Daisy
As I take Hound’s order to the bar, I look over to check on Dad, but his table is empty now. I go to Marsha and ask her if he paid. “No,” she says. “I thought maybe he went to the bathroom? Do you know him, Daisy?”
“No,” I lie. “I just don’t want The Lady Shack losing business. I care greatly about the continued success of the company.”
Marsha looks at me like I’ve gone mad, and then is swept away by another waitress. I don’t think. I just head for the exit, staring at the floor, trying to make it as clear as possible that I’m not in the mood for any, “Hey, honey,” or, “Nice ass, baby.” Except from the man called Hound, I reflect, thinking of the way he pulled me into his lap. The biggest, toughest-looking man I’ve ever seen in my life. Seven feet tall, wearing a plain blood-red T-shirt and scuffed jeans, muscled all over, bursting out of his clothes, looking oversized at the Shack’s table. Black locks of curly hair spilling over his head, a shadow of stubble, and a wolfish grin. All of it offset with dark ice-blue eyes. No, except for him…which I have to admit, kind of got me off…maybe just a little…
I force that from my mind as I push out into the parking lot. Dad can be such a jerk sometimes, and maybe jerk is understating it. He expects me to do everything: keep hope, support him financially, trudge on like a packhorse never once complaining, work two jobs, two shitty jobs because I had to drop out of school before graduation, and all he cares about is his gambling. And then he comes in here and unloads on me and disappears! I feel like leaping back in time and grabbing that sixteen-year-old girl by the shoulders and screaming in her face, “Listen! Don’t even bother with him! All he’s going to do is bring you pain and make you want to tear your hair out by the roots! One day you’ll be twenty-seven and thirty will look way closer than it does now and you’ll get very, very scared about what your life means.”
I can’t say that I regret helping him completely, otherwise I wouldn’t be pacing between cars right now looking for him. The sun beats down relentlessly, as it always does. Without the relief of the air conditioning I feel my clothes sticking to me. A group of businessmen on lunch stare at me with what I think they think are seductive expressions. I ignore them and make my way around the side of the building, down the alleyway where we throw the trash, pressed up against a big waffle chain on the other side. What am I doing? If he’s not in the parking lot, it means he jumped in his old beat-up car and drove away, leaving me to wonder what’s going on. But I remember when I was younger I would often wake in the middle of the night to find Dad gone from the apartment. This worried me the first few times before I skulked around in the night, walking the streets in my slippers, and found him in an alleyway opposite the building, smoking a cigarette. Maybe he’s had the same brilliant idea this time.
I think of Mom as I walk, of her sardonic twisting smile, her bright green eyes, her words which came sometimes like blades and sometimes like petals. And I wish she was here. Wish she was here so badly I get an ache in my chest.
But I can’t spend my life wishing. A Lady Shack girl has to remember to be bouncy, bubbly, beautiful. There’s no time to be human.
I’m halfway around the alleyway, squeezing between a dumpster and walking between some banana peels as though this is a cartoon, when I hear it. At first I think it’s the whimpering of a kitten. I imagine a tiny cat, patchy fur, limping, whining softly into the empty alleyway. But then I creep closer and hear the unmistakable sound of Dad talking. He’s talking fast, frantically, like he does when he’s nervous. I remember soon after Mom died he talked like that a lot, waving his hands and never letting his eyes settle on one place, as though if he kept talking he didn’t have to acknowledge that she’d never reply, and if he didn’t let his eyes settle, he could pretend she was right there, just out of his periphery vision.
I creep along the wall, past faded and new graffiti, right to the edge. When I peek my head round, I see Dad, looking as old and broken as ever, standing opposite the huge man named Hound, the man who got my body going a mile a minute back in the Shack. They’re side-on so I can see them clearly, Hound with his hands in his pockets, standing casually, hair wild around his eyes, Dad pacing in a small circle worrying at his knuckles with his teeth.
“Listen, listen, it’s not that I don’t have the money right,” and here he bites his knuckle before going on, “right now, it’s just that it’s not, you know, physically here with me. That doesn’t mean it’s not mine! That’s like saying that you’re broke because all your money—you know—like all your money’s in the bank so you don’t have any. But that’s not how it works.”
Hound sighs, but doesn’t move. He reminds me of a lion or a wolf or some other dangerous predator, resting lazily as though finding the idea of moving as erratically as Dad laughable. And yet as I watch him, as I soak in the reality of the situation—this man is here to collect on one of Dad’s many debts—I don’t kid myself by thinking that Hound would be any less dangerous than a wolf or a lion. “I really want to believe you, sir,” he says. “Really, I do. It’d make my day way, way better if I could just nod and smile and accept this story of yours. But the fact is I’ve done my own investigation into your finances and I happen to know that what you’re telling me is a lie…” Hound pauses, strokes his chin, and then speaks like a poet with sudden inspiration. “It’s a complete fabrication.” He seems quite proud of himself as he nods up and down. If he wasn’t shaking down my father, I’m sure I’d smile.
