still I wanted to keep looking. Her voice was a poem.
She poked her head out the door and pulled me into the room, closing it behind us. She threw on a black sheer silk kimono. “I sensed you coming,” she said. “I swear I can see the future since he burned me. Gave me some magic powers, I’d like to think.”
“Who’s he?” I asked.
“Oh,” she said, surprised. “Your mother really wasn’t much of a gossip. Well, it’s a long story, I won’t bore you with it.”
“My mother never told me anything about you. Or this place. It was her secret assignment.”
“I pictured you older-looking,” she said, appraising me. “But you have her face. You walk the same way, too, like you’re not sure where you’re going.”
“My grandma Cherry says I have the face of a truck driver.”
“I’ll let you in on a secret,” Daisy said. “You’re going to be really pretty someday, and she can’t stand it. Don’t you have any intuition, kid, or do you just believe what people tell you about your own self?”
She watched as I looked at the jagged raw-cut pink and jade crystals lining her desk, like the ones my mother had taken to collecting. “Let the crystal pick you.”
“I don’t believe in that stuff,” I said.
She twirled a clear oblong wand between her fingers. Held it up. “Selenite. Keeps the bad away.”
She tried to hand it to me but I stepped back. “It’s because of you and this place she started drinking again. She never would have if it wasn’t for you.”
Daisy sat on her pink velvet chair. A fan blew a few wispy bleached hairs around her face. One of her eyes was white all the way through, and I saw clearly then that the portrait in the entryway was of her. “Your mother’s got that emptiness inside her and she’s gonna fill it with something. Drink, church, men. Always switching seats on the Titanic.”
“No one else will help me.”
“What happened here?” Daisy said, pointing at my crotch. I looked down and saw there was more blood than I thought. Saw that my life was so different than it was just a month ago when my mother was still teetering on the edge of disaster but still here at least. We still completed our days together, some idea of the future ahead. Now the future was this and I hated it. Blood had smudged onto my thighs. The yellow bikini didn’t hide it at all.
“People underestimate young girls but they never should,” she said when I didn’t answer. “I look at my own daughter—you saw her there downstairs—and I realize I don’t know her experience at all. She doesn’t tell me a thing. And why should she? If I’d have told my mother what I was up to at her age she’d have taken me outside and shot me.”
“My mother has no idea what she’s done to me.”
She took a light pink kimono off a hook near her vanity and draped it over my shoulders. I felt immediately comforted by its feel, its vanilla scent. “Is this one hundred percent polyester?” I asked.
Daisy scoffed. It was not. Silk at last, I thought, fingering its fineness.
“Your mother’s not in good standing with me, either, I guess we have something in common.” Daisy drank from a tall thin glass bottle. Water. My desire pulled at me. “Broke my number one rule. She let one of these fools convince her he was gonna make her a real star. I told her they all like to promise that. If I had a cent for every man who heard my honey-whipped-cream voice and told me I could make it on the screen I’d be rich.”
“So you know where she is?”
Daisy took her hair out of its bun and respun it in one motion, tying it in a knot. “Well. I know the phone number of the caller who stopped calling so much the day your mama went bye-bye, and that’s all.”
“The Turquoise Cowboy,” I said.
“But giving it to you would be far against our confidentiality clause. We’re a clean business above all else.”
“Please,” I said.
She pulled me closer by the belt of the kimono. “Tell me why you came here barefoot and bleeding.”
I shook my head.
“If I had to guess I’d say you’ve been with a man,” she said. “Or a man’s been with you.”
I felt myself about to cry, just like I hadn’t wanted to. Crying was an exhausting pursuit and I’d done so much of it