daisy narrows her eyes at me. I grin in return.
"The annual town play is really for the children." Noelle's tone turns serious. Heavy. She's injecting emotion into her words. Essentially, she's hitting me with the big guns. "For some of those children, the annual play is something they look forward to all year long. They come together, working to put on a show for the town. They even build the set, with some help from adults." A bright smile takes over Noelle's face like she's just remembered something. "I forgot to tell you the best part! We got a famous actress to play the female lead role." Her lips press together as her gaze flits between the two of us.
"Who?" Daisy asks, giving Noelle the question she's seeking.
"Tenley Roberts!"
Daisy's jaw drops. "What?" she screeches. "How?"
"Who?" I ask.
Daisy and Noelle turn astonished gazes on me. Daisy says, "Tenley Roberts. She was America's sweetheart for forever . She came to Arizona to film a movie and fell in love with a cowboy. How can you live on planet Earth and not know who she is?"
"I don't watch movies. Or TV."
Daisy throws up her hands. "You're hopeless. Useless. If you weren't providing the world with something pretty to look at, I'd say we should throw you in a pit of despair."
"Is that a real place? Is there a physical location? An address?" I cock an eyebrow. "Or is it a metaphor?"
Daisy crosses her arms. To my credit, Noelle looks amused. I keep going, because there's one more point I need to make. "Feel free to let me know if I got this wrong, but Sunshine, did you just say I'm pretty to look at?"
"I misspoke," Daisy says through clenched teeth.
An arm slices the air between me and Daisy, swift like a guillotine's blade. "Don't mind me cutting in here," Noelle says, "but let's stay on topic. Peter"—she turns to me—"if you're going to pull a dick move and back out on the kids, I need to know this second, because I was out of time on casting the role about a week ago. What I'm saying is, I'm desperate."
Her eyebrows are lifted, asking for my decision, but also daring me to put my foot down. Shit.
"Fine," I bite out. "But I have no acting ability." Guilt rushes in. Apparently, I have some ability to act.
Noelle claps her hands in excitement, and so does Daisy, but I can't make eye contact with her. I'm too much of a shithead, a fucking fraud.
Noelle programs my number into her phone and tells me she will text me the schedule and a PDF of the script.
"Rehearsals start Monday," she hollers after me and Daisy on our way out the revolving front door.
"Cool," I mutter. "That's four days from now."
"I almost feel bad for you," Daisy says, hopping up into the passenger seat of my truck while I hold open the door for her. Slim Jim pops up from the back seat, and she lets out a startled cry, palm pressing to her chest.
"Warn a girl," she says, looking out at me from her elevated perch. We're nearly eye to eye, and she looks so pretty in my truck, sitting there in her pink floral print skirt falling to mid-calf, the ivory sweater buttoned halfway with the silky looking top underneath.
What would it be like to gather the hem of her skirt in my grasp, run my hands over the smooth expanse of skin below? I don't need to go higher than her knee. I'll settle for her calf.
Torture has never really been my thing though, so I force myself to stop thinking of her this way.
Leaning slightly left, I look over the back seat and give Slim Jim his lie down command. He obeys immediately, and Daisy says, "His commands are in German?"
"Some, but not all." I close her door and round the back of my truck, jumping into the cab. Wisps of plum hit my nose, followed by notes of something smoky, and maybe amber? Whatever it is, my salivary glands are exploding. How am I supposed to spend time in this enclosed space and survive? Daisy smells too good. Mouthwatering.
"So," I say a bit on the loud side, too forcefully, like that one word can push away the intoxicating scent of the women three feet away from me. I start up the truck, backing out of the space, and ask, "How is wedding planning going?"
I've been waiting around to see if there would be any kind of fallout from my interaction with Duke at my house a couple days ago, but it's been radio silence.
Duke and Daisy's wedding is almost the very last subject I want to talk about, but she was at a wedding dress fitting before the library, and not asking about it seems odd, like it's being left out on purpose.
When she doesn't immediately answer, I glance over. Her hands are on her lap, her right hand twirling her engagement ring.
"Sunshine?" I prompt, shifting into drive and starting forward on one of the side streets.
Daisy looks over, something in her eyes that's impossible to decipher. "Wedding planning is going fine," she answers.
"Sounds like it," I answer, a little more gruffly than I intended.
"It is," she insists, but she sounds tired. It makes me think of the way she and Duke parted on Saturday night, the lack of warmth and care, giving no indication they are anything special to one another.
"Aren't you excited to be getting married? You've found your true love, right?" Honestly, I hope she has. I'd rather she be sublimely happy. "Not many people can say that."
"True love," she echoes, laughing softly, a disbelief in the notes. "The stuff of fairy tales."
