Free Tigers in Red Weather by Liza Klaussmann Page B

father, of course, when he came up on his trips from the city. But her mother didn’t. Uncle Avery needed money for his collection, she knew; something to do with the movies, but she wasn’t sure what exactly. When she thought of it, Daisy imagined a huge room filled with reels of film under glass. Her mother had been very angry about it all and she had seen her father trying to calm her down. But her mother had said, “Goddamn Helena and her goddamn husband,” before realizing that Daisy was standing at the door. She had looked at her with those green eyes, not flashing like Vivien Leigh’s, but flat and cold, like broad beans. Then she slammed the door shut and Daisy couldn’t hear any more.
    Her mother pulled Daisy’s little plaid suitcase out of the back of the car and handed it to her.
    “Don’t forget to unpack those dresses so they don’t wrinkle,” she said, but Daisy was already racing off, dragging the case through the back door, letting the screen snap behind her.
    She was anxious to get upstairs to her room and make sure all the things she had tucked away the summer before were still there. Her comic book collection, the pink, striped shell that, among others, she had found on the beach and the special shampoo she had begged her father to buy her (“So Glamorous! For Soft, Lustrous Hair”).
    She ran down the long hallway that led from the back of the house to the front, catching her case on the worn runner every few steps. Just before the front door, the house opened up, with two large sitting rooms, one green and one blue, on either side. Their large, screened windows looked out onto the front porch, and the harbor beyond.
    As she crossed to the wide staircase, she caught a glimpse of Aunt Helena sitting in a chintz armchair in the blue room, wearing a soft,distracted expression on her pale face. Daisy had almost forgotten that her aunt and cousin had already arrived. She wondered where Ed might be lurking.
    “Hi, Aunt Helena,” she called over her shoulder as she stomped up the stairs.
    “Hello, dear one,” her aunt called back. “Ed? Daisy and Aunt Nick are here, darling.”
    Daisy huffed into her beloved bedroom, with the twin brass beds and the pink rosette wallpaper she had been allowed to pick out herself. She threw her suitcase on the extra bed and flew to the window. Pushing up the sash and pressing her nose against the screen, she breathed in the air, heavy with ocean, but sweet, too, with the scent of the albizia tree flowering just outside. She fingered the gauzy, ruffled curtains. Then she went to her secret hiding place.
    In order to keep nosy parkers such as her mother or her cousin out of her business, Daisy kept her treasures at the bottom of an old bureau that, considered too bulky for everyday use, had been abandoned in the back of her closet. She pushed back the decoys, an old beach blanket and the enormous stuffed unicorn her father had gotten for her at the West Tisbury fair three summers before. She had been in love with unicorns that summer, but she had been unable to knock down the four bottles to win it. She had spent all her allowance trying, and when she had none left, her father had taken pity on her and handed the man two dollars for it. She had slept with it every night, admiring its golden horn and stroking its flowing mane. But the next year, she had stuffed it in the bureau, suddenly embarrassed by the cheap plastic eyes that stared dumbly at nothing.
    Underneath it were the ten Archie comics; the matching set of Silver City Pink lipstick and nail polish she had bought at the five-and-dime on Main Street and snuck into the house under her blouse; six nickels she had earned sweeping the walk the summer before; apair of oxidizing copper clip-ons, stolen from her mother’s jewelry box; and the picture of her parents on their wedding day. After taking stock of all this, she put the blanket and the unicorn back in their place and shut the drawer. As she was emerging