“Three words to live by,” she told me, shaking her bangles, counting them off on her manicured fingers, “after—the-wedding.”
I spoke to Daisy every Sunday, just a word or two when she was sick, longer conversations when she was feeling better. She always asked about the dogs and the cats, and I told her stories about all of them, Rags included. I told her the Moran kids were always asking for her. And that poor Petey sent his love-which was always met by a purposeful silence that brought more vividly to my mind her freckled blush and her goofy grin than any words she might have spoken. In March she left us-as all the family took to saying, harking back to some ancient, ancestral turn of phrase none of us, separately, could have claimed as our own, although Bernadette and I, alone in our beds, might over the years have thought to say, she left me.
Uncle Tommy was visiting us when the long-expected phone call finally came, and he was the first to point out (determined to be happy) that she had left us in the season of the Resurrection, the beginning of spring.
Late in August of the summer Daisy came, just after my parents had left for work, I went into the house, through the kitchen and the living room and into my bedroom, where I dumped the ribbons out of my ribbon box—just a shoebox covered with fabric—and carried it outside. I went around the perimeter of our lawn, pulling at the long grass, filling the box. I knew without asking that this was Petey’s gift, indistinguishable as it was from a burden.
Petey, who always used to ask, challenging and pleading at the same time, “Do you like me? Do you like my family?” Who had wept with his fists tight. Who would be plagued all his life by anger and affection, by gifts gone awry, by the irreconcilable difference between what he got and what he longed for-by the inevitable, insufferable loss buried like a dark jewel at the heart of every act of love.
I tore at the grass around our yard, handful after quick handful, and as if the sound of it had drawn them, when I looked up, the Moran kids were slowly moving through our gate. Judy with baby June in her arms, Janey with a box of sweet cereal clutched to her chest, Tony and Petey bumping arms and hips as if battling to share the same space.
Without a word, I carried the box to the steps and bent down, and with the Moran kids gathered around me, I gently lifted the hopeless little things, still breathing, into the nest of torn grass.