Daisy's Choice

by Mike Owens

Overview

Nothing left to live for...that's how eighteen-year-old Daisy Sugarbush feels after an explosion inflicts deep burns over seventy percent of her body, condemning her to six excruciating months in the hospital, where her pleas to stop treatment are ignored.

Blind and horribly disfigured, she wishes only to end her wretched life as soon as possible. Starvation should push her ruined body over the edge--the doctors told her as much--which becomes her game plan.

Then a new therapist, Arthur, enters her life with other ideas, but can he succeed where so many others have failed?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781509219971
Publisher:	Wild Rose Press
Publication date:	03/21/2018
Pages:	308
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.65(d)

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

"How on earth you're going to get along when you're married, I don't know." How many times had I heard that one? But Mom was right, and you didn't have to look far for examples. For instance, I didn't know the first thing about shopping for groceries and even less about how to turn them into a meal if I had them. Even the process where dirty clothes went into the laundry hamper and turned up washed and ironed in my closet, another mystery.

Yeah, as an eighteen-year-old girl whose mother still did her laundry, I know it looked like I was lazy or stupid or both. The sad fact was, I just couldn't figure out how to run the washing machine. All the dials, the little flashing lights meant nothing to me, even after any number of educational sessions with Mom.

My name is Daisy Sugarbush, and I live in Warrensburg, a little bump in the road — like, blink and you'll miss it — in southeastern Virginia. I've never lived anywhere else, never wanted to. I know there's a big world out there, and maybe someday I'll get around to seeing it, but for now this small town suits me just fine.

People always ask me about my plans, like, since Dad died last year maybe I should get serious about life, but I'm doing just what I want to do, thank you, very much. Of course, I'd much rather be working with my dad, but he's gone now, and I'll be damned if I'll let his little handyman business go under, not if I can help it. If the good ship Sugarbush goes down, it won't be because of lack of effort on my part.

For most of my life, it was just me, my mom and dad, but triangles as a family structure can be problematic, I've learned. For years I felt like a tug toy, pulled in two directions at once between a father and a mother. I naturally leaned in Dad's direction, because as easy and comfortable as I found Dad's world, it was just that difficult with Mom's.

None of this was lost on my mother, of course. As she pointed out over and over again, all of those domestic things that I should know about, I didn't.

She did her best, like when I stumbled into another of her little teaching sessions one Wednesday morning — washing day at the Sugarbush house. I'd just run downstairs to fetch a small Phillips screwdriver that Dad needed when Mom ambushed me by the washing machine. She started right in with her usual explanations of wash cycles, spin cycles ... stuff like that. I guess she figured out quickly enough I had other things on my mind, and the finer points of washing clothes wasn't one of them.

"Daisy, you're hopeless. If you'd just pay attention, it's really easy, and you're going to have to learn someday. I'm not going to be around to wash your clothes forever."

"But why are there so many dials and buttons? It's all just soap and water, right?"

Mom rolled her eyes, like she was trying to explain algebra to a third-grader. Then there came that deep sigh, the one that made me grind my back teeth. Finally, she pointed toward the door, and I knew I was off the hook, for now.

I'd heard "hopeless" more than a few times. On the other hand, she never called me stupid, because I could take apart the entire washing machine, dryer, too, and then put it back together in perfect working order. And she knew it. Just those damned little dials and those damned little blinking lights. Maybe it was more than coincidence that Dad had never been able operate the machine either, or so he always said.

"Thanks, Mom." I ran up the steps and out of the laundry room before she could change her mind. Dad was changing the fuel pump in the truck that day, and I didn't want to miss it.

Then, about a week later, the washing machine, with all its magical bells and whistles, conked out. Dad was away running errands, and Mom was in a rush to wash all the bedding in the house. I know it must have cost her dearly to ask me for help, but she did it.

"Please," was all she had to say.

It was a simple repair, a broken belt I replaced in about half an hour. Most of that time was spent rummaging through Dad's supply of spare belts — he had hundreds of them lined up on the wall in the garage. The belts were about the only things organized in his workshop. I swear he could have opened his own hardware store with just the stuff in the garage. There were piles of this, piles of that, and you really had to know where to look to find anything. I knew, I'd watched him sort through stuff hundreds of times, but that was part of the fun, not knowing what you'd find, or where.

"There, good as new," I said to Mom after no more than thirty minutes of work. I did a little extra grunting and groaning, trying to make the job look more difficult than it was.

"Are you sure?" She always arched her left eyebrow when she was uncertain about something, like maybe the washing machine would burst into flames.

"Turn it on and see for yourself."

Like I said, good as new.

My last few years in high school, when the other kids were playing sports, going to parties and such, I was completely happy following my dad around, helping him with his chores. He was sort of the town handyman, and there was never a lack of jobs to be done: lawn mowers that wouldn't mow, washing machines that wouldn't wash, and car engines that wouldn't run. He tackled them all, and if it was a job he hadn't done before, he'd figure it out pretty quick. Best of all, he taught me how to do it, too.

