Daisy’s voice breathes money and so did my grandmother’s. Her name was Louise and she died several years ago, though I only recall select tableaus, pictures time refused to wash away. I remember her wearing a yellow dress before I remember the grey hospital room and her gurgling breaths through the ventilator. She beat cancer, twice I think, but what took her down in the end I didn’t fully understand. I was the only one who visited her in the nursing home.

The stained glass I made her hung over the wilting plant below the window. She said she looked at it every day and thought of me. One day, as I walked from the overhang to the parking lot, I looked up at the Spanish tiled building to see if I could find her window. Three from the left on the fourth floor, I saw her sitting at the chair next to the window, waving at me. I didn’t want to leave, but I couldn’t stay. The halls felt so sterile, like a condemned resort building.

Things hadn’t always been like this. Louise once had her Gatsby. I remember my grandfather Lamar as a gauzy black and white photograph,  like a headshot of an old Hollywood star. He mapped the brain at the University of Florida and drank three glasses of wine every night at dinner. One night alcohol and pills mixed. The kids found him and ran for the neighbors, but Lamar didn’t outlive the sunrise.

Louise sold real estate and mingled with the horse-racing crowd in Ocala, where she lived and died. The people said they loved her, and after her funeral, at the house in Ocala with the vine-lined drive, they reminisced this love. Her eloquence, her grace, her love for her children who looked on at all the parties wondering when their turn for mommy’s love came. I took a finger sandwich and went outside to feed it to my uncle’s golden retriever. The house belongs to my uncle now, though he cheated her out of it long before that.

A year before her death, Louise lived in a lake house with a green light at the end of her dock. Her lover was a Texas oil tycoon with bad ankles, who never said a word to me. He thought women should be seen, not heard, but I was fine as long as he footed the bill, and I get the feeling, so was Louise. When he died of old age, his children made sure she got nothing. So she came home to the house in Ocala she no longer owned, the house where her husband and son both commit suicide.

The love of the people faded while she lived in Texas, so she cocooned herself in the memory of the house. The day she moved to the nursing home, she gave me a pink handkerchief sprayed with her perfume. My back pocket smelled like folded roses as I carried her trunk over the threshold to the vined drive.

On that last hour, I entered her room in the hospital. The drawn blinds dusked her pale skeleton. She still looked like Daisy: fair on the outside, but the corrupted inside. The gold in the center killed her, not fluid in her lungs, because she wanted those people to come, to praise her wit and laud her eloquence. Only the people whose hands I shook at the funeral, who only showed up for the wine and the will, could have saved her.

Then she called me by my mother’s name, beckoned me to her side. Then I remembered. Not Daisy, but the yellow rose, and cried.