Out Of Control
“It is very sad that you never knew your grandfather,” Amalia was telling Emily. “But a good thing that this man, Mr. Wynne, is writing a book about him because you will learn many things about him that maybe you didn’t know.”
Which is part of the problem, Daisy thought. There had been another message from Nicholas Wynne that morning. She checked the casserole—not ready yet. Amalia’s antiquated stove took forever to heat up.
She opened the back door to the balcony. A cool breeze off the ocean tossed her hair. Fog had obscured the moon. The surrounding cottages, empty in the winter months, were dark. Amalia’s cottage was at the end of a cluster of twenty that lined Dolphin Cove’s crescent-shaped beach. Before she was born, her father had used the cottage as his studio, and he and Amalia had spent summers there—fairly wild summers, she’d gathered from bits and pieces dropped by Amalia over the years. Above the fireplace was a painting of Amalia in a 1950s-era bathing suit, draped against a fin-tailed Cadillac convertible bristling with old wooden surfboards.
Pictures—of Amalia, of Amalia with Frank, of Amalia and Frank with other handsome, windblown, sun-kissed friends—lined every square inch of wall space. All were taken in the first half of her father’s relationship with her stepmother. Before Daisy, or B.D., as she often thought of it. Something had happened right before she was born, and Amalia had left.
The second phase of the Frank and Amalia relationship began on the day of her tenth birthday. She’d come down to breakfast, excited about the presents she knew would be waiting for her and found only this exotic-looking woman with huge gold rings in her ears and a red chiffon scarf tied around her head. “Say good morning to Amalia,” her father had said. “She’s made flan for breakfast.”
“It’s my birthday,” she’d blurted. “Where are my presents?”
Frank had pointed to Amalia. “Happy birthday. Meet your new mother.”
And that was it. No explanation. No little talk beforehand. “Honey, a very dear friend has come back into my life. I hope you will learn to love her as much as I do…but if for any reason you’d rather she left, just say the word. You’re always first in my life.”
Hah. Amalia had taken over the kitchen, always making dishes with too much spice and big chunks of unidentifiable meat. She’d play this weird, sad music that nothing drowned out, and she and Frank were always kissing and giggling and tickling each other.
“Either she goes or I do,” she’d told her father about six weeks after Amalia appeared at the kitchen table. “I was here before she was and it’s not fair.”
“Amalia was here long before you were,” he’d responded. “And life’s not fair.”
“Where’s my real mother?” she’d screamed. “I’m going to live with her.”
“Write me,” her father had said.
Years later, long after she’d accepted Amalia as a stepmother, she’d asked again about her real mother. Amalia claimed not to know. “I came back to your father and found him with a daughter. Frank never wanted me to ask questions.”
“Your real mother?” her father had smiled. “Who would you like her to be? Mother Teresa? Dolly Parton? Mae West?”
“Hey, Mom.” Emmy appeared on the balcony. “What’s burning?”
“Damn.” She darted inside and opened the oven. “Caught it in the nick of time.”
“Nick,” Emily said, following her.
Daisy looked up from the casserole.
“That just reminded me. Nick called.”
“The biographer?” Daisy raised an eyebrow. “Since when has he been Nick?”
Emmy rolled her eyes. “Jeez, Mom. That’s what he said his name was. He sounds nice. Kind of like… Hugh Grant. You know, in Bridget Jones’s Diary.”
Daisy nodded. They’d rented the video last week. “But Hugh Grant wasn’t really nice, was he? He was deceitful and—”
“Jeez, Mom. Chill out,” Emmy said.
Daisy carried the casserole to the table, where she had to shove aside a gigantic vase of yellow roses to make room for it. As she did, a card fell out.
To Amalia. I hope that doesn’t strike an overly familiar note, but on some level I feel as if I know you already. In any event, I wish you a speedy recovery and am looking forward to meeting you in person and learning all about your late husband. Warmly, Nicholas Wynne.
“Emily!” Daisy yelled to her daughter, who had wandered outside. “Are you going to help me, or do I have to do everything around here?”
CHAPTER FOUR
THAT NIGHT DAISY couldn’t sleep. In his book Baba talked about forgiving and how, when you did, the heart opened like a bud. But sometimes, even now, when she thought about her father she could feel her own heart snap shut. Or maybe it was more like the lid of a trunk slamming down on all the things you never wanted to think about again. All the things, good and bad, jumbled in there together. What was she supposed to do? Just hand them all to this biographer and say, “Here, you sort it all out”?