Over those last happy years we had together, we learned to communicate on a special, nonverbal wavelength. If he needed a three-eights socket wrench, he simply stuck out his hand, and I placed the desired tool in his palm, no questions, no explanation needed. Like we were both extensions of the same brain, and, I liked to think, the same heart.

By my senior year I had a pretty good education in how most things around the house worked and what to do when they didn't, just by watching my dad. He was my mentor, and yes, I know it sounds odd for a girl to have a dad-mentor instead of a mom-mentor, but that's just the way it worked out. Things were always so easy with him. We dressed the same, walked the same, and except for a prominent set of boobs inherited from my mother, I looked like a second generation Sam Sugarbush. Everybody said so.

Right down to his hands, clever, dexterous little devices that seemed to know innately how stuff worked. Of course, the kind of work we did led to grimy, bruised knuckles and fragmented nails, hands no girl with an iota of self-respect would ever tolerate. Me, I was proud of them. I think my dad was too, even though he would never say so.

My dad was, for me, the perfect role model. If I'd been a guy, no problem. "Chip off the old block," folks could say with a wink and a nod, no harm done.

But I was a girl and my only true role model — my mom — was perfect, and I can't do perfect. Don't even want to try. I called her my Stepford mom.

Mostly she did her mom things, and, usually she let me do mine. Still, how she must have yearned for a more suitable daughter. When all the other moms she saw at church were probably talking about their daughters' plans after graduation, she had nothing to say. How could she brag about a daughter who seemed to have no more ambition than a turnip?

She tried, of course. Can't fault her for lack of effort, I never gave her much to work with.

Early August, the summer after my senior year, the last summer we'd have my dad, was the hottest anybody around Warrensburg could remember. At least, that's what everybody said. My dad seemed to wilt along with everything else, but it wasn't the heat that was driving him down. We would learn all about that later, after trying for weeks not to notice what was right under our noses.

I'd just finished mowing the lawn, the part the summer sun hadn't burned up, and ducked into the kitchen for a glass of iced tea. I thought Mom had a church meeting that morning, and I didn't expect her to be home, but there she was, sitting on her kitchen stool by the sink peeling potatoes. And it didn't help a bit that even in the August heat her dress had nary a wrinkle. Did she even perspire?

Needless to say, I suffered by comparison, dirty sweaty and probably a bit pungent. A daughter to be proud of, right?

"Hot out," I said. Gulping down a cold beverage on a hot day wasn't such a good idea. I quickly got the first warning of the headache to come.

"You forgot something, Daisy."

"Huh?"

"Your bra."

"But Mom, it's so hot out, and there's nobody around but us."

"All the more reason you should take care of your appearance. It's how we look when there's no one else around that's important."

Where did she get them, all these words of wisdom she kept laying on me? Dad never seemed to care how I looked. I don't think he even noticed. But with Mom it was an argument I was bound to lose, so back to my room, put on the bra, then back to the kitchen. I even thought of ducking out the window in my bedroom, but that would have been a bit too childish, although I knew there was more to come. I could just feel it. Nothing to do now but face the music.

"You know what you're doing, don't you?" she said. "Hanging out with your father, you're just killing time. You have some decisions to make, Daisy, and the longer you put them off, the harder it's going to be."

Decisions: I never liked the sound of that word, mostly because I knew the question underneath, "Who am I?" I had no clue. I wasn't the Sugarbush son, even though I acted as if I was. It didn't help one bit that I was so different from my own mother, partly by my own choice, but mostly because looking as good as she looked was way out of reach for me, for most of the women in Warrensburg, for that matter.

At a time when most kids were already set on some path: marriage, a real job, grad school, something of the sort, I was going nowhere fast, in the company of a total stranger ... me. To make matters even worse, my guiding light, my father, got knocked off the rails. That fall, 1993, a mesothelioma, a slow-growing type of lung cancer devoured him from the inside out, leaving a fragile husk that hardly resembled the man I loved more than anything in the world.

When he died I lost my anchor, my north star blinked and then went dark. I know that sounds a little over the top dramatic, but for me that's how it felt. That left just Mom and me, and that arrangement has never been exactly smooth sailing.

More than just a loss, my father's death led to a reconfiguration of the situation in our house. After dad died, Mom turned up the heat. I still tried to keep up with his round of chores, but more and more she tried to drag me into the domestic routine. And the harder she tried, the harder I resisted. I kept a pile of dad's old work clothes stashed under my bed so I could get dressed early and duck out the back window in my bedroom before she could get at me. Then it was down to Sparky's for a cup of coffee and a doughnut with my buddy Ralph, who managed the place. A near-perfect escape, and one I used often. Ralph was a third-generation owner of Sparky's, and had the good sense not to change anything about the business, which, while small, was never without an active clientele, including me. Then, after my little refueling stop, it was on with my round of handyman chores, just like my dad would have done.

