The Gremlin

Daisy

I picked her up in the Gremlin. It was a totaled piece of scrap metal Carson miraculously welded into something halfway drivable and left for me to test my luck. I would have been embarrassed to be seen in it at school, but I always got there early and parked off in a corner of the teacher's lot, skittering out onto the sidewalk and away from the thing like a spooked hamster.

That's what Granny reminded me of as I rolled into the Texaco. She looked out of her element standing next to the pay phone she must have called me from, grasping her pocketbook to her chest like some young ruffian was bound to steal it. I wouldn't know anyone who would try against a woman bound to smack you upside the head before thinking twice about it.

When she saw me, she took a second like she was really seeing me, remembering why she was there in the first place. She got into the passenger side of the car, and it was like walking inside her house again – the musty past meets the slightest hint of jasmine.

"How'd you get here?" I asked, braver than I would have been around her because I was in my own car, on my own turf.

"Bus." I found that to be almost as jarring as the fact that she was sitting right next to me. I couldn't fathom Granny on a bus, a woman who took an overt liking to soap and seemed generally suspicious of people of any kind.

"Let's just get right to the point of it, Daisy." She breathed out my name, a word foreign in her mouth, and reached for a folded piece of notebook paper in her pocketbook. She unfolded it, and I waited for her to read it like a decree, but instead, she folded it back up and put it back from where it came.

"Your father's gone."

"I know that."

"No, like not living, Daisy. He left to leave for good."

"He left to go find my mother," I said. The Gremlin's wheel was becoming a part of me as I gripped it tighter and tighter.

"Your mother's dead, too, kid. She died a long time ago after she left. Drugs," she said, delivering a blow that didn't land as heavily as it should have. I had expected something like that, deep down. I had expected that all my hopes and "one days" were the protective covering outside my core. And each time I got the quiet opportunity to dance my feet into oblivion or whap my hairbrush against my legs, it was like excavating for that core – the real me.

I hunkered into my pain but still noticed hers. It etched through years of her face, and maybe I was wrong. Maybe she wasn’t so old but really, just sad. How can you hate your own child? I wanted to ask her – a question I didn’t even know that I’d be asking myself years later.

But I knew the answer. She didn’t really hate him. She just hated herself.

"Now what?" I asked, the truth shouldering up against us.

"We wait," she said like it was something she was good at.