Lately, there were days when she saw her father’s face in everything. This morning it had been the pair of black rubber Wellington boots, hers, aligned neatly on the cabin’s back porch next to a pot of red geraniums.
She’d just finished feeding the goats and had started up the path to the cabin when she happened to glance down at the front step. And there was her father with his sun-faded blue eyes and year-round tan and the gleeful expression of a child as he rambled on about something he’d done that he wasn’t going to tell her about because he wanted it to be a surprise. And he was wearing a big, clomping, olive-green version of the boots he’d bought her in Paris at a shop near the Pompidou Center, where they’d also sold chickens and rabbits in cages. He’d made her put on her boots and they’d gone tromping down to the fields to check out his surprise, which had been an old wrought-iron birdcage that he’d hung from the bare branches of an almond tree. Inside, he’d perched a yellow plastic bird of indeterminate species. It was the incongruity that had delighted him.
A good memory. And then there was the one about rain.
She’d been in the bathroom getting dressed for school and she’d called out to ask if it was raining. He’d said it wasn’t, but when she’d looked outside it was pouring down. He’d flown into a rage when she questioned him. His definition of rain was obviously different from hers, he’d yelled. This was just a heavy mist, nothing more than a drizzle, and why did she even ask if she didn’t want his opinion?
Maybe it would have been funny if he hadn’t been so furious.
Would that be a memory to share with Nicholas Wynne?
She glanced at the bedside clock. Two-thirty. God, she was going to be a basket case tomorrow. She got up, pulled on a sweatshirt and padded barefoot to the kitchen. The refrigerator, a more reliable source of emotional solace than Baba—she felt guilty thinking that, but it was true—yielded only cheese, milk, peanut butter and some yellowing broccoli. But then, hidden away behind a tub of nonfat yogurt, she spotted a bag of chocolate chips.
She would hate herself for this when she got on the scales tomorrow, she thought as she finally drifted off to sleep.
The next time she opened her eyes, it was nine-fifteen.
Damn. She jumped out of bed and headed for the kitchen. And found Toby, her ex-husband, sitting there with Emily, both of them laughing.
Emmy laughing. Daisy shook her head. It was a sound she hadn’t heard in weeks. They were so deep in whatever was making them laugh that neither of them saw her in the doorway. There was a box of Cocoa Krispies on the table, two blue bowls and a gallon of milk. Emmy finally glanced up, saw Daisy and her smile faded to a scowl.
“Our little girl wants to go to culinary school,” Toby said. “What do you think about that, Daze?”
Daisy grunted something noncommittal. She and Toby ran a restaurant together, Wildfire. He was the chef, she made desserts. When they opened it last year and she’d let it slip to Martin that she’d financed it, he’d told her she needed to have her head examined. “Just don’t come complaining to me when Toby acts up, as he will,” he’d warned. “The restaurant business is notoriously fickle, and going into partnership with your ex-husband, much less a character like Toby, is just asking for trouble.”
“I was telling Emmy, it’s about time she started dressing up to show off how good-looking she’s getting,” Toby was saying.
And I’ve been telling her just the opposite, Daisy thought. She noticed that Emmy, who flew into a rage at even the mildest criticism of what she was wearing, was carefully avoiding her eye.
Toby, after a few more unsuccessful attempts to engage her in conversation, announced that he’d better get going. He left—cereal bowl filmed with milk and glued-on bits of Cocoa Krispies still on the table. Emmy had retreated to her room.
Daisy carried the bowl to the sink, put the cereal away and wiped off the table. An image came to her of her father at the stove. He’d never slept well, often getting up around dawn to make breakfast, an activity that involved hollering and playing marching music and singing at the top of his voice—just in case she might still be sleeping. None of it had bothered Amalia, who could sleep through anything.
On that particular morning she remembered, he’d been wearing a chef’s hat, brandishing a wooden spoon like a conductor’s baton as he’d belted out tunes.
She’d got her camera and snapped off half a dozen shots before he realized what she was doing. After the film was developed, he’d critiqued the pictures. “Not bad, not bad. But notice how the spoon is slightly out of focus and you’ve got all this clutter in the background and, this is just constructive criticism, honey, but see the way the clock on the wall seems to be coming out of my head….”
