The people of our town learned, from the County Paragraph, details about the night before Daisy discovered Lenore gone: a rusted-out pickup, its tireless wheels up on blocks, downhill from the house among other scrap metal—junked tractors, bent fence posts, the shell of a Studebaker filled with leafy cocklebur plants. Elvis would become famous by the police artist’s sketch, his eyes sleepy and heavy-lidded. In the sketch, he had a kind of beard, and we debated what to call it—was it a Vandyke or a goatee? Was it an overgrown soul patch? Across his forehead fell a forelock, a sweep of thick, dark curl that we knew was the thing that was probably most seductive. How do you see past such a cute lick of boyishness? We could imagine it coming loose always and flopping forward, distracting and handsome. And he was handsome, in a way, truth be told, even with that creepy pout the artist gave him. There were more than just a few among us who thought they could easily have seen past that silly beard long enough to fall in love. Some of us had fallen for worse, of course.
“You probably think I’m a child,” Daisy had told Elvis, down the hill from the house. The truck had been lit by the moon. She’d sat on the passenger side, barefoot, in a lime-green dress of a gauzy material patterned with daisies. Elvis had bought the dress for her from a boutique in the city.
Her mother had given parties with daisies frosted on cakes, daisies on the paper napkins and Dixie cups, real daisies in vases—the wrapping paper of presents had had daisies, smiling cartoon daisies with fluttery loves-me-loves-me-not eyelashes, and inside had been plush daisies on the toes of bedroom slippers, daisies in the corners of stationery, on a springtime raincoat and rain boots.
But Daisy thanked Elvis, with kisses and kisses, for the dress he brought her, because how could he know? After all, she had nothing with daisies now; they didn’t even grow in her flower patch.
Daisy sat with her knees together, her hair bobby-pinned in a futile effort to control its frazzle. She held the cold bottle on top of her knee. “You think I’m a nervous little girl for not wanting to drink in the house,” she said. Elvis had bought the bottles of hard lemonade for the evening, and the drink, though weak, got Daisy tipsy fast. She never drank except when Elvis was on the farm. And he’d only been there a few times before, for a few days at a time, over the last few years. So whenever she drank with him, it went right to her head.
“You are a little girl,” Elvis said. He held the bottle to her mouth, then kissed her wet lips. He put his hand to her head and pulled her close to his chest. He had muscles in his arms, and his T-shirt smelled of pipe tobacco. “That’s why Daddy loves you, right? Daddy loves his little girl, doesn’t he? Daddy loves Daisy.”
In her comfort, resting against him, she told about sitting in this pickup years ago, waiting for her father by the irrigation pond, deep in the field. She’d been young enough to have no sense of the expanse of the world, and she’d imagined herself in a jungle, continents and continents away from home—immersed in the lush green, and the bugs that bit and itched the skin, and the chorus of toads that creaked their foreign noise.
As she continued to talk and talk and talk to Elvis, she told him about her father in the months before his death thirteen years before. She told about him sitting at the end of the vegetable garden, in a rusted metal folding chair, pointing his cane at potato plants for Daisy to dig up. As she’d shoveled and harvested throughout the garden, she’d found herself watching and listening very closely to her father; she’d sensed something fatal in his every flinch and cough.
“I’ll never leave you,” Elvis told her, and Daisy loved just leaning against him, leaning into him, the muffled thump of his heart in her ear pressed against his chest. She hadn’t wanted to drink in the house and hadn’t wanted Lenore to hear her with Elvis, to hear her whimper in his arms and to beg him to call her his baby. It’d been bad enough that Lenore had seen her sit in Elvis’s lap as he’d read aloud from a fraudulent Miranda-and-Desiree novel he’d bought from a street vendor in Hong Kong, a piece of apocrypha that fell between books six and seven, in which Miranda and Desiree find and saddle an extinct Tasmanian tiger and rescue a family of orphans who’d been locked away in a grandfather clock. Elvis collected everything—all the counterfeit books bought in other countries, the miles of pages of fan fiction online, the encyclopedias of characters and associations and devices, the dolls, the movies, the board games, the cereal boxes, the comic books, the first two seasons of the animated series on DVD, and the DVDs’ hour after hour of extras.
When Lenore had fallen asleep, Daisy and Elvis had walked to the old pickup behind the tin lean-to in the feedlot. She’d carried her shoes in her hand, though the grass was dry and burned-up, sharp against her bare feet.
After they’d stepped into the pickup, as Elvis pried open the bottle tops of the hard lemonade against the steering wheel, Daisy checked herself in the rearview mirror. So very plain, she thought.
To desire and to be desired was the best part of it all. Sex left Daisy feeling greedy—she could never get close enough. She’d rather stay in the quiet moments leading up to it. She wanted to be whispered to, all his little promises. She would, every night that he was there, lie with his arms around her, her back to his chest, cradled, and he’d fall asleep first, his hold growing sweetly slack, his breath going slow. She loved staying awake long enough to lose him like that.
It was already the middle of July, but a few leftover fireworks nonetheless popped and spun in the black sky, shot off by kids on adjacent farms. Daisy and Elvis drank and watched. This time, Daisy fell asleep first.