Chapter 16
Daisy
The Maybelle Arts Center had been built as an annex to the Rec Center, offering theater camps, daycare, and art classes. When Daisy was a teenager, she had taken every art class in school she could, plus classes here—sketching, painting, photography, and ceramics. She’d made still lifes, landscapes, portraits, vases, and busts. She had worked in charcoal, chalk pastels, watercolors, and clay. The Arts Center and Bookworm’s Delight had been her two homes, where she let her imagination run wild.
After she graduated, Daisy had still lived at home, working in the registration office at the Arts Center in the mornings and using its classrooms and kiln to work on her art until late at night. Her sister-in-law had started displaying a few of her bowls and mugs at her gallery, and one of Daisy’s teachers let her assist at art fairs, showing her the ropes.
Her life had had a quiet, lovely rhythm. Daisy was sure now that it would’ve just flowed on like that, little waves of change, like moving out, happening naturally, if not for Tyler.
She had had a crush on him for years, since he was best friends with her brother Levi, but he didn’t pay her any mind until she was almost nineteen. Nineteen, wearing a dark pink top under jean overall shorts, her bare arms and thighs and neck streaked with flaking clay, she’d run into him in that shared parking lot between the Arts Center and the Rec.
Her things had gone flying, while his bag had fallen off his shoulder to the pavement with a heavy thud of shoes and climbing gear.
It was like fate, a moment without her brother around, and something had started to bloom that she’d been dreaming of for years. Her crush returned her interest, telling her he always loved being around her, that he felt at peace with her, and she told him that she felt alive with him.
All of it had been true, but it had changed her course.
It hadn’t seemed wrong at all to be Tyler’s safe haven, to be his champion when his mom pushed too hard. If Daisy had lost some focus with her work, if she’d worked fewer art fairs, then it was no matter; she was happy, and they didn’t need the money that badly. When it was over, when she asked him to go, he had fled, horrified to realize what her support of him had done to her.
She’d tried, for almost three years, to recapture her dreams. But living at Shane’s house, scraping by without a car and barely making any money overall from the art, felt demoralizing. Her pottery was all she loved to do, and people called it cute or said her bowls were perfect for their keys. Men still saw her as this fragile, innocent girl who’d gotten her heart broken by Tyler Houston, and her love life was more like awkward-first-date life.
That was when she’d gotten fed up, moved out of Shane’s, taken the job at the firm, and put aside childish dreams of being a full-time artist.
Time to grow up, and be seen as a grown up.
A year later, Daisy was standing in the old, familiar ceramics classroom at the Arts Center. Maybelle moved slow; her teachers were still here and so was almost everyone she’d worked for in the office. They had all been so excited to work out a way for her to use a room and the kiln.
It was gratifying, but now, as she walked into the empty ceramics classroom, it only added to the pressure she had already put on herself. What if she’d lost what limited skills she had before? What if all of the anticipation she was feeling popped like a balloon once she was working?
Taking a deep breath, she picked up a brick of clay, filled a plastic cup with tepid water, and brought it to one of the stations.
She cut open the plastic and peeled it away from the clay. She stroked her fingertips along its damp surface, her eyes abruptly filling with tears at the sensation of its unique texture—wet and smooth and so dense, waiting. Her fingers tingled with rising elation as she took her ribbon cutter, which was a wire strung between two wooden handles, and used it to slice the brick apart.
She moaned as she began to knead. She’d forgotten how sensual it was.
She’d forgotten how powerful she felt, using the strength of her shoulders, arms and hands to warm and soften it, changing the dense clay into something malleable and soft.
She’d forgotten the soothing whir of the wheel as she turned it on. She’d forgotten how mesmerizing the clay looked as the wheel spun, misshapen from kneading it, water filling in the indentations from her fingertips and glistening in the bright afternoon sunlight.
She’d forgotten how deep into her imagination she sank as she placed her left hand along the base and cupped the top with her right, beginning gently to shape it, as she began to see what it could become.
Her mind cleared of everything but the sensations, joy bubbling up.
Without making any conscious choices, she shifted her hands, shifted the pressure she applied, and what began to take shape wasn’t anything she’d made before. It wasn’t a bowl or a shallow dish, a mug or a bud vase.