It had been the same with every picture she’d taken. She’d examine them for hours before she submitted them to him, convinced she’d finally mastered perfection. She’d never even come close. After a while she’d lost interest in photography all together.
Another memory to share with Nicholas Wynne?
The phone rang. She took a deep breath and picked up the receiver.
Nicholas Wynne.
“My God, I was beginning to think you were a figment of my imagination,” he said. “Either that, or you were avoiding me.”
Daisy sat at the kitchen table. This guy sounded a tad too chipper for the mood she was in. “A lot of stuff going on,” she said.
“How is your stepmother, by the way?”
Sober, I hope. And taking her asthma medicine. And staying off the dune buggy. “Improving,” she said.
“I’ve left a couple of messages, but haven’t heard back,” he said.
“You’re kind of batting zero all around.”
“Sorry?” He paused then laughed. “Oh, right. I’ve left one or two with you, too, haven’t I? Anyway, I wondered if we could meet for lunch in the next day or so. I thought perhaps the Ritz Carlton. A favorite of your father’s, I understand.”
“So was Tio Taco’s,” Daisy said.
“Would you like to meet there, then?”
“It burned down ten years ago.”
“Right… That’s out then. Back to the Ritz?”
“The Ritz isn’t my kind of place,” Daisy said. “The Ritz stuff was before my time…before I was born, I mean.”
“Do you have a suggestion?”
Go back to England. “Why my father?” she asked.
“Why do I want to write about him specifically?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, as I explained in my letter, I was intrigued by something in his painting. I’m not much of an art enthusiast, I’m the sort who buys a picture because it goes with the couch. But I’d seen your father’s painting and I felt more hopeful somehow.”
“Kind of a lot to take away from a painting,” Daisy said.
“You’ve never felt that way? Moved in a way you can’t explain by a piece of art or music…”
Daisy shrugged although obviously he couldn’t see her. Chopin did that to her, but she wasn’t about to say so. “That was it? You saw the painting and decided to write a book about him?”
“Well, I did some research, of course.”
“How?”
“Newspaper articles, other published works about him.”
“His first wife’s book?”
“Uh…I’m taking all that with a grain of salt,” he said.
Martin had probably told him to take it with a whole saltshaker full. Except a lot of it was actually true. “So, how is a biography different from gossip?” She could hear a tone in her voice that sounded exactly like her father. Not just questioning but truculent, spoiling for a fight. She couldn’t stop herself. “I mean, you read this juicy stuff about him written by an enemy, say. How do you even know it’s true? Who even decides it’s true?” Her voice went up a notch. “Maybe she’s lying through her teeth.”
“That’s entirely possible,” Nicholas said. “Which is why I talk to as many people as I can.”
“Even so. Memories are so…circumstantial. Say I was in a bad mood, maybe some little thing I told you would make him sound dark and gloomy, or not a very nice person. But say I’d just made this incredible pot of salsa, and the smell of it was like a bouquet of flowers and the sun was shining through the door. I could tell you the same story and it would come out completely different.”
“I’ll just have to catch you on a day when the cooking’s going well,” he said.
Daisy gave up. Baba talked about creating false obstacles—reacting to your thoughts instead of to real situations. Maybe this guy would just ask a bunch of puffball questions. She’d give him warm, fuzzy answers and that would be that.
“I own a restaurant in town with my ex-husband,” she said. “Wildfire. I’ll be there tomorrow around five if you want to drop by.”
As soon as she hung up, she wanted to call back to say she’d changed her mind. What if he wanted real information? Could you simultaneously yearn for the truth but be so terrified of looking too closely that you were always averting your eyes?
The phone rang again. It was Amalia.
“Your father came to me in my dream last night, Daisy.” She sounded shrill, almost hysterical. “He is very, very angry about the book.”
“The book? You mean the biography?”
“He said no. No book.”
Daisy walked outside and sat down on the porch steps. The dogs stopped chasing squirrels to join her. Amalia was always having dreams about Frank telling her what to do. “Did he say why?”
“Frank does not explain himself,” Amalia said. “When he says no book, he means no book. He has always been that way. He says terrible things will happen if it is written.”
Daisy imagined tomorrow’s conversation with Nick. “Sorry to disappoint you, but my father said no book.”
