Perfect Tunes - Emily Gould Page 0,81

back inside with a commanding wave. Then she turned and gestured to Marie in a very similar way. “You can charge your phone, but then you’re going right back to wherever it is you came from. I’m not running a tourist operation here. It’s ghoulish and it doesn’t do me any good.”

“I’m sorry that you have to deal with people coming here,” Marie said.

“You’re sorry!”

“I’m different,” she said, not knowing quite how to phrase it. She’d come up with a few different alternatives on the bus, but now that she was here, they all seemed melodramatic.

“Oh, everyone thinks they’re different,” said Daisy.

13

“You’re not the first person to come here and try to convince me they’re his child.”

Daisy had poured herself and Marie both glasses of white wine from a large bottle, filling them both to the very top. It was flattering to be presumed to be an adult, and she wanted the wine, but something made Marie feel like she had to be honest with Daisy about everything in order to be believed about the crucial thing. “I’m only fourteen,” she said, gesturing to the glass. It had gone through the dishwasher, she could tell, but still wasn’t quite clean. The whole house was like that: a veneer of tidiness, but dust on everything, piles of unsorted mail, a musty dog-smell that was almost but not quite canceled out by the woodstove and the general freshness of the air outside.

“I’m sure you can handle a glass of wine if you’re related to me,” Daisy said with a grimace.

“I do have a high tolerance,” Marie said, and took a sip. “So you believe me?”

Daisy scowled as she scrutinized Marie’s face. “You’re more plausible than the rest. And I met your mother once, I think. She was one of the ones who was seeing him around the time of his death. The one who was also in a band, with that beautiful friend of hers.”

“Callie. Yeah. My mom’s beautiful, too.”

“She was pretty, but I didn’t understand what he saw in her. She was a pushover. Too shy to be a singer. Not a match for him. They wouldn’t have lasted.”

“Well, probably no one’s relationships that they have in their early twenties are meant to last, right?” Marie took a sip of her wine and pretended that this was hard-won knowledge, not something she’d assimilated from TV shows.

“I met Dylan’s father when I was twenty-four. We were together for three decades. He stood by me through everything.” Daisy’s tone was deadened, not sentimental or wistful. “Now he’s gone, too.” Her glass was empty already, and she poured herself another; the bottle was still on the table. It wasn’t the kind of wine Marie’s parents drank; it tasted sugary, almost like a spoiled soda, but she gulped it down almost as fast as Daisy did. She was hungry, and the sugar in the wine was almost like eating food. She felt exhilarated. This was her grandmother! Marie felt like she was unraveling a mystery, though it wasn’t clear what she was trying to solve. She’d known that Daisy existed, and that she was her father’s mother. Was there something more to know? She struggled momentarily to remember why she’d come.

She’d thought her dead father, or what remained of his family, could be an alternative to her living mother. She knew her mother loved her but also wanted her to be a happy child still, and to stay that way forever, and it was already too late for that. She could tell that her sadness made Laura uncomfortable—it wasn’t transient like Laura’s own sadness, it was something bigger that she couldn’t handle. It made Laura feel like she’d failed, and that was too horrible a thought to cope with. That after all the effort she’d put in, and everything she’d sacrificed, there was something wrong with Marie that she couldn’t fix. And Marie, in turn, felt like she’d failed Laura, which made her feel even worse. It was impossible to talk about any of this, of course, so instead they fought about rules.

Whereas with Daisy she could start fresh. She might understand what it was like to be defective, brain-wise, in a way that couldn’t be cured by a good night’s sleep or a walk around the block.

“Tell me about our family,” Marie said. “I want to know where I come from.”

“I will, but first you should call your mother and tell her where you are, so that she doesn’t worry about you,” said Daisy.