Daisy Lane Read Free Page B

woman’s dominant expression and any other was hard to maintain for very long.
    “It’s a shame about this house,” the older woman said, with a look of contempt. “When my mother was a young girl, it was the Rodefeffer’s home; one of the finest in town.”
    Grace knew better than to reply. With someone like Mrs. Larson no matter what you said it would be wrong somehow.
    “I’m surprised it wasn’t condemned after the flood,” Mrs. Larson said.
    Grace just looked at her, willing her expression to be vacant and stupid.
    “Well,” Mrs. Larson sniffed. “If you really won’t accept it, I guess I’ll be going.”
    “Thanks,” Grace said.
    Grace closed the screen door and locked it with the hook and eye. She was just about to close the interior door when Mrs. Larson spoke.
    “We’re all concerned about you, Grace,” she said. “We’re praying for you.”
    Grace couldn’t suppress her shudder.
    “Good-bye,” Grace said.
    “God bless you,” Mrs. Larson said, but her back was already turned as Grace shut the interior door.
    “Who was it?” her grandfather said as she returned to the kitchen.
    “A church lady delivering dinners to the poor,” Grace said, and took her seat at the table. “I told her we didn’t need it.”
    There was an iron skillet, blackened with age, sitting on the table between them, with two biscuits left of the four she’d prepared. Grandpa was buttering his with margarine from a purloined fast food container, the bright yellow grease clinging to his beard.
    “Hah!” he said, his mouth full of food. “Makes them feel better, I guess, to feed poor people three days per year and then spit on them the other 362.”
    Grace took a bite of her own canned biscuit, a recent past-sell-date bargain from the IGA, and tried not to think about the delicious smells that had emanated from the basket Mrs. Larson had offered.
    “It was Mrs. Larson,” she said. “Grandma used to clean her house.”
    “One of the worst of the bunch,” her grandfather said. “Her father was a falling down drunk but to hear her tell it he was a saint in human raiment.”
    “Her son goes to my school,” Grace said.
    “A chip off the old block, I’d wager,” Grandpa said. “Best you stay away from that lot. Too good for the likes of us.”
    From somewhere upstairs a door slammed and a cold breeze blew down the hall and through the kitchen.
    “Edgar hates strangers comin’ around,” Grandpa said.
     
     
    After breakfast Grace did the washing up while Grandpa worked in the greenhouses. He had sold many dozens of tulips, daffodils, and lilies around Easter time, and now he was selling roses, peonies, and irises. There were no signs out front advertising his business, but still business owners and local people came down to the greenhouse to make their purchases. He also sold flowers at the IGA in town, and in the farmer’s market during the summer.
    Grace pulled on a sweater and went out the back door, pausing outside the entrance to the second greenhouse only long enough to call out, “I’m going,” before pulling an old red wagon out of the bushes and up to the first greenhouse. There she loaded tall zinc buckets full of cellophane-wrapped flowers into the wagon, wedging them together between the wooden guard rails on each side. When Grace was a small child her grandmother used to pull her to the grocery store in the same wagon. Grace remembered the safe, happy feeling she had being pulled back home amongst the paper grocery bags. It had been her job to hold the carton of eggs so they did not break.
    As she passed by the front of their house she looked up and tried to imagine it the way Mrs. Larson had described it. As far back as Grace could remember the white paint on the trim had been pealing, the mortar between the bricks had been crumbling, and the whole building was sagging in the middle. The 100-year-old Victorian had three stories and an attic, plus multiple gables, porches, and turrets;