It was abstract, at first, a thick base rounding out like a lightbulb, then flowing outward, more like a powerful, crashing wave than a delicate flower unfurling. There were light grooves, but instead of horizontal bands like on a mug, they were more like a knotted tangle of yarn, stretched flat across the surface of what she was making. She slid her finger to the inside, stretching out the middle so that it widened, then carefully brought the top inward, so that it was barely large enough to fit two fingers within.
Then she turned off the wheel and slowly let go of the clay.
She exhaled hard, studying what had come out of her through her hands.
Now that the trance had broken, she could see it for what it was.
It was a heart, suspended somewhere between the clichéd Valentine’s Day symbol and an anatomically correct organ. Those light grooves detailed what looked like the leaves of the Catalpa tree, shaped like the spade in a card deck, also heart-like. But the foliage was dense, somehow, as if it were choking the organ, and the whole thing was off-kilter.
Not broken, but full to bursting.
Daisy let loose a loud, heaving sob and dug one elbow into her hip, that hand pressed into her clavicle, her other hand splayed over her face.
The outpouring of sadness lasted until she felt emptied out.
She got to her feet unsteadily and ripped a few paper towels from the dispensers near the sinks, wiping her eyes and blowing her nose noisily.
She loved Duncan McCoy, and she missed him.
And this time, the man she was trying to move on from wasn’t going anywhere because his family, his friends and the kids he coached were here. She had to figure out how to live in Maybelle with him—and that, eventually, he’d be with someone else. She would have to move on enough to try again, to be brave enough to give her love again, too.
She frantically dug her cell out of her bag and called Stephanie.
“Hey, Daisy,” Stephanie chirped.
“Stephanie?” she wailed.
“Daisy?” Stephanie’s voice was immediately worried. “What’s going on?”
“I—” She gulped down another wail and began to get the sculpture off the wheel and covered, so that it would be protected against drying out. “It just… hit me that I’m alone,” she managed to say finally. “Dunk’s… gone.”
Stephanie sighed and whispered, “Oh, honey. I know it hurts.”
“What was I thinking, dating someone who’s best friends with Chase and Leda and Jesse?” she babbled, the extent of her predicament finally sinking in. “We’re just starting to get close, but now I can never go to their birthday parties or Jesse’s New Year’s bashes or—”
“Daisy!” Stephanie interrupted. “What brought this on?”
Daisy tried to catch her breath, slumping against a table, and then mumbled, “I’m at the Arts Center. I was sculpting and I just…”
Stephanie let the sentiment breathe on the line between them for a little bit before she replied gently, “Making art makes you vulnerable. You let all your emotions out. That’s a good thing, honey. You’re starting to heal. I know that you don’t want to hear that, but you are. Your art is helping.”
“I don’t want it to help,” Daisy denied frantically. “I don’t want it to be like therapy or something! It’s my happy place, and I was so happy while I was just working. But when I was done, the sculpture I made, it’s like… this big, lopsided, morbid broken heart, Stephanie! What do I do with that?”
“You fire that badass up in the kiln and put it on your kitchen table,” Stephanie told her, her tone brooking no arguments. “You remember our favorite line in Center Stage? Take your feelings and use them. So what if your heartache fuels your sculpture? So what if your first new pieces in a while aren’t adorable soup bowls or potpourri dishes? We both know you’re not going to get over Dunk by dating someone new. So do this.”
Daisy’s instinct was to fight against that, too, to tear at it, rip it apart.
But Stephanie had known her since they were little girls and her advice and her opinions were worth listening to, especially when Daisy knew that she wasn’t capable of having any perspective on this.
“Okay,” she exhaled shakily.
“I’m texting Karen and we’re coming over tonight,” Stephanie said.
With a tiny laugh, Daisy nodded, carrying her covered heart sculpture to the storage cabinet and setting it inside carefully. “Okay,” she repeated.
“We got you, girl,” Stephanie reminded her firmly.
“Thank you,” Daisy said, starting to breathe a little easier between Stephanie’s unconditional support and putting away the heart sculpture.
“See you soon.”
Daisy finished cleaning up, tugged on her ponytail to tighten it, and put on her sunglasses as she jogged towards the exit.
That heart was badass, even if she couldn’t quite face it yet.
But she would learn from this just like she’d learned from everything else she’d gone through, and life would get better, even if it was slow going.