“Daise?” Jordan’s voice shook me out of my reverie.
“Jay,” I finally said, his name sticking in my throat, making me sound hoarse. “I just… I haven’t heard from him in so long, Jordie. I didn’t even know if he was alive.”
Jordan gave me a careful, quick hug, not pulling me too close, to keep my dress perfect. “I’ll give you some privacy,” she said. “I’ll wait for you downstairs. Car should be leaving for the church in twenty minutes?” Her voice sounded like a question, and I nodded in response.
She blew me a kiss and walked out. As she shut my bedroom door behind her, I looked at the letter again, blinked, and then focused on the words.
My Dearest Daisy,
It has been a while since I’ve been able to write, but know that you have never been far from my thoughts. Every night in the trenches, I’d close my eyes, and you would be there. I love you. I have always loved you.
But I’ve just heard your news, all the way across the ocean.
In Oxford, everyone knows the Buchanan name. He has money, and I suppose he can give you everything. He has promised you everything. But he will never love you the way I love you. And you will never love him the way you love me. Remember, Daisy, that night in the rain? When our lips met that first time, I knew. I just knew. We’re meant for each other.
I still dream about the feel of your warm flesh against my hand, about the way I touched you and you made that little sound, like a bird, a desperate lovesick sparrow. Can you close your eyes and remember that moment, Daisy? He doesn’t make you feel the way I made you feel. I know he doesn’t.
And still, you might think, the money. Yes, the Buchanans have so much of it. But I will soon, too. I promise you. The war is over, and I’m studying at Oxford now. I’m going to figure out a way to make a fortune, so I can take care of you the way you deserve to be taken care of. I’ll buy you a big house, and all the diamonds you want, and we can live by the water and love each other forever. But I just need a little more time.
Please, Daisy. Don’t marry him. Give me another year or two. I promise you. Wait for me?
Love always,
Jay
I reached the end of his letter and held the paper against my chest, closing my eyes, the way he’d asked. I did remember. That night in my bed, his fingers had trailed slowly up my thigh. The sensation of pleasure at his touch had felt so intense, that a sound had inadvertently escaped from my lips that I’d never made before, or since. A lovesick sparrow.
But that was so long ago. When Daddy and Rose were alive. When I was a different girl, an entirely different Daisy.
Mrs. Buchanan had said something to me in Paris that I thought of again now. It was just after the seamstress had wrapped her tape measure all around me, clucking over the imperfections in my body, commenting in a French I supposed she thought I didn’t know: bosom too small, hips too narrow, legs too short. Corps de canard. Did I really have the body of a duck? I’d held my breath and thought how I would’ve been much happier shopping at Marlene’s shop in downtown Louisville, trying on the dresses she kept in stock.
“Daisy,” Mrs. Buchanan had said, as we’d walked out of the atelier, and my body had felt ugly, somehow foreign, displaced from myself. “You’re going to be a Buchanan soon. Go back in there and tell her to apologize to you. Demand she apologize. Or we will go to another atelier.”
Mother bit her lip, clearly dying to be her snow goose self, but not wanting to step on Mrs. Buchanan’s toes either.
“My French is rusty,” I said, excusing the things the seamstress had said about my body with a wave of my hand.
“Well,” Mrs. Buchanan said sharply. “Mine is not, and she cannot speak to you that way. Go.” She put her hand on my shoulder and pushed me gently back inside the atelier. It felt like a test, and certainly, I was about to fail.
I glanced at Mother, who stood red-faced with her arms crossed in front of her chest, and I imagined what she would say, if she got up the nerve to talk: Daisy Fay, mind your manners. You’re a lady! But she said nothing at all and Mrs. Buchanan frowned. What choice did I have but to walk back inside?
“You have forgotten something?” the seamstress said to me, in jagged English.
I took a deep breath and stared directly at her. “I do not have the body of a duck. I would like an apology.”
Her face flamed, and she stammered out a quick apology, half English/half French. And I’d felt something then, rising up inside of me. Money would give me a couture dress, and diamonds, and Tom. But it would give me this, this red-hot power, too.
I put my hand up to touch my necklace now. My neck had adjusted to its weight and the pearls no longer felt stifling. Instead, when I turned my head, even just the slightest, I could feel them there, formidable and stunning against my collarbone. What kind of a woman could wear three hundred and fifty thousand dollars around her neck like it was nothing? Mrs. Tom Buchanan.
I folded Jay’s letter back up, put it in the envelope, and ripped it in half. Then I tore it again, and again, until it was no longer words with any meaning at all, but shreds of paper on my bedroom floor that Fredda would come in and sweep up later.
Jay was right. I’d felt something once. We’d felt something together. But I clutched the pink pearls in my fingers, now. Whatever I had felt then, two years ago, was nothing compared to what I had now. And being married to Tom, I’d never have to worry about Mother’s or my comfort again.
I took one last glance in the mirror, straightening the diamond hairpins just a bit. And then I turned and walked downstairs. Mother and Jordan stood in the parlor, waiting for me, and Jordan sighed with what appeared to be relief when she saw me.
Mother stared at me, held her hands to her mouth. “Oh, Daisy Fay,” she trilled when she found her voice. “I’ve never seen such a beautiful sight in my whole entire life. Your daddy would be so proud of you.”
“Are you ready, Daise?” Jordan asked.
“Yes,” I said, and I meant it. I really did. More than I’d ever meant anything in my life. “I’m ready to go become the happiest wife in the whole entire world.”
Jordan June 1919
LOUISVILLE
IT WAS SO HOT AT Daisy’s wedding that a man out and fainted in the middle of the church, just after the ceremony ended. I saw the look on Daisy’s face—that abject horror as she watched him go down—and then I could see all the worry turning around in her head that this one moment would define her entire wedding, ruin everything.
As the maid of honor, it was my duty to assist the bride in every way. And since Daisy and I had been best friends for so very long, I took this duty quite seriously.