I make sure to crouch low, trying to work out what the best course of action is. I have to do something, I know, but only if it looks like it’s going bad. Maybe there’s a chance Dad might be able to talk his way out of it. I refuse to believe somebody can spend decades sinking into and then partially paying off debts without developing something of a silver tongue. But if it goes south, what then? Am I going to charge into the fray with a trashcan-lid shield and a banana-peel Morningstar? The image momentarily rises in my mind: a knight in a skin-tight Lady Shack uniform swinging a banana peel over her head and deflecting blows to the metallic clang of metal. No, I’ll have to use my silver tongue, if that even exists. Still, perhaps it won’t come to that…
“I have different bank accounts!” Dad breaks out, flapping his arms. “I do! I have bank accounts for all different kinds of things. Please, listen to me, this is real now. This isn’t the lie. But I can’t tell you all the details. If I could tell you—Yeah, yeah, come on, man, it’d fix all my problems. But I can’t give you all of it. But I can say this. Look, listen. I can say this. I have another bank account with over a million—way over, way, way over—just waiting to be released. Once all this legal shit is done, I’ll be richer than God. You’ll see. I promise!” Something about the earnest way Dad speaks give me pause. Maybe it could be true, I reflect, but then I remember that tomorrow morning I’m working fourteen hours straight. “It’s a—I can’t tell you the details because if they find out I don’t get my money! I signed a—what’d’ya call it? NDA! I signed an NDA!”
“You know who I am,” Hound says. It isn’t a question. He sounds tired.
Dad nods respectfully, the same way I once saw him nod in the bank when I went with him to pay his over-withdrawal fees, nodding to something larger than himself.
“Then you know I’m not an unfair man, sir,” Hound says. “My momma taught me two things: always respect your elders, and never hit a woman. But then again, that was before she hightailed it down to Cali to start a new family without so much as a goddamn postcard. Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is this. I respect you, because you’re an old man and you seem pretty harmless. But I also respect my employer, and I also respect the fact that I’ve got a job to do. So what the fuck am I supposed to do here? I’m being honest when I say that I have no desire to smash your head into that wall there.” He indicates the wall in question with a lazy swipe of the hand. “But I also have no desire to go back to my employer with no plan about how to recoup his losses.”
He sighs again, shaking his head.
“I’m going to need your teeth,” he says.
“Wait—what? My…My teeth!”
Dad begins groveling, talking very fast. I don’t think even he knows what he’s saying.
Hound doesn’t click his neck side to side, or crack his knuckles, or make some tough guy comment. He just takes a slow step forward. It’s like he isn’t there at all, like he’s floated somewhere else and is letting his seven-foot body slip into Violence Mode. I don’t want to see him go into Violence Mode, especially where Dad is concerned, so I stand up from my place behind the wall and shout, “Wait!”
Dad stops groveling and Hound turns to face me. I see the moment the violence stops: a flicker in his eyes, life returning. Dad takes longer to notice me through his tears. “D-Daisy?” he says uncertainly. “What are you doing?”
I swallow nervously. That’s a good question. What exactly is my plan here? I’ve left the banana peels and trashcan lids behind.
“I don’t think you want to hurt people!” I yell. Or does my voice just sound too loud in my own ears? I can hardly tell over my panting breath. “I don’t think you want to hurt a man half your size and twice your age,” I go on, looking into his eyes, which are not the eyes of some mindless thug at all; they’re the eyes of a man who has been playing the mindless thug for a long time. Maybe just like my eyes aren’t the eyes of a mindless Shack girl, but the eyes of a woman doing the same. “There must be a way to resolve this without hurting anybody. There must.”
“You’re brave,” Hound says, watching me closely. “You don’t know me at all. What if I just take out a machete right now and start hacking at the both of you? What the fuck made you jump out here like that? You could’ve gone and gotten help, the police…well, I guess the boys in blue wouldn’t work for Dean, right? Too many connections to illegal gambling dens and the like.” Hound strokes his stubble, thinking. I just wait, toes curled in my heels, sweat making it feel like I’m in a sauna. “I’ve got a good, uh, rapport with my employer.” He pauses for a moment at the word rapport, as though using it for the first time. Maybe he thinks I’ll giggle at him. But Charlie Chaplin could dropkick Amy Schumer right now and get nothing from me. “I could talk to him, if I had a plan, but I can’t go back there with nothing. I can’t just skip in there and say, Hey, you know that thing you wanted me to take care of, well, I just completely ignored it.”