My face scrunches. A whole-hearted believer in love of the truest kind, Daisy was always staunch in her position. Downright stubborn. Who is this woman beside me, dismissing the notion? Without thinking, I blurt, "You don't believe in true love any—" I cut off, shaking my head. "Sorry. I misspoke. Too many thoughts in my head at once." I clear my throat, trying again. "You don't believe in true love?"
Daisy doesn't catch my slip of the tongue, thankfully. "There is no such thing as true love. No knight in shining armor."
Of everything Daisy has said to me since I've been back, this might be the most concerning. The Daisy I remember loved love. She hosted weddings for her stuffed animals. The question was never 'what are you dressing up as for Halloween', but 'which princess will you be?' Whomever she chose, her dad dressed up as the prince. Without fail.
"Come on," I urge, side-eyeing her. "What about Sir Galahad? Charlemagne? Hector of Troy? All fabled men considered bastions of chivalry."
She scoffs. "Their mothers probably wrote their bios."
"We should all be so lucky," I respond. In my head, I hear the old Outback steakhouse tune that played on radio commercials around Mother's Day. No one ever loves you like your mum, mum.
I keep that little ditty to myself, even though I know Daisy will remember it, the way it would get stuck in our heads as we tromped around her farm, singing it. Instead, I push her a little harder on the topic of true love. I can't let it go, not without digging deeper. There's a lot more to this story, I know it.
"Is there a specific reason you hold this position?"
"I believed in true love once, when I was a child." I spare her a glance as I drive. She gazes out the windshield, eyes glossy. "Turns out, it was a product, sold to me by books and movies. All those fairy tales, you know? And watching my parents. So stupid. Na?ve."
I open my mouth to interject, to defend her against herself, but she continues and I decide to be quiet.
"I didn't only believe in true love, I assumed it was there, waiting for me, distant but on my horizon. It wasn't a hope, but an eventuality. A certainty ." She sighs. "But then I learned a few lessons the hard way."
My fists curl around the steering wheel. Something about the way she says this tells me I was right, there is more to this story, and it has to do with someone hurting her. Someone who is not me.
"Did someone hurt you, Sunshine?" We've lived a good portion of our lives without one another. It's not only possible, but probable, somebody hurt her along the way. But the question is, how much? In what way?
"Why do you say it like that?"
"Like what?"
"Growly."
Because I want to find creative ways to off anybody who hurts you.
"I'm morally opposed to people hurting other people." Wow. I really pulled that right out of my ass.
"Sure. Right." She crosses her arms, brow raised. "Because you've never hurt someone?"
She has a point. Especially considering the person I hurt is her. "We're not talking about me, we're talking about you."
"Anyway," she says, the word hard and pointed. "Liam hurt me. My college boyfriend. Four years at Arizona State University, and three of them were spent with him. We were very in love, or so I thought. It turned out he had many other girlfriends. It was this sick and twisted online thing he was doing, meeting up with women and sleeping with them." The corner of her lip curls up. "This might be TMI, but I never hated him more than when I sat in an exam room, waiting to hear whether his unfaithfulness had left me with not only a broken heart but also a sexually transmitted infection."
I have a lot of thoughts racing through my mind right now, but the main one is how to slyly learn good old Liam's last name. Pay him a visit. Maybe permanently alter his smile.
Daisy continues. "It didn't, thankfully. But I learned the hard way that you can love people, and they can love you, and they will still leave you. You can love someone, they can claim they love you, and they will screw you over. Then you can love someone who loves you back, and life can take them away from you."
That first one in her list is about me, but there's something about the way she says the third one that prompts me to place my focus there. "Like your mom?"
She nods in this tiny, heartbreaking way, and dammit if it doesn't tear me apart. Make me want to haul her to my chest, keep anything from causing her pain. I hate that life has disappointed Daisy. I hate that my actions so long ago have made it onto her list.
Reaching across the console, I find her hand and give it a squeeze. "I recently lost my mom."
Daisy's head swivels, waiting for me to say more. It's one of the last things I want to talk about, ranking up there with Daisy's upcoming wedding. But Daisy needs me in this moment, needs me to provide her with some sort of comfort, and a platitude doesn't feel like nearly enough.
"Liver failure, a few months ago." Now it's my turn to stare through the windshield, trying like hell not to see my mother's face, the regret she felt for the mother she became for a portion of my childhood.
"I'm so sorry, Peter. That's awful."
I nod, thinking back to my mother's final few months. "You know," I say slowly, a new thought turning over in my mind. "It might've been a blessing in disguise that I was injured. I mean, I don't love the scars," I say, palming the left side of my face. "But it gave me time with her I wouldn't have otherwise had. If not for the injury, I would've stayed a SEAL. And she wouldn't have told me about her health."
"She wasn't going to tell you she was sick?" Daisy asks, aghast.
