MAVIS
While Mavis’s mother chattered away in the front seat, telling Mrs. Tully about taking French cooking lessons at the YWCA with her cousin Elmira, who was in a Toyota commercial, Mavis told Rose about all the places they’d lived.
“And one time, we lived in a condo in Atlanta that had a Jacuzzi in the bathroom,” she said. “But the landlord got mad ’cause we had a dog.”
“What’d you do?” Rose asked.
“Gave the dog to my uncle Jerry.”
“Oh.”
“Once we lived with this crazy lady named Trixie who saved everything,” Mavis said. “Like used paper cups and empty soup cans.”
“Really?”
“And one time we lived over a Chinese restaurant, and I got free fortune cookies.”
Rose’s eyes grew wide. “How many places have you lived?”
“A bunch. But I might go live with my dad someday.”
“Where does he live?”
“In Tennessee with his mother.” She leaned toward Rose and added, “She’s kind of mean, so that’s a problem.”
“Your grandmother?”
Mavis nodded. “I was supposed to stay there all summer last year, but she made me leave early.”
Mavis was surprised to see Rose suddenly look a little sad. It was their very first day together as best friends, and already Rose felt bad about Mavis’s mean grandmother. That was a good sign.
As the Tullys’ car made its way up the interstate, Mavis ran her hand over the soft leather seats. Then she took off her flip-flops and wiggled her toes in the thick black carpet under her feet. There wasn’t a speck of dust or a single crumb on that carpet. When Mavis’s mother drove her boyfriend Mickey’s car, the floor was always littered with moldy french fries and dirty napkins and gravel from the driveway. But then, when the transmission had gone, her mother had left the car on the side of the road, which made Mickey mad as all get-out. He and her mother had hollered at each other, and two days later Mavis was packing her duffel bag again.
Before long, Mrs. Tully turned off the interstate and zigged and zagged until they reached a wrought-iron gate across the road and a sign that read MAGNOLIA ESTATES.
“This is where you live?” Mavis asked Rose.
Rose nodded.
“Why is there a gate?”
But Rose didn’t answer. She was waving to a gray-haired, whiskery-faced man in a small brick gatehouse.
“Who’s that?” Mavis asked.
“Mr. Duffy.” Rose kept waving out the back window of the car as they drove into Magnolia Estates. “He’s really sad,” she said.
“How come?”
“His dog died.”
Rose looked down at her hands in her lap, and Mavis thought she was going to cry.
“What happened?”
Rose looked up. “What do you mean?”
“What happened to his dog?”
“She just got old.” Rose let out a little sigh. “Mr. Duffy used to do magic tricks and play his kazoo and stuff. But he doesn’t anymore. He never even wants to play checkers.”
“Then we’ll cheer him up,” Mavis said.
“I’ve been trying.”
“What’ve you tried?”
“Well, I took him some blackberries. And I showed him a new card trick from a magic book I got at school.”
Mavis let out a little pfft. “You gotta do more than that.”
“Like what?”
“I’ll think of something.” Mavis poked Rose’s arm and added, “Trust me.”
ROSE
Rose and Mavis tagged along while Mrs. Tully showed Miss Jeeter around the house. Rose couldn’t help but notice her mother’s face each time Miss Jeeter piped in with a comment.
“Dang!” Miss Jeeter said, motioning at silver trays and pitchers and bowls on the pantry shelf. “That’s a lot of polishing!”
“You gotta be a rocket scientist to figure that thing out,” she said, pointing to the knobs on the gas stove. “But I’ll get it,” she added quickly.
“Check this out, May May!” She tugged on Mavis’s arm. “A laundry chute!”
Rose could tell her mother was getting irked. That was a word she used often at the supper table when she told Rose’s father about her day. Someone had almost always irked her.
So Rose asked Mavis if she’d like to go upstairs to her bedroom.
“Sure!” Mavis said.
Rose led Mavis up the winding staircase and down the hall to her room.
“Holy cannoli!” Mavis said as she flopped onto Rose’s bed. “A canopy!”
Then she jumped up and ran over to Rose’s closet and began to count the dresses, ending with a loud “Seventeen!” and making bug eyes at Rose.
Mavis darted around the room, touching and counting and thwacking her forehead and saying “holy cannoli” a few more times.
When the sound of Miss Jeeter’s voice echoed up the staircase from the dining room and twined around with Mavis’s voice there in her bedroom, Rose suddenly realized how quiet their house usually was.
It was especially quiet since her sister, Grace, had gone away to college last fall. Sometimes Rose went into Grace’s room to touch her things. The white leather jewelry box with gold initials. The ceramic cat with a ribbon for a collar. The flower vase filled with bird feathers.
