IT REALLY WAS too hot to walk, and as Rose and I stepped out on the street I wished I could take Daddy’s Roadster. The problem was, Mother didn’t know I knew how to operate it.
If there’s two things I want you to know before you get married, Daddy told me, it’s how to drive an automobile and how to shoot a gun. He’d taught me to do both by the time I was Rose’s age. But it was with the understanding that Mother should never know about either one.
Now Daddy was off in Chicago on business, and his Roadster was sitting idle, parked out front. Rose and I walked past it and made it only two blocks before she looked like she truly was melting. Her limp grew more noticeable when she was tired, and I hated seeing her have so much trouble. Hated remembering the way we worried about her so last summer. What would the pretty one be like without the good one? Vapid and useless. Vain and sour. I hated even the very idea of myself without her.
“Rose, we really could take this food when the heat breaks,” I said gently.
Rose shook her head and kept walking, taking all her effort to go faster, push ahead of me. I had to skip to catch up to her.
“Would you ladies like a ride?” I’d been so focused on Rose and her trouble that I hadn’t noticed a shiny black car had pulled up next to us, that a soldier sat behind the wheel calling out to us.
Camp Taylor had opened in Louisville in June and this summer there’d been soldiers all over town: men in uniforms walking across the Big Four Bridge, driving down Main Street and through our very fashionable neighborhood in the Southern Extension. They’d show up in groups to our Saturday night parties and sometimes they’d ask me to dance. I did not yet see these men as warriors. I did not picture them traveling across the great wide ocean sometime soon to fight, and to die. They were simply handsome men, flirting with me. I had no qualms with that.
“Well? Can I help you out?” the soldier asked again.
My hair was limp against my forehead, and I put Rose’s basket down for a second and made a futile attempt to fluff it with my fingers, before picking the basket back up, turning, and offering the soldier a smile. I knew some of the ladies who had tea with Mother on Thursday afternoons hated that our little Louisville was now being overrun by common men in uniform. But truly, I had yet to find one downfall to it.
“No, thank you,” Rose said just as I said, “Yes, that would be grand.” Rose turned to me and frowned.
“Come on,” I said to her. “It’s hot, and this nice soldier is offering.”
That was enough for him to get out of the car, walk around, and take the basket from my hand. Our fingertips touched, and I looked up at him. He was tall with short blond hair and a pale, clean-shaven face. I had the strangest urge to touch him, to reach up and run my fingers across his silken cheek. But I restrained myself.
“I’m Daisy Fay,” I said, clasping my twitchy fingers together. “And this is my sister, Rose.”
“Jay Gatsby,” he said, holding my gaze for a second before turning to smile at Rose. He had bright green eyes. The kind of eyes that would catch you, even across the room in a crowded party.
“Thank you for stopping, Jay Gatsby,” I said. My voice caught just the slightest bit on his full name, my tongue feeling out the sound of it. It wasn’t a familiar name. It definitely wasn’t a Louisville name. I wondered where he was from, what his daddy did.
“You think I see the prettiest girls in all of Louisville needing a ride and I’m not going to stop?” he was saying now, as he opened the passenger door and motioned for us to get in. Rose didn’t move, so I got in first. She sighed and finally slid in next to me.
“Don’t go kissing him, just because he’s giving us a ride,” Rose whispered, as Jay walked back around to the driver’s seat. She sounded like more of a snow goose than Mother.
“I won’t kiss him because of the ride,” I whispered back. “I’ll do it because he’s handsome. Did you notice his eyes?” Rose shook her head, not because she didn’t notice, but because she found me incorrigible. In an adorable way, of course.
Jay got back in the car, put his hands on the steering wheel, and suddenly I was close enough to him that I felt the length of his leg against my own. I didn’t move away, toward Rose. Instead I touched his arm gently and thanked him again for the ride. “We were so lucky to run into you,” I said.
“Daisy Fay,” he said softly. “I think I was the lucky one.”
* * *
“MR. GATSBY, ARE you following me?” I’d spotted him across the crowded room at Marcy Hillet’s party—he was walking toward the door, and I’d run to catch up with him before he disappeared from me again. Now, I stood before him, out of breath.
Exactly one week had passed since he’d driven me and Rose to the almshouse, then insisted on waiting and driving us back home. And tonight I saw those bright green eyes across the dance floor, stunning and hypnotic from afar, as I knew they’d be. I’d been looking for them, for him, ever since I got out of his car a week ago. I had not been able to stop thinking about him, the easy sound of his voice, the solid weight of his body, and the green pools of his eyes. The truth was, if I’d known exactly where to find him, I might’ve been the one following him.
“Daisy Fay,” he said now. A smile erupted across his face, and he leaned down and kissed my hand. His lips lingered for a thrilling moment. And then he clasped my fingers. “I’ve been hoping to run into you again.” Hoping? Not exactly following me, or, even making an effort to find me.
“Funny,” I said. “I’ve been hoping you’d stop by all week to say hello.” When he’d dropped me and Rose off at our house last week, that was how he’d left things. Maybe I’ll stop by and say hello sometime. But then days had passed, he hadn’t stopped by, and I’d wondered if I’d imagined that moment of connection I’d felt between the two of us in his car.
“I did stop by!” he said now, shouting to be heard above the din of the crowd and the loud swell of the dance music. “I asked your father to let you know. Didn’t he tell you?”
I shook my head. Daddy had just returned on Tuesday from Chicago, and leave it to him to wreak havoc on my social life the moment he got back. Daddy didn’t much care for me hanging around with soldiers; as Daddy said, they were unrefined men, hiding behind their uniforms. If I was going to hang around with a man, let it be a Louisville society man, from a good family, at least. Daddy didn’t care that I found those men dreadfully boring. I had no interest in hearing about their hunting trips or their whiskey, which seemed to be all the finest young men in Louisville had to talk about.
“Would you like to take a walk?” Jay asked, interrupting my thoughts. It was nearly September and the air had finally cooled tonight. But the sounds of gaiety and laughter from the party had been interspersed with distant claps of thunder all night.