"No," I answer, shaking my head. "She, uh," I falter, fearing I'm saying too much. That Daisy will hear Penn in my words, see the skinny boy who never had enough to eat, and start putting it all together. "There were times when she wasn't a great mom when I was young. She didn't want to make her problem my problem again. Those were her words." In my mind I see her in those final months, the yellow skin and the bruises that seemed to come from nowhere.
"You weren't close, then?"
"That's a tough question to answer. I don't know how grown sons are supposed to be with their mothers, but our relationship was heavy. She wore her guilt about my childhood like a shroud. Being around her was difficult sometimes because she couldn't forgive herself for the past. Our present was being affected by our past, but I didn't have it in me to tell her that, so I stayed away more than I should have. And now I don't have a chance to make that right. Or at least attempt to." The backs of my eyes burn.
What is it Plato once said? You deal with the emotion now before it festers and explodes and puts your brothers in danger, or bury that fucker so deep it never sees the light of day.
Maybe, no matter how deep they're buried, all emotions fester and explode given the right circumstances. Like sitting in my truck with my childhood best friend, grappling with the way my heart feels when I look at the woman she's grown into. With the way I want to pour my heart out about every single thing, my mother's death and the reason I left Olive Township, the places I've been and the missions I went on.
It's me, Penn .
Fuck what Duke said. Fuck the fall out from Daisy learning the truth. I'll weather that storm. Fuck it ALL.
"Daisy, I?—"
"Peter, look out!" Daisy smacks my arm, pointing with her other hand at the road.
The alarm in Daisy's voice sends my foot straight to the brake, but I hesitate. Daisy doesn't know, but we've been here before, me and her. I've been the driver of a vehicle I couldn't control, one that jumped the curb, Daisy's scream reverberating, and then the teeth-chattering collision. Daisy slumped over the dash, blood pouring from her head. Thirteen-year-old me, staring in horror, knowing that was it for me. Knowing everyone would come to their senses, stop ignoring the way my mother wasn't taking care of me. Would it be juvie for me? Or foster care? And my mom? What would become of her?
I blink back against the awful memory. There was no juvie, or foster care. Just a payout, and a one-way ticket to San Diego.
"Look how cute they are," Daisy squeals, as Gambel's quail, at least a dozen of them, mosey across. The male leads with his comma-shaped topknot of feathers, and the female brings up the rear, herding ten fuzzy golf ball sized babies running zig zags over the asphalt.
My heart rate decreases, not all the way to normal, but better than the galloping pace it soared to when Daisy first cried out.
Nobody's driving behind me, so I come to a full stop. We watch the quail attempt to get all their babies safely across the street.
Daisy coos and awws . I open my mouth, about to ask her if she remembers that time we saw a cactus wren swoop in and nab a baby quail, the way she sobbed and I patted her back and reminded her about the circle of life and how quail have a large brood because many don't survive. My mouth snaps shut, and a feeling of frustration shoots through me.
I want to share that memory with her. I want to listen to the way her voice goes higher in pitch as she remembers, a twinge of that sadness she felt back then resurrecting.
Daisy's looking at me now, smiling. "Aren't they adorable? Quail mate for life."
"Very romantic," I agree, and she senses the way I'm placating her, so she thwacks me again. I pretend to rub the spot, putting on a show like it hurt. Right now, I'll do just about anything to avoid the swirling mass of emotion in my chest.
The quail make it across the street, darting into the brittlebush on the side of the road. I let off the brake and keep driving.
"What were you going to say to me? Before the quail? You said Daisy, I but then I interrupted you."
I wave a hand back-and-forth in the air between us, like I'm saying it was nothing. Spilling my truth on a whim is a recipe for disaster. The last thing I want to do is add more grief and pain to her life. And yeah, maybe it is chicken shit for me to just let her believe a lie for the time being, but it's looking more and more like I'm going to go back on what I said before I came here. I can't have Duke's thinly veiled threat hanging over my head.
I am going to tell Daisy the truth. I have to. Every minute I spend around her, it becomes more and more difficult to keep this going. I think, over time, I had convinced myself that we were just kids, and Daisy probably didn't look back on our friendship the way I did. Was that me protecting myself from the guilt I felt over leaving her? Or was it me doing what I do best, pushing people away because I don't believe that they could possibly love me, or that I could be worthy of their love?
We're getting closer to our destination, and Daisy has rolled her window down a few inches. I do the same, so the air can flow through the truck. Daisy's hair is picked up by the breeze, moving gently around her face. She seems content to be quiet, to sit in the silence.
A smile begins to tug up the corners of my lips, but I keep it under wraps so that Daisy does not get suspicious. I feel lighter, almost buoyant, knowing there won't be much time until I tell her the truth.
It is no longer a question of if, but when.