Susan Wiggs - Marrying Daisy Bellamy

At the library, he could surf the web and access his free email. He quickly found the ROTC site and used the special log-in provided in his welcome packet, feeling as though he’d gained membership to a secret club. Then he quickly checked his email. That was how he kept in touch with Daisy. They weren’t the best at corresponding, and there was nothing from her today. He had school and work; she’d recently moved from New York City to the small town of Avalon to live with her dad. She said her family situation was weird, what with her parents splitting up. He felt bad for her, but couldn’t offer much advice. His folks had never been together, and in a way, maybe that was better, since there was no breakup to adjust to.

Email only went so far, though. He wanted to call her with his news. And to thank her for reminding him college wasn’t out of his reach. Her suggestion, made last summer, had taken root in Julian. There was a way to have the kind of life he’d only dreamed about. In a casual, almost tossed-off remark, she had handed him a golden key.

The apartment he shared with his mother was in a depressing faux-adobe structure surrounded by weedy landscaping and a parking lot of broken asphalt. He let himself in; his mom wasn’t around. When she was out of work, she tended to spend most of her time on the bus to the city, going to networking meetings.

Julian paced back and forth in front of the phone. He finally got up the nerve to call Daisy. He wanted to hear her voice and tell her in person about the letter. The call was going to add to a cost he already couldn’t afford, but he didn’t care.

She picked up right away; she always did when he called her on her cell phone because nobody else called her from this area code. “Hey,” she said.

“Hey, yourself. Is this a good time?” he asked, thinking about the three-hour time difference. In the background of the call, he could hear music.

“It’s fine.” She hesitated, and he recognized the song—“Season of Loving” by the Zombies. He hated that song.

“Everything all right?” It was weird, he hadn’t seen her since last summer, but her It’s fine struck him as all wrong. “What’s up?” he asked.

She killed the music. “Olivia asked me to be in her wedding.”

“That’s cool, right?” Julian was going to be in the wedding, too, because his brother was the groom. He’d never attended a wedding before, but he couldn’t wait because it was going to take place in August at Camp Kioga. Suddenly it occurred to him to check his ROTC schedule to make sure he was free that day.

“It’s not so cool,” Daisy said, her voice kind of thin-sounding. “Listen, Julian, I’ve been trying to figure out how to tell you something. God, it’s hard.”

His mind raced. Was she sick? Sick of him? Did she want him to quit calling, make himself scarce? Did she have a boyfriend, for Chrissake?

“Then tell me.”

“I don’t want you to hate me.”

“I could never hate you. I don’t hate anybody.” Not even the drunk driver who had hit his dad. Julian had seen the guy in a courtroom. The guy had been crying so hard he couldn’t stand up. Julian hadn’t felt hatred. Just an incredible, hollow sense of nothingness. “Seriously, Daze,” he said. “You can tell me anything.”

“I hate myself,” she said, her voice low now, trembling.

The phone wasn’t cordless, so his pacing was confined to a small area in front of a window. He looked out at the colorless February day. Down in the parking lot, Rojelio’s wife was bringing in groceries, bag after bag of them. Normally, Julian would run down and give her a hand. She had a bunch of kids—he could never get an accurate count—who ate like a swarm of locusts. All she did was work, buy groceries and fix food.

“Daisy, go ahead and tell me what’s going on.”

“I screwed up. I screwed up big-time.” Her voice sounded fragile, the words like shards of glass, even though he didn’t know what she was talking about. Whatever it was, he wanted to be there, wished he could put his arms around her, inhale the scent of her hair and tell her everything was going to be all right.

His mind scrolled through the possibilities. Had she started smoking again? Was she failing in school? He waited. She knew he was there. He didn’t need to prompt her anymore.

“Julian,” she said at last, a catch in her voice. “I’m going to have a baby. It’s due in the summer.”

The words were so unexpected, he couldn’t think of a single thing to say. He kept staring at Rojelio’s wife, now on her second trip with the grocery bags. Daisy Bellamy? Having a baby?

At Julian’s school, pregnant girls were pretty common, but Daisy? She was supposed to have, like, this privileged life where nothing bad ever happened. She was supposed to be his girlfriend. It was true, they’d parted ways in the summer having made no promises, but it was an unspoken assumption between them.

Or so he’d thought.

“Julian? Are you there?”

“Yeah.” He felt as if he’d been punched in the gut.

“I feel really stupid,” she said, crying now, sounding scared. “And it can’t be undone. The guy … he’s somebody from my school in New York. We weren’t even, like, together or anything. We got drunk one weekend, and … oh, Julian …”

He had no idea what to say. This was not the conversation he’d imagined when he’d picked up the phone. “I guess … wow, I hope you’re going to be all right.”

“I pretty much changed everything for myself. I told my parents, and they’re, like, in shock and everything, but they keep telling me it’ll all work out.”

“It will.” He had no idea if it would or not.

“Julian, I’m so sorry.”

“You don’t need to apologize.”

“I feel terrible.”

So did he. “Look, it is what it is.”

“I wouldn’t blame you if you never wanted to see me again.”

“I want to see you.”

She breathed a sigh into the phone. “I still want to see you, too.”

“I guess we will at the wedding.”

“Right. So … enough about me.” She gave a weak laugh. “How are things with you?”

It didn’t feel right to share his news with her now. All the energy had been sucked out of him. He couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that she was pregnant … and what she’d done in order to get that way.

“Everything’s fine,” he said.

“Good. Julian?”

“What?”

“I miss you.”

“Yeah,” he said, though he didn’t know what he missed. “Me, too.”

“Hey, buddy,” said Daisy, perching on the edge of Charlie’s sandbox. “Guess what?”

Her son smiled up at her, green eyes twinkling in a way that never failed to catch her heart. “What?”

“You’re going to have a sleepover with your dad.”

“Okay.”

“Does that sound like fun?”

“Yep.” He went back to the trench he was digging in the sand.

The afternoon light filtered through the new leaves, glinting in his fiery red hair. “Silly question,” she said, pushing a toy truck along one of the roads he had paved. “You and your dad always have fun together, right?”

“Yep.” He filled a dump truck with sand. The backyard sandbox was elaborate, a gift from his O’Donnell grandparents for his third birthday. Charlie loved it. His grandpa O’Donnell claimed this was because shipping and transport—the O’Donnell family business—was in his blood, same as his red hair and green eyes.

He looked so much like Logan that Daisy sometimes wondered what part of her their son carried in him. Looking at Charlie felt like peering through a strange lens that took her back across time, to Logan as a child. Before she knew it, Charlie would be starting kindergarten; he’d be the same age Logan had been when Daisy had first met him. That was freaky to contemplate.