As he talks, I see his eyes once again straying to my body, my legs and my breasts. I’m used to men staring at me, but the way Hound does it is different. He’s not like an overexcited young boy, as most of the men in the Shack are. He’s not just pleased to be in the general vicinity of a woman. And he’s not in the least intimidated. No, he’s looking at me meaningfully, with real intent there. I can’t recall ever being looked at like that before. And so I’ll run with it. All my adult life has been spent fighting to keep what remains of my family safe. And now I’ll do the same. And if, maybe, I enjoy it just a tiny bit? If, maybe, I want to do it anyway?
“I can pay my father’s debts,” I say.
The corner of Hound’s lips twitch. “Really? You have the money?”
“I am willing to discuss a payment plan,” I reply. “But first, you have to let him leave.”
Hound shrugs. “I can always find him again, if need be, unless he’s got some secret high-powered connections I don’t know about?”
I shake my head. So does Dad, and I have to admit I’m slightly wounded by how quickly and eagerly Dad shakes his. He can’t wait to be out of here, even if it means leaving me with a man who just threatened to collect all his teeth. I’m as annoyed by him as I am by myself for being surprised. He’s spent his whole life behaving this way. People don’t suddenly change. Part of me wants to just leave him here, to whatever fate Hound decides is best for him, but my chest gets painfully tight at the thought, and all I can think of is Mom, looking away from me in disappointment.
“Then go.” Hound shrugs. “Just know that if we can’t sort this out—”
He doesn’t even get a chance to finish. Dad shouts, “Okay!” and then is gone, hurrying past me, eyes downcast. “I’ll fix this,” he mutters, before jogging down the alleyway.
“It’s pretty incredible how they make clothes these days,” Hound says, walking across the alleyway toward me. He stops about a foot away, so close I can smell something papery and musty on him, underneath his manly scent.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“Well, take the company that manufactured that there uniform. They’ve somehow put pockets in it that makes thousands of dollars be able to squeeze into skin-tight skirts. Incredible.”
I bite my lip, wondering if I’ve made a mistake. But I don’t think this man would hurt me. I’m sure of it, in fact, which doesn’t make any sense to me.
“I take it you don’t have the cash,” he says, looking down at me.
Despite everything, I feel a tingle whisper up my thigh. Of all the things that have happened to me in, or near, The Lady Shack, I’ve never felt even a hint of real lust. I tell myself: I’m doing this for my family. But I can’t ignore the tingle, or how huge this man is, so big I have to crane my neck just to look into his face. I can’t ignore how my nipples are already getting hard and how my mind is already skipping away from me.
“Maybe we can work something out,” I say, shocked by the sound of my own voice. I sound confident, sexy, seductive, way more than I ever have giggling over a group of balding businessmen whilst watching the clock. I’ve always seen all men as essentially the same: jerky, jock-types who nod and smile just to get to your body. But Hound is somehow different. Maybe he’s a jerk, too. I don’t know him well enough to say. But there’s less pretense about him, and I get the sense that he’d make quick work of any of the usual assholes who hit on me. I find myself leaning forward so that my breasts brush against his blood-red T-shirt. “What do you think?”
He grins down at me. “You’ve got to know,” he says, “that you can’t come at me with a body as tight as that, with a face as sexy as yours, and expect me to back off. So you need to answer a question. Do you really want this?”
I look inside myself, wondering. I’ve never been sure if I really wanted anything, I realize. Maybe when I was young and Mom was still alive, but the day the cancer attacked her, I stopped wanting and just started doing. It wasn’t a question of want. I couldn’t even let it factor into my decisions because it would upset me too much. What teenager wants to drop out of school and work like a dog? What woman wants to work at The Lady Shack and smile at asshole guys? And yet, as I lean even closer to this mysterious, giant of a man, I find that I do want it. At least, I think I do.
“I…I don’t know how to tell,” I answer, honestly. Too honestly. I’m supposed to be playing the sexy seducer, not giving him a glimpse into my heart. “I mean—yeah, baby. I want it, bad.”
“No,” he says. “No, I don’t want that. I can pay for that. I want you.”
“You want me to want it? Why do you care?”
His lips twitch again, and then he reaches forward and slides his hand up my dress, to my panties, and presses his middle and ring fingers against my pussy. He presses hard, pushing against my clit, watching my face carefully.
The pleasure hits me like a speeding truck, taking my unawares. I didn’t realize how wet my pussy was until now, with the wetness filling my panties. The tingles multiply, becoming more intense, becoming so intense a moan escapes my lips.
“Because when you come all over my dick, I want it to be real. I want to hear you moan, and know it’s real.”
I twist my lips here and there, letting the fakeness seep out of me like water from a burst balloon. “It feels good,” I whisper. “It does. It really does.”
Maybe I am doing this for my family, but that doesn’t mean I can’t do it for me at the same time. Maybe it’s time I started thinking about me every once in a while anyway. But even as I sink into the pleasure, a little nervous voice echoes around my head: “What are you doing? Is this right? What are you doing? Is this right?”