“He was very, very angry,” Amalia said. “He doesn’t want this stranger to write about him.”
“Amalia…” Daisy sighed. “Look, the guy has come all the way from England. I mean, I’ve never been that jazzed about the biography, but you and Martin both wanted it. I can’t tell him it’s off just because you had a dream.”
“This dream was very, very real. I saw Frank as if he was standing in front of my eyes. He said bad things will happen.”
“What kind of bad things?”
“You don’t want to know,” Amalia said. “But very, very bad. I was wrong. Daisy, please, you have to tell this Nicholas no.”
“Okay.” She hung up the phone. It rang almost immediately. Amalia again. Even over the phone she could hear her stepmother wheezing.
“Okay, okay. Use your inhaler. I’m going to meet him tomorrow. I’ll tell him. Listen, I’ve got to go. I’ll call you later.”
As she grabbed her keys and started for the door, the phone rang again. Guessing it was Amalia, she grabbed it.
“This is American Express,” a woman said. “We’re calling to make sure you actually made a purchase that’s about to be charged to your account. It’s a little out of the ordinary for your spending habits and…”
“What’s the purchase?”
“A salamander.”
“A what?”
“Thirty-five hundred dollars. From the Culinary King.”
Daisy scratched her head. A salamander was some kind of reptile, right? Then enlightenment dawned. Toby had apparently ordered another expensive toy that Wildfire couldn’t do without. “No,” she said. “Don’t approve it. I need to talk to the buyer first.”
As she sprinted to the truck, she glanced up at the sky. “Okay, what gives? Have I offended someone up there, or something?”
CHAPTER FIVE
NICK WAS SO RELIEVED at not only making contact with Daisy, finally, but actually setting up a time to meet her that he couldn’t focus on anything that required sitting quietly at the computer. Laguna was still waiting to be explored, and it seemed a perfect time to find out more about the world Frank Truman had once inhabited.
He left the apartment, strolled around the tree-lined streets for half an hour or so, people-watched the bronzed and beautiful from the vantage point of a sidewalk café and walked some more. On a side street off Pacific Coast Highway, he came to the restaurant Daisy had mentioned. He walked into the courtyard filled with a jungle of greenery. The front door was locked, but he could see through into the sleek glass and chrome dining room and part of the kitchen beyond where a chef was working.
The chef saw him and waved. In one of those bits of serendipity that occasionally brighten the day, the chef, it turned out, was none other than Toby Fowler, and he was only too glad to help in any way he could.
Thirty minutes later, Nick had drawn at least one conclusion about Daisy’s ex-husband. After listening to him hold forth on everything from the most flavorful wood to use for smoking meat (apple) to where in Laguna to meet “the hottest chicks,” (Main Beach), Nick had decided that, for all the talk about other women, Toby was still struggling with unresolved feelings for his ex-wife.
One clue was his apparent inability to stop talking about her. No matter the topic, everything eventually led back to Daisy. He watched Toby sharpen a lethal-looking knife—Daisy hadn’t wanted him to buy it, of course, which was further proof, according to Toby, that she knew nothing about running a restaurant. As Toby talked, Nick tried hard to reconcile Daisy, the golden child in the paintings, with Daisy the ex-wife of this stocky, muscled man with the bleached blond crew cut. Somehow he couldn’t quite manage it.
Toby was rattling on about how Daisy never did this and was always doing that. Why, Nick wondered, were solutions to the romantic agonies of others (get over her, for God’s sake, she’s clearly not worth it) so much more obvious than one’s own? Perhaps he should consult Toby on whether or not to encourage Valerie’s visit.
“The thing with Daisy is, if she believes something’s good or bad or whatever,” Toby said, “no way can she accept there might be another way of looking at things.”
“How exactly do you mean?” Nick asked.
“Like her father, for instance.” He stopped. “Look you didn’t hear this from me, okay? I don’t want Daisy coming down on me for dissing her father, but everyone knows he was nutty as a fruit cake. Would Daisy admit that though? Uh-uh. He was eccentric. Different. Emotional. Nuts? Not a chance.”
Nick was interested. “Did you know him?”