The standoff lasted for almost a year, Mom insisting, me resisting, all punctuated by the occasional blowup followed by me hiding out at Sparky's again.

Sometimes Mom's not-so-subtle hints came out more like hand grenades. One of those little bombs was my former classmate Elizabeth Beeson, Lizzie to me, or Lisbeth as she preferred being called after her first year at William and Mary. It's what all the girls call me now, just drop the E, you got it.

I guess a truly suitable daughter would look something like Lizzie. I'm sure my mother thought so. Lizzie, Lisbeth or whatever came over to pay a courtesy call on Dad not long before his second and last admission to the hospital. I wondered whether her mom might have prodded her into the whole scene, just to show my own mother what she was missing, like, "See what a fantastic daughter I've raised? Ever wonder where you messed up with Daisy? Just look at the poor thing."

Yeah, I was different. So what?

The only good thing, I was out of the house when Lizzie made her entrance, so her shining example meant nothing to me. But Mom wasn't about to let an opportunity pass by, which is why I spent as much time as possible away from home.

Put together all the fundamental differences of opinion about how I should live my life, and we had all the ingredients for a real donnybrook, one where everybody loses, just lying there, waiting for a spark. I was willing to maintain a truce, but, as usual, Mom had one more salvo to fire. She never gave up, not really, and Lizzie's visit was all the ammunition she needed.

"Your friend, Elizabeth Beeson stopped by to see your father today. I'm sorry you missed her. I haven't seen him light up like that since the day he knew he was coming home from the hospital."

Now she was talking about my dad like he wasn't even in the same room with us. "That's nice." I added a smile I didn't feel. I took refuge in a chair beside his bed and held his hand. It seemed like a pretty safe place for the time being. It would be awfully gross of her to come at me full bore when I was sitting so close to my dying father.

"Elizabeth let her hair grow out. It looks so nice. She made Dean's List this semester, you know."

"That's nice, too." Damn, why couldn't I come up with something more original than that? If I came off looking like a petulant little dork, Mom won. Of course I knew Lizzie made Dean's List. It was in the local paper. It was just one more zinger Mom had to throw in.

"She spent most of last summer in Nantucket with one of her sorority sisters. Can you imagine that?" Mom asked.

Yes, I could. I knew the rest of it by heart; she'd thrown Lizzie's accomplishments in my face so many times. Lizzie the perfect daughter, excellent grades, all the right social clubs, was now in her second year at William & Mary. Such a pretty girl, Lizzie was a daughter any parent could be proud of.

Then there was me. Lousy grades, lousy choices, lousy all the way around, blah, blah, blah. And she'd hit the roof when she saw shop class on my senior year schedule.

"Shop? You're taking shop? Daisy, I just don't understand you."

Never mind that I'd loved the class, with its power tools and loud noises and that wonderful musty aroma that came from running a circular saw through an oak board. So what if I was the only girl in the class.

She also decided my choice of social clubs during high school and now — the local Sparky's — was "lacking." God, what a waste of time those stupid clubs had been, a bunch of girls sitting around giggling. At least Sparky's had grape slurpees. But of course, Mom didn't see it that way.

"How are you ever going to meet nice young people in those places where you hang out?"

Apparently, only not so nice people ever go to Sparky's, not even for the grape slurpees.

When arguments about general issues ensued, they always ended with Mom shaking her head and walking away defeated. God knows, she tried, but she'd been saddled with a daughter who was going nowhere fast. And yeah, I couldn't help feeling some regrets, but not enough to jump on board and try to become some sort of domestic goddess, not that I ever could.

But when the arguments got pointed and personal, like now when she compared me item by item to Lizzie Beeson, major escalation usually occurred, meaning Mom geared up for a fight. Before Dad got so sick, this kind of confrontation often lead to bouts of shouting, door slamming, or, worst of all, tears — hers, of course, not mine. What kind of coldhearted ungrateful daughter would drive her poor mother to tears? Even when I won, I lost. So what was the point?

No way was I about to sit around here and let the discussion deteriorate further now that she'd brought the arguments back around to how wonderful Lizzie was and how much I sucked. Absolutely nothing was to be gained from it.

I managed to pry my hand out of Dad's grasp. "Bathroom break," I said.

"I want you right back in here," Mom said. "We have things to discuss."

Yeah, sure. That wasn't going to happen.

Like I'd done so many times before over the past ten years, I crawled out of my bedroom window. Whatever had set Mom off tonight, like realizing time was running out for her to remodel me into a Lizzie Beeson type, I had no intention of remaining anywhere near her. She could find some other target to lob grenades at, My stomach clenched. No one else in the house with her but Dad and she wouldn't dare act out with him. Worry ate along the edge of my mind as I walked away from the house. At least she never had before.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Daisy's Choice"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Michael R. Owens.
Excerpted by permission of The Wild Rose Press, Inc..
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