The Secret Hum of a Daisy by Tracy Holczer

Author:Tracy Holczer
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-05-01T04:00:00+00:00

17

Wheel of

Fortune

As Grandma led me through the garden, Beauty came up to the fence and gave us a good-natured grunt.

“I don’t have any carrots for you,” Grandma said, and Beauty grunted again.

“I’ll bring some later!” I called.

The garden led to a path I hadn’t seen on my one and only trip through these woods from that first day, which seemed so long ago. The path curved and then ran alongside the river, about ten feet above it, a wide, rocky slope in between. I realized I had one hand clenched into a fist as we walked. It helped, so I left it that way.

We crossed a fast-running stream that came from above and flowed on down into the river, stepping from one enormous flat stone to the next.

“Your grandpa laid these in so we could always get across.”

“Tell me about him,” I said.

Grandma thought for a minute, looking up into the leafy trees. “He smoked a pipe because he thought it made him look smart.” She smiled her crinkle-nosed smile. “He was a whiz with his hands, could fix anything you put in front of him. He was that way with puzzles too.” We reached a curve in the trail and she paused, looking down where the river rushed by. “He was never indoors if he could be outside. I used to think he liked to garden, but he had no eye for it, so after years of watching him pull perfectly good plants and leave the weeds, I realized he just liked to be useful. But he could name every tree in the forest. He always had a book in his hand and a smile on his face.” She shook her head. She went back to walking, turning to see if I was coming along. “Your mama was everything to him.”

Like with Daddy, I’d made up stories about Grandpa too. From the one picture I’d seen, he didn’t seem like the kind of man who wore a suit to work and said things like “quarterly reports” or “credit application.” I liked to think that he was a writer, like me, or did something heroic like move cattle across the plains or build hearing aids. And now I found out my ideas of him were not all that wrong.

I let myself imagine him. The white and brown stubble of his chin. How he would smell of pipe tobacco and pine. How he would have taken my hand and walked me through the trees, pointing to this one or that, giving their proper names, like maple or ash or sycamore.

I felt a deep, burning anger at Mama. At her need to move from place to place and drag me with her. Then disloyalty slithered its squeezy fingers around my insides.

Matching breaths to the beat of my footfalls helped the squeezy feeling pass, and eventually, we came to a green meadow where I could feel the warm weather hiding just around the corner. The meadow touched the edge of a large rocky beach, the river beyond.

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