Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 1: Cadwaller's Gun by Tom Carson Page A

muddled. I’m positive I remember an exhilarated Daisy prattling about what wonderful fun the Scandinavian, SooSoo the dog, and I were going to have during the whole week bothersome, bossy, blissfully flickering Mummy was away. Yet when I came down to breakfast, she was anticipating her Belgian second husband’s line of business—Georges Flagon peddled safety equipment to small airports—by waving two squares of burnt toast around an otherwise vacant kitchen.
    The toot of a hired car outside made her wildly eye me and then the now odorless, Scandinavian-less servant’s quarters behind her. Then a cupboard, as if wondering how long she could responsibly trust Pamela to survive on a diet of dishcloths, dog food, or whatever it contained. Ironing board, Mother.
    A second toot unlocked her feet and hurried me upstairs, where my mother began to toss random Pam-garb into a suitcase she’d rejected while slowly feeding her own wardrobe, Smee-style, to three much wider sets of crocodile jaws the night before. Her haste was complicated by her dashes to the window to semaphore our progress to a—what do you know, Miss Jessup?—gray-coated, jackbooted, quintessential (he was male, albeit Asian) chauffeur.
    “We’re going to the most wonderful place on Cape Cod,” she told me as clothes flew. “You’re going to meet all Mummy’s bestest, most special friends! Oh, here’s a lovely sort of little Russian blouse. Is it mine?”
    “It’s the sun dress I had on yesterday, Mother, and it’s dirty. And too small.” Taking it back from her dazed hands, I thought the Scandinavian might use it to wipe furniture or finally blow her great big nose in if we still had a Scandinavian. “How do you know where we’re going is wonderful?”
    “Because I’ve decided it will be! For everybody, and I’m always right. Yes, always! Wasn’t I smart enough to pick you out from all those otherlittle jellybeans when Daddy and I went to that great big expensive candy store on Fifth Avenue?”
    “Is she coming?” No need to identify who she was, much as I might wish my mother hadn’t unconsciously agreed.
    “Why, of course! She’s going to help me take care of you. Won’t that be fun?”
    “Then I don’t want to go. I hate her,” said the budding pudding that was Pam, with twin Civil War memorials for eyes. “She’s a witch.”
    “Oh, sweetie, don’t be silly. You’re too young—don’t know enough about anyone yet to really and truly hate them. And she isn’t a witch! She doesn’t look like one, does she? Isn’t she pretty? Well, now, doesn’t that just show you? She, oh, she just gets put under a spell sometimes—by her father, who’s an awful, wicked, mysterious ogre in the mountains—and that makes her act like one. But she doesn’t want to! That’s the important thing. Please remember that, Pammie. Watch out for the people who want to. Won’t you? For me?”
    My mother’s failure to become a writer was a failure of discipline, not imagination. Either on the page or in person, I’ve never been able to improvise like that. Not without a single nugget of reality to wrap my words around.
    My face scraped a crushed Daisy-bosom’s blossoms in surprise as she lifted me, apparently forgetful that I’d been three the last time she’d tried and was more of a handful now. Unable to maintain a rib grip, her hands scooted up under my armpits as the suitcase staggered toward my unexpectedly defrocked rump. I thought she was going to pack me in it and spare the Lotus Eater the sight of Pam until we got to Provincetown, but it turned out she only wanted me to sit on its lid.
    Posted by: Pam
    Of course it’s peculiar to be getting ready to describe Provincetown to you, Panama. You know it better than your Gramela. You weren’t born yet when a cousin of Cadwaller’s with no children deeded her place on the Cape to your grandpa Chris and his wife Renée not long after Hopsie died.
    I still wonder sometimes if that unmet