Daisy-May is stripping the lemon pips off of her knuckles with her thumbnail, like a knife carving seeds outta peppers. Drawing a wrist cross her forehead, she’s gritty-all from the dust-wind. It’s getting up strong, she can feel it, like how static crackles through drying bed-sheets touching each other on the line. Zinging down her bones, like all else from Cherrybrook. Daisy-May is born of the earth, the sand and the dust. Mothers will be thumbing patterns in pie crust, wringing grease from their palms, gathering in their daughters and peeking through their shutters for their men folk, who are all but rodeo-riding spooked and bucking cattle to safety in preparation. The heat, it’s baking into her chicken-white skin, her chest heavy, sweat making a nest at the back of the tangled candyfloss of her hair, a dew of it balls down her temple, splashes her bare shoulder.
Refreshing.
A star winks in the strip-light bright of the day, the star becoming metal which becomes a truck in the flickering distance. Daisy-May is aching for the road, the possibilities it suggests, of getting out of this town.
The truck is rearin up close, chucking up spumes of sand like a raging bull. And Daisy-May, well she’s fetchin to leave. But then there was Donovan to think about, and Mickey-Joe. Sweet, good, kind Mickey-Joe with his gravy brains, as momma was want to say, God rest her. Daisy-May knew there was more to him than that, his lumbering figure and baby boy face. If not for him, she could mount up on a shiny white truck and ride out of town, leave her home, Donovan and her past behind.
Daisy-May remains on the dirt, the only girl about in the disintegrating town, resolute at her makeshift stall. Scallops of her lemon skirt twitch against the back of her knees, the stirrer clinking at the neck of the juice jug. Only sound for miles, it seemed.
As the truck slows, the girl with the chicken skin battered in freckles which were not dainty but fat like hundreds of miniature overstuffed cake cases and the lemon scallop skirt, the strangest pink-red candyfloss hair, buffeting in the breeze, as is the jug stirrer, rocked by the sniffing, snuffling exploring wind, whispering of lands far away, picks up her smile as the truck stops in an explosion of hog-squealing metal and grit sparks and says, ‘Well hey there, sir, y’all thirsty? Got some juice ready. 20 cents a cup.’
‘Darlin, I got some juice right here. Won’t even charge if you’re good.’
‘And where is it you be headin, sir?’
‘The question missy is where you be headin.’
The dust-wind is creeping strong, stronger and Daisy-Mae stands tall, spine straight as a schoolmistress’ cane. The wind pulls back her hair, smoothes over her freckles and curls around her body. The jug stirrer disturbs the buzz of the heat and that sound, that slither inside the dust-wind. It throttles the stirrer livid like a very rattler itself.
Daisy-May reaches out her forefinger, short nails, all practical, and stills the stirrer with a quiet but distinct tink. Her scalloped skirt is uniform, unmoving. The smile gains, eyelashes bat, her lips pull apart, ‘Oh no sir, you’re quite wrong. That ain’t at all the question.’
The truck driver goes bull eyes. He starts for her and it’s then the sky does crack.
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