It was boring at home without Grace, who was always so surprising. She would up and do the most unexpected things, like buy a ratty old motorbike with her babysitting money or roller-skate in the foyer when their mother’s garden club was there. Once she had brought a boy named Rocky home for supper without even asking. She just sat right down at the dining room table and said, “Pass the chicken,” without even introducing him. He had talked about deer hunting the whole time and given Mrs. Tully a headache.
Before Grace left for college, she’d given Rose the shiny silver dollar she had found on the beach in Mobile one summer. Was there anyone else in the whole world who had found a silver dollar on the beach? Rose didn’t think so.
Grace had put the coin in Rose’s palm and closed her fingers over it. “Hold down the fort, Rosie,” she had said.
When Grace finally came home to visit at Thanksgiving, she had a hummingbird tattoo on her wrist. Rose thought it was beautiful, but her parents didn’t. Grace had hurried back to school in a huff, and now she was spending the summer with her roommate’s family on a lake in Maine. Rose was trying to hold down the fort, but it sure was hard without Grace.
“So,” Mavis said as she inspected Rose’s books on the shelf under the window seat, “since we’re best friends, we should have a club.”
A club?
Rose had never been in a club before, unless you counted the Junior Garden Club her mother had made her join in third grade. But she hadn’t liked that club very much and had disappointed her mother when she dropped out after only a few meetings.
“What kind of club?” she asked.
“You know, like a Best Friends Club,” Mavis said as she examined Rose’s collection of china horses.
“Oh. Okay.” Rose wasn’t too sure about letting Mavis handle her china horses, but she didn’t say anything. Instead she said, “What will we do in the club?”
Mavis moved on to Rose’s stuffed animals in the doll bed. Rose hoped Mavis didn’t think the doll bed was too babyish like Amanda did. She was relieved when Mavis just ran her hand over each stuffed animal and then gave the doll bed a little pat of approval.
“Well, for starters,” Mavis said, “we can think of ways to cheer up Mr. Duffy.”
“Okay.”
Rose felt a tingle of excitement.
Suddenly things seemed a lot better in Magnolia Estates.
MAVIS
“Well, it’s not exactly the Ritz-Carlton,” Mavis’s mother said, dropping the suitcase onto the bed. She opened bureau drawers and peered into the closet and inspected the cupboards in the kitchenette. “Heck,” she said, “it’s barely even the Motel 6.”
; Mavis liked the little apartment over the Tullys’ garage. Well, it wasn’t really an apartment. More like just a room. But it had everything they needed. Beds and bureaus. A stove and a refrigerator. A closet and a bathroom. There were small ruffled pillows on the beds that matched the flowered curtains and the armchair in the corner. All the dishes in the kitchen cupboard matched, even the cereal bowls and the coffee mugs.
And it was way better than her dad’s house in Tennessee, where she had to sleep on the couch when she visited, and it smelled like mothballs and too many cats.
Mavis had a good feeling about this place. She’d only been here one day, and she already had a best friend and her own bureau.
But Mavis’s mother strolled around the room, examining things and grumbling.
“Some people get mansions, and the rest of us get one little ole room.”
She turned on the tiny television on top of one of the bureaus. A soap opera came on. Two women were arguing about a man named Todd.
“At least the TV works,” her mother said. “But a toaster oven would’ve been nice.” She turned the television off and dropped onto the bed. “This might’ve been a mistake.”
Here we go again, Mavis thought.
“Doesn’t seem like a mistake to me,” she said. “We don’t have to pay one penny for this room. And the Tullys’ house is like a castle. It sure beats working at the Early Bird.”
The Early Bird Café was the last place her mother had worked in Hadley, Georgia. She used to come home every afternoon and tell Mavis that those hillbillies who ate there didn’t even know how to spell the word tip, much less leave one. Then she had gotten into an argument with some lady who complained about her fried eggs, so Mr. Harding, who owned the café, told her to leave.
“I couldn’t get out of that dump fast enough,” she had told Mavis when she got home.
Mavis could have made a list of all the good things about her mother working for the Tullys. Like the central air-conditioning and the shiny marble foyer. That huge vase of real flowers on the dining room table. The French doors that opened out to the patio, where the gardener watered the potted ferns on the rock wall along the walkway that led down to the biggest, greenest lawn Mavis had ever seen.
But instead, Mavis said, “Rose is my new best friend.”
Her mother rolled her eyes and flopped back on the bed.
Mavis went down the steps and into the garage to look around. She had never seen such a tidy garage. On shelves along one wall were large plastic trunks labeled with things like OUTDOOR CHRISTMAS LIGHTS and COVERS FOR ADIRONDACK CHAIRS. On another wall, shovels and rakes and hoes hung on pegs. In one corner was a pink bicycle with silver tassels on the handlebars, a red wagon with wooden sides, and a skateboard. Mavis loved riding skateboards. She used to have one at her father’s house in Tennessee. But then her grandmother ran over it with her car