Daisy
A Story About the Gentrification of Invisible Love
It was a City of Calgary Land Agent who came with a police officer to tell us we had a month to leave. Mama was sitting in her blue nylon robe and Crocs at the kitchen table, drinking Jack Daniels beside a pile of unopened mail.
I heard her yell, “Tammy! Tell whoever that is to fuck-off!”
Mama hadn’t let anyone in the house since Daisy was born on Canada Day in 2000. That was the year I turned ten, and mama turned twenty-three. Nona, Mama’s mama, and her third husband Cheney had died in a car accident on their way to Lethbridge that summer; picking up supplies for the store that Cheney was running at the front of our house. I didn’t miss them, since Cheney hurt Mama, made her too scared to leave and Nona did nothing about it. But Mama wasn’t right in the head after that, or maybe she’d never been right. Maybe because Cheney was my daddy and Daisy’s too, which I learned on a TV soap, isn’t supposed to happen.
I started toward the door, but stopped on the way to make sure Daisy was quiet, and nowhere in sight.
The night Daisy was born eight years earlier, she came out of Mama onto an old yellow towel, just before the Canada Day fireworks started. I helped the best I could, but she came out fast. Mama didn’t seem to want her and said I could name her. So, I called her Daisy since she came out in summer, like the flowers in the empty lot beside our house. I learned to give Daisy a bottle and change her diaper, so Mama could run the store. That’s how Daisy got to be mine from the start. I loved her right away and dragged my mattress from the kitchen to sleep curled up with her sweetness by the warm furnace room in the basement, I brought her bottles of milk and kept her out of Mama’s way. When she got bigger, I brought her toys, paper and crayons from our store, and my old clothes from the attic.
She loved me as much as I loved her.
When she started walking, she got herself upstairs a few times. When that happened, Mama would sometimes scream and hit her like a crazy person, especially after a few Johnny Walkers. I wondered if it was because Daisy had fair hair and blue eyes like Cheney’s, while Mama and me were dark like Nona. I had to lock the basement door after that, since I feared Mama would hurt Daisy, who learned to stay down there when she heard Mama’s footsteps. When Daisy was big enough, and Mama was passed out in the afternoons, she’d come to the kitchen or help me arrange things in the store. On summer evenings, we went for walks, and I showed her the flowers she was named after.
Eventually, Mama mostly seemed to forget about her.
My sister loved decorating the walls of the basement with her crayon pictures. She especially loved drawing daisies and putting her name under them like I taught her. A few times, I hung one of those pictures in the hall, in case Mama might want to remember she had two daughters. Mama didn’t say nothing, but the pictures disappeared and it wasn’t me who took them down.
The day the land agent came to the door, I was eighteen, Daisy was eight, and Mama had stopped doing much of anything but drinking and sleeping. So I was running things as best I could. By then, Mama’s mind was as torn and flimsy as the wallpaper in our kitchen, and she talked in slurred anger to invisible people, sometimes crying like a baby for no reason.
Occasionally, I had to turn up the radio when customers were in the store, then talk over it to drown her out.
When I finally opened the door, the Land Agent started by saying, “This is the only courtesy visit we’re gonna make.” His reedy voice smelled of cornflakes and cigarettes. “You’ve got 30 days to relocate, understand? The City’s already sent you payment.”
I knew there’d been notes on the front door telling us to leave, but this was the first I’d heard of a payment. Over the years, mama had shown me how to make the bank deposit, sign for deliveries, pay the bills, and once, take all the reciepts to H & R Block in January. But I was not sure what to do with mail about other things. So, I left it on the counter, hoping Mama would open it.
“Yes, Sir,” I said.
Seeing a police officer on our porch made want to do what they said. But I didn’t know exactly what I was supposed to do — so I just stood quiet.
“A social worker will visit tomorrow, in case you need support with the transition.”
“Oh.”
On T.V., social workers took children away.
“She’ll come at 3:00 o’clock. Her name’s Julie Wong. You got that?”
“Yes, 3:00 o’clock.”
He handed me a card that said, Ron Coleman.
Before Daisy was born, Mama taught me some reading and math so I could work in the store, and when a few customers asked her why I wasn’t in school, she told them I was ‘home-schooled’, which is how I knew I’d better home-school Daisy too. Mostly, people in the store don’t ask about anything much, as long as we have what they want.
When Ron Coleman pulled away from the curb, I read his bumper sticker, which said, ‘Take A Hike’ written in the shape of mountains.
That night, when Mama and Daisy were sleeping, I went to the kitchen and opened every envelope from the City of Calgary. It seemed they needed to ‘re-develop’ our house into something called the ‘East Village,’ and there was a copy of a letter Mama had signed, agreeing to sell our house. I found a check for $227,000.00. Which was suprising. I couldn’t believe our cramped, moldy house was worth that much. I guessed it was because of all the stuff we had in the store, so I put the check in the cash register to take with the bank deposit on Friday.
Just before 3:00 o’clock the next day, I told Daisy to be quiet in the basement, so the social worker wouldn’t take her. I also made sure Mama was passed-out in her bed like usual.
I was stacking lemons into a pyramid when Julie Wong entered the store.
“Are you Velma Kelly?”
“No, I’m Tammy, her daughter. She’s sick, but I take care of her, the store, and the house too.”
“Oh, I see. Is she alright?”
“I don’t know. I guess.”
She was quiet for a second while we both stood there just looking at each other. The she said, “I’m Julie. Do you mind if we check on her?”
I was thinking she wanted to take our house away, or Daisy if she found her, so it caught me off guard that she was worried about Mama.
An hour later, an ambulance carrying Mama left for an ‘assessment’ after Julie Wong and two paramedics found her ‘unresponsive.’ Seemed to me she was just sleeping like always, but a few days later, I learned from Julie Wong, that Mama was staying in the hospital because of a thing called ‘Korsakoff’s Syndrome’ from all that Jack Daniels.
“Will she get better?”
“Maybe” she hesitated, ‘but maybe not.”
Julie told the truth, which made me feel like trusting her. Over the next few days, I told Julie Wong most everything, even about Daisy. She wanted Daisy and me to stay together, and promised to get us birth certificates so I could become Daisy’s legal guardian. She also said she’d get me something called a ‘power of attorney’ so I could use the money from the City, to take care of Daisy and me. Then she helped me find a job at the big Co-Op store on 16th Avenune, since we wouldn’t have our own store anymore. She also helped me rent an apartment across the bridge, near a school for Daisy. She even helped me pack. There wasn’t much to take really.
“We’ll talk about school for you next,” she said when we were putting a few things from the kitchen into a box that said “Dole Pineapple’ on the side.
No one had ever talked about something for me before. I felt a flutter when she said it. I wondered where people like Julie Wong came from and if there were any more.
On Friday, Daisy and me finished clearing out Mama’s room, just before the house was boarded up for demolition. I felt my breath catch when I found three drawings in her dresser drawer, each signed by Daisy in crayon. I folded them into Mama’s blue robe.
Julie came to take Daisy to register at Stanley Jones school, and droppled me off a the hospital to take Mam’a’s things to her. Mama didn’t wake up when I came in, so I put the bag by her bed and pinned the drawings to the cork board on the wall. Then I sat down and watched her sleep. No booze was there, but they must’ve given her medicine, because her face looked peaceful. When I noticed that, my eyes started welling up for some reason.
Then I went outside to wait for Julie to pick me up.
The news that Mama was missing from the hospital came the next morning, the same day the house was scheduled for demolition.
Julie called to tell me when I was unpacking the kitchen things in me and Daisy’s tiny apartment Bridgeland. She told me there were people searching for Mama and not to worry. I wasn’t, Mama always did what she wanted. By afternoon, it seemed clear to the searchers that after getting past the night staff, Mama had found her way home on foot, squeezed through the safety fence, and pried open a sealed basement window at the back. The broken seal was unnoticed by the demolition crew, who’d arrived to pull the house down at 9:00 am — right on schedule. By late afternoon, they found Mama, her body under the rubble, curled up beside the furnace on Daisy’s old mattress. Julie told me the police found a drawing of flowers near her hand.
Just this summer, my sister and I finally walked past the high-rise apartments where the house used to be. We wondered about the people who live there, and what it’s like to fall asleep in the sky every night, with the last of the summer daisies growing in the small wild spaces between them.