“I stayed out of his path as much as I could. Didn’t want to be around him. Daisy put up with stuff from him that no one in their right mind would take. I was the one who had to calm her down after he’d yelled and screamed at her for something or other. He was this famous artist though, so it was okay for him to yell and scream. Anyone else would have the police knocking on the door.”
Nick wondered if Martin considered Toby one of Frank Truman’s detractors. Maybe the truth lay somewhere between Martin Truman’s version and that of the mendacious first wife.
Toby brought the blade down with a hard thwack. “You know what else drives me nuts about her? That bunch of freeloading hippy friends she’s got living up on her property.” He disappeared behind the door of a massive stainless-steel refrigerator, emerged with a tray of steaks. “Well, she calls them friends. Problem is, they’re all on the take. You ever been up to her place?”
Nick said he hadn’t.
“She lives in this cabin on about three acres of land off Laguna Canyon Road. It’s worth millions, but Daisy doesn’t care. Her father built the cabins back in the fifties for these big-time artist friends from Los Angeles who came down to Laguna on weekends. Not a load of deadbeats like Daisy’s got living there.”
“Do they pay rent?”
“‘Oh Daisy,’” he said in a mincing voice, “‘my kitty cat got sick and I had to take her to the vet and now I don’t have enough money to pay the rent.’” In another falsetto, this presumably Daisy’s, Toby said, “‘Just pay me when you have the money.’ Right.”
“Maybe she thinks of it as carrying on her father’s legacy,” Nick said. “Helping struggling artists, that sort of thing.”
Toby made a dismissive gesture. “If what they do is art, then I’m Chef Boyardee. They call themselves artists, but none of them has ever sold a damn thing.”
Nick imagined himself approaching Daisy, who apparently had a blind spot for a sob story. Tin cup in his outstretched hand. Please Miss Daisy, talk to me. This biography will put food on my table. I haven’t eaten for months.
“The thing you gotta know about Daisy is she has a heart as big as all outdoors. She kind of went to pieces after her father died. Gained a ton of weight. She’s dropped it, but she doesn’t look the way she did when I first knew her. It’s like she’s, I don’t know, gone into herself.”
“So she doesn’t talk about her father to you?”
Toby shook his head. “Doesn’t talk about him to anyone. After he died, she just stopped talking about him, period.”
“How long have you known her?” Nick asked.
Toby shrugged. “We grew up together, like, but I didn’t really get to know her until about a year before the old man died. She was kind of lonely then, no one else to turn to.”
He’d started cutting the meat into wafer-thin slices, every move careful and exact. A muscle twitched in his cheek, his jaw was tense. Anger offered another clue that Toby still had a thing for his ex-wife. People got incensed at those they didn’t love, of course, but there was a certain quality to the kind of anger that was all mixed up with having once loved the person who has caused your wrath, making it burn with a particular intensity. Toby was clearly smoldering.
“Naturally, she forgets all that now. She’s got all her hippy friends who are happy to listen to her. Hell, it’s cheaper than paying rent, right?” He shook his head. “To be honest with you, Daisy drives me nuts, but…I dunno, sometimes I think it’s too bad we can’t just make things work again. I mean, we have a kid and everything…but Daisy’s so damn stubborn.”
And you’re in love with her, Nick thought. Was it mutual? Maybe just a sticky patch on the matrimonial road? His own experience had proved, ultimately, to be less sticky patch than insurmountable block. He realized that he felt sorry for Toby. If he could have come up with some words of wisdom, he would have.
“You haven’t met Daisy yet, right?” Toby asked.
“Tomorrow.”
Toby rolled his eyes. “Good luck. She’s not the easiest person to be around these days.”
WHY HAD SHE AGREED to meet the guy? Why? It was four o’clock and Daisy was in the kitchen on the phone with a hysterical Amalia, mindlessly devouring a bowl of Wacky-cake batter. She put the bowl in the fridge, leaned against the door and breathed slowly.
“Amalia, listen to me, okay? Just listen.” She moved to the table and sat down. “I don’t understand why you’re getting so worked up over this dream—”
“I tell you, Daisy, it was so real. You should have been there to see your father’s face. Please promise me you will tell Mr. Wynne there is no book.”
“I’m meeting him in an hour.” She scratched a spot of hardened candlewax from the tabletop. “Look, don’t get mad, okay? This whole dream thing? You just seem to be, I don’t know, overreacting a little. Are you sure something else isn’t bothering you?”