While Daryl is napping, Carol goes to visit Cody in the infirmary. He smiles to see her and says, "I'm finally getting busted from this joint tomorrow, you know."
"I'm glad to hear it." She settles in the chair by his bed, and they chat for a while. Before she leaves, she bends down and kisses his cheek. It's not the pity fuck Daryl suggested, but it does leave Cody beaming. "Thank you for talking Daryl into sponsoring me and Sophia," she says. "You were our savior, in a way. We were getting close to starvation out there alone." Not to mention what those men would have done to them.
"From what I hear, Daryl isn't sorry he agreed. He says you're a fu..fantastic cook."
Carol smiles at Cody's self-editing. "Maybe I could cook for you sometime. As a thank you."
"Really?" he asks, blue-gray eyes wide with excitement.
"As a friendly thank you," she clarifies.
He sighs. "I'm not as dumb as everyone thinks. I know what that means. You're saying just want to be friends so I don't get the idea you like me."
Carol smiles. "But I do like you."
"I mean like me like me," he replies.
Carol has to force herself not to laugh because that phrase throws her back to elementary school. "But I would like to be friends, if you'd like that?"
"Of course I'd like it. I like friends. Especially ones who get me medicines by waving a gun in the butler's face."
"Well, I wasn't going to let Arthur tell me no," Carol insists. Might as well own the legend at this point.
[*]
Sophia is home from school and playing solitaire on the living room coffee table when Daryl emerges from his nap, yawning and scratching his head as he pads out in his bare feet and muscle shirt (but no more towel around his neck), his scraggly hair sticking up in a hundred places. Carol stands at the stove, where she's seasoning the soup that's simmering on the electric hotpot.
"Smells good," he says. "Can I have some?"
"Of course. As soon as it's done. It's almost lunch time. I'm making roasted eggplant soup. I roasted the eggplant in the toaster oven to start."
She glances back at him and sees that his face has soured. "Never mind," he mutters. "Eggplant's nasty. Merle always traded our eggplant to Bonnie."
"Will you at least try it? You might find you like the way I make it."
"If anyone can make eggplant edible," Sophia says from her seat on the living room floor as she turns over three cards, "it's my mom."
Daryl turns his attention to the girl. When he sees what she's doing, he rushes frantically to the coffee table and begins scooping up her cards from the surface.
"Hey!" cries Sophia as she grabs them back.
The cards flutter out of Daryl's hands onto the table, except for one, which he turns over and back while looking at the design.
Carol chuckles. He clearly thought she was playing with the naked lady cards. "Ivan gave her that deck," she tells him. "I put your deck on your nightstand by your books."
Daryl's cheeks turn a reddish-pink. "Wasn't my deck. Was Merle's."
"Whatever you say," Carol says as she resumes stirring the soup. She thinks about Sophia's Hey! and how she swatted those cards out of Daryl's hand. The girl never would have dared make such a protest to Ed. As gruff as Daryl is, Sophia's not afraid of him. That's a good sign, Carol thinks. Sophia feels safe here.
As if to cement Carol's observation, Sophia asks Daryl, "Want to play a hand of poker with me?"
"Poker? You don't want to play Go Fish?"
"That's a little kids game! I'm thirteen."
"Oh, thirteen. Practically an old lady." He sits down by the coffee table opposite her. "Who taught you poker? Your mama?"
Sophia laughs. "Yeah, right. No, Glenn did."
"Who's Glenn?"
"Just…someone we used to camp with." Her voice hitches. "But he probably got bitten or burned up on the farm."
"We don't know that, sweetie," Carol tells her. "Some of them may have gotten out."
"Yes. We do. We do know that. There's was no one there when we went back."
"He could of gotten out," Daryl tells her. "Hell, my dog survived a housefire when I was a kid."
"Really?" Sophia asks.
"My mamma didn't though. She burned up."
"I'm sorry," Sophia tells him. "How old were you?"
"Seven. Had to live in a trailer after that. 'Bout the size of the trailers here. My daddy put it right on the ashes. He kept saying he'd rebuild the cabin, but he never did. Only got half the foundation laid."
"That must have been awful for you," Sophia tells him. "Living on your mother's ashes!"
"That's what Dr. Eastman said. What are we betting with?"
"We never bet. We just played."
"Ain't poker if you ain't betting. Hold on. I'll get something." He stands and disappears in his room. Carol can hear nightstand drawers opening and closing. When he comes out, he drops six rolls of Smarties candy on the coffee table. Sophia's eyes widen.
"You take three rolls." He says as he eases back down on the floor. "Just open one for starters. The yellow, pink, and violet candies are worth five. Red and orange are twenty-five. Blue and green are fifty."
The soup is ready, but Carol doesn't want to interrupt their fun, so she turns the electric hot pot off and puts the lid on to keep it warm and begins ever so slowly setting the table with spoons, napkins, and glasses of water.
Daryl has to tell Sophia about how to ante, see, raise, and call. They play one hand, which Daryl wins, and then start a second.
Carol's worried the soup will get cold, and she can't waste the battery on the portable charger leaving the hotpot on, so she warns, "Lunch will be served in three minutes" and begins filling the bowls with soup.
"I'm all in," Daryl tells Sophia, pushing every one of his loose smarties to the center of the table as well as an unopened roll.
"But you only have a two and a five showing and I have a pair of kings!"
"You don't know what I got under these other cards. Could have me a straight. All in!"
"You're bluffing!" Sophia insists. "I call!" She pushes all her smarties to the center of the table, too. "Show me."
"Read 'em and weep, girlie." Daryl flips his cards over. "Got me a pair of twos."
