The Secret Hum of a Daisy: Chapters 24–34

Jo, Max, and Mrs. Brannigan continued to bicker.

I took a deep breath and let everything wash over me. The way you can ask for help and people will actually give it. The surprising feeling of belonging as I sat in the middle of a squabbling family when I’d just left Mrs. Greene’s feeling the opposite.

Mr. Brannigan was tall and lanky where Mrs. Brannigan was small and round so that together they looked like a lowercase b or d depending which side of him she was standing on.

He put his hands on either side of my waist and helped me into the saddle whether I was ready or not.
"How does it feel up there?" he said, and patted Pumpkin on his haunches.

Jo suddenly looked stricken. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to talk about...”

The dirt path led to a watering trough for the horses and an old-fashioned hitching post.

The folder had lots of newspaper clippings from when the park was being suggested to the city council, the different park ideas that were tossed around, and the final plan. There were blueprints and schematics and some quotes Jo had written down from her interviews.

“In case I haven’t told you, I am a master sleuth. I’ve read every single Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie novel in my parents’ house. Of which there are many.”

“Max has been sick. He's got something called acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a form of cancer. He's been in remission a little less than a year now.”

“Remission is good, right?”
“Remission isn’t cured,” she said, and then took a mouthful of chocolate cake.

Try as I might to hold them off, pictures came: the silent whirling lights of the ambulance, Mama’s matted hair, a policeman standing frozen on the bank of the river with helpless hands stuffed in his pockets.

I laid Mama's coat on the hearth so it would dry quickly as Grandma made up the couch.

By the time she was ten, she worked with a soldering iron and a rivet gun so her birds would be more three-dimensional.

A thought niggled at me, though, like I was missing something important.

Grandma started to poke at the rocks and mortar.

I walked slowly toward Beauty and the tiny horse that was all legs and knobby knees. Mr. Brannigan told me to kneel right beside the foal.

Then Beauty stood, talking in a soft nicker as she licked her new baby.

We hunkered down in the hayloft, which looked in on Beauty’s stall. We had all the survival supplies we’d need: beach chairs, a bag of potato chips, two sodas, and my tripod flashlight.

“They see Max is okay now, with all his hair grown back, and they don’t get why I feel like the Other Side is just waiting for us to make one wrong move, change its mind, and take him. They say I’m morbid.”

"I told you that my brother does an almost constant impersonation of King Tut before you found out on your own, that we have the psychic ability to talk to God through our Answer Jars, and that my mother sometimes stands in the closet when she needs a break. You can tell me one silly thing.”

Max appeared in the doorway carrying a sleeping bag and a pillow.
Jo sighed with exasperation.

In a panic, I turned to see an arm, white in the murky water, floating beside me.

I stared straight up into the rafters of the barn and rested it on my forehead, slowing my breaths, hoping meaning might drop into my head and chase everything else away.

I knew Lacey could be selfish, but I’d only seen her mean when someone else poked her first. I was plain flabbergasted.

But Grandma was in a questioning mood. She pelted them at me like she was trying to win something.

“Some people believe there’s a blueprint. But I like to think that God, or whoever is in charge, doesn’t dabble in blueprints.”

After a while, I tinkered with Mama’s unfinished crane. When I couldn’t make any of the pieces work, I got up to pace, tired of my own deep-down hurting, the deep, hard scratching that wouldn’t stop.

I woke up, unsure of where I was. I stared at the ceiling, counting deep breaths, remembering I was at Jo’s. Sleeping on her dusty trundle.

She grabbed a misshapen pottery jar with a wide cork lid.

Ginger and Beth were there with a gaggle of Max’s friends, including Spencer, the friend he blamed for hiding his red suitcase.

Jo stood at the makeshift podium Mrs. Brannigan set up using a stool from their kitchen island.

“Colic is when the intestines get into a bit of a twist,” she said.

Mr. Brannigan tried to get Daisy standing by soothing and whispering. He touched and coaxed while Beauty whinnied next door.

So I decided we needed a dog. What with so many of them dead along the side of the road or wandering around the dusty fields without collars, grungy and electrified with hunger.

Margery had talked about a cavernous space and how it can grow between people. It was so easy to stay on your side of that space instead of wading through all that emptiness and loneliness, making a thousand wrong turns.