No Chains Shall Bind Me (The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Seven) by Randall Farmer Page B

macaroni salad the Schubers had trucked down from Flint, unrefrigerated.  Funny, nobody but Gail would touch it.  Pork, ham, bacon in everything – the Schubers raised more than a few pigs.  They had tried cattle, once, before Van hit kindergarten, but raising cattle proved to be too much work.  The Perfesser, already teaching his art history and art appreciation courses at Flint JC, didn’t have it in him to be organized enough to milk the cows every day, or organize anyone else to do so.
    Gail sat down with another heaping bowl of the, well, three-quarters spoiled mac salad under the lightning oak, named for the obvious reason.  Alone, and thankfully away from everyone.  The sun reddened in the west, braced by distant tall thunderheads, white on dark purple-grey shadows.  The free meal had everyone in her household happily porked out – so to speak – and a happy household made a happy Gail.  Bacon spaghetti sauce, however, was about the oddest food Gail had ever seen.  The food did make everyone content, though, however strange.
    Of course, echoing the emotions of her household wasn ’t anything the pamphlets mentioned.  Yet another incongruity she, by now, expected.
    “That crap ’s going to kill you.”  Gail looked up.  Daisy, cigarette in hand, sat down five feet away, a half smile on her face.  Gail almost stood and walked away.  The last thing she needed in her life was any Daisy.  They always fought.
    Only Daisy felt different, somehow, today.  Gail forced herself to relax, and suffer.
    “There’s a Focus trick that doesn’t make the newspapers,” Gail said, half embarrassed.  “We can eat nearly anything and not get sick.”  The embarrassment came from her late-night snacking on the household garbage.  She wouldn’t admit her nighttime habit to anyone, even to Van.
    “Useful,” Daisy said.  She shook her head.  “I heard what you did to your parents.  You ’ve got to do the same with mine, before they mess you guys up with their ahem help ahem.”
    Gail smiled and held up the spoiling mac salad.  “They really are trying, which is more than my parents could manage.  We can live through their chaos.”
    Daisy, of all things, smiled.  “Neat.”
    “Neat?”
    “You ’ve grown, Gail.  And I don’t mean the half inch taller crap, either.”
    Gail didn ’t think she had grown any since she last suffered through Daisy.  “Huh?”
    “You ’re not trying to organize my parents.  You always used to.”
    “Organizing them made everyone unhappy,” Gail said.  “I ’ve got too much to worry about now, without having to worry about organizing the impossible to organize.”
    “As I ’ve said, grown.”
    Gail studied Daisy, closely.  Especially the insides of her elbows.  She had to be high.  No way would she be compl imenting Gail sober .
    Daisy noticed Gail ’s inspection.  “I’m still not doing IV drugs,” she said.  Unlike normal, Daisy didn’t seem bothered.  Perhaps what Daisy disliked about Gail was her effect on Daisy’s parents.  “Go ahead and scrape.  I didn’t cover them up with makeup, either.”
    Daisy ’s makeup today was ‘young hooker’, not an uncommon style for her.  ‘Young hooker’ made the proper social statement, on one hand, and went over her mother’s head, nearly as important.  What Daisy wore when her mother wasn’t around, in her infrequent visits to Van, was pure hippie.  She took the Franklin Roosevelt liberalism of her parents and quadrupled it, becoming in her mind a true proletarian revolutionary.  Gail tried not to think about Daisy’s confused politics and philosophies; for one thing, Van had cautioned Gail that Daisy’s espousal of Marxist-Leninist revolution was an act, simply to pull her parent’s chain.
    Gail held out her hand; Daisy provided an elbow and Gail did check.  Daisy rolled eyes and lit another cigarette.  “You want to check between my toes, perhaps?”
    Probably too much.  Gail