"A pair of kings beats a pair of twos!"
"It does?" Daryl asks.
Sophia chortles and pops a Smartie into her mouth, and then another and another.
"You'll ruin your appetite," Carol warns her.
As Daryl stands, he says, "She's a growing girl. Needs her nutrients."
"I don't think there are a whole lot of nutrients in Smarites." Then to Sophia, Carol says, "Save them for dessert, sweetie. And save the unopened rolls for another day."
"You ain't got to save 'em," Daryl fake whispers to her in a manner that is perfectly audible to Carol. "Got more where those came from."
"Soup's on!" Carol announces, and they all settle around the table, but not before Sophia pops another Smartie in her mouth.
Daryl toys warily with his soup with his spoon, stirring the contents in a circle.
"Just try it," Carol insists.
"What's the light brown stuff?"
"Chickpeas." Those came from a can in the cabinet. "Just try it."
He makes an uncertain sound. He looks at Sophia. "When you were growin' up, did your mama tell you to eat your vegetables 'cause there were starving children in Africa?"
"Yeah," she says.
He smirks. "You ever tell her to ship your food to them then?"
"Once," Sophia says uneasily. The night Sophia did that, Ed flew into a rage, told her she was being a 'disrespectful little shit' to her mother, slid all of his vegetables on her plate next to hers, and forced her to sit there, crying, until she had eaten them all. Later, he lit into Carol for 'putting up with that bullshit from her daughter' and told her she better shape up as a mother or he'd have to give her the back of his hand. "My dad said I was being disrespectful. He was really mad about it. I mean…I was though. I was being disrespectful."
Carol opens her mouth to reply, but Daryl speaks first. "Yeah," he says, "my dad was like that. Would take it out of my hide for being disrespectful to my mama, and then turn 'round and disrespect her ten times worse himself."
Sophia looks up from her soup. "He did?"
"Used to blame myself, but I know now it wasn't my fault. I's just being a kid. You know? That was all his shit. Wasn't my fault. Wasn't your fault, neither."
Sophia glances at Carol, who nods. "He's right. And no one has to eat the soup. I'll eat it all. Because I like it." She takes a big bite.
"I like it, too," Sophia assures her and takes a bite of hers.
Daryl raises a spoonful to his mouth and eyes it warily. He blows on it to cool it and finally, hesitantly put it in his mouth. "Hmm," he concludes. "Ain't half bad."
It's not fucking fantastic, but Carol will take the half-compliment, especially since he immediately takes another bite and says, "Ain't half bad a'tall."
After lunch, Carol has Sophia wash the dishes so she can cut Daryl's hair. She sits him in a kitchen chair and uses the damp towel he left on the floor of his bedroom as a cape. First, she runs a black, finetooth comb through his hair to work out the tangles. He winces and "Ow!"s his way through the entire process.
"Quit being such a baby," she tells him. "My combing can't possibly hurt a tough guy like you."
"You ain't exactly a gentle woman."
"It would help if you brushed your hair at least once a day."
"Ain't nobody got time for that."
She works out a tangle in the back of his hair, which is beginning to look a bit like a short mullet. "I have time for it because you never leave me any chores when you're gone. Is there something in particular you'd like me to do tomorrow?"
"Laundry'd be nice."
"I did that yesterday. Didn't you wonder where those clean clothes you're wearing came from?"
"Then whatever you want. Hell, clearly you know how to keep a house better 'n I do."
Carol snips her way through his hair, purging it of the half-mullet, trimming it out of his eyes, and evening it up nicely. He looks good, she thinks, cleaned up like this. It's nice to be able to see his eyes clearly. She runs her fingers through the top of his hair to shake out the excess clippings. At first, he jerks away from her touch, instinctively, she thinks, but then he settles back into it, even closes his eyes like a dog being scratched.
Carol, finding she's temporarily given into an urge to run her fingers through the strands of his hair in a non-business like manner, abruptly stops and slides her hand away. "All done," she says. "Why don't you go take a look at in the mirror?"
She sets her comb and scissors down on the kitchen table and snaps off his towel, but before he can stand, there's a knock on the door, which Sophia answers. "Hi, Zander."
"Hi," comes a small voice from the other side. "I need to see Mr. Dixon."
Sophia lets him in. It's the little tow-headed page boy. He walks up to the chair where Daryl sits and says, "Mr. Dixon, you've been summoned. Jefe wants to see you right away."
"Tell you what, kid. Pedal your dirt bike back on up that hill and tell Jefe I ain't a fucking genie that can be summoned anytime she wants. I just got back home. I'm tired, and I'm relaxing."
The page boy looks uneasy, if not downright frightened. "Please don't make me tell her that. She knows you got in four hours ago."
"Fine. Just Tell 'er I'll be up in about thirty minutes."
Zander nods and retreats from the cottage. While Carol sweeps up the hair on the floor, Daryl goes to his bedroom to put on an overshirt, his socks, and his second, cleaner pair of boots. Then he goes into the bathroom to look in the mirror.
"Do you like it?" Carol asks when he comes out.
"I look like a damn catalogue model!"
"Is that really a bad thing?" she asks.
"I ain't tryin' to sell underwear." He runs a hand through his short bangs and muffles them up.
"Well," Carol tells him with a smirk, "now you've got that natural tussled look they spend hours perfecting before the photo shoot."
"Stahp." And then he's out the door and headed to the mansion.
At least he's not going up there to sleep with Jefe, Carol thinks, with a great deal of relief. Not that it's any of her business. Because it's not at all her business who he has sex with.
But she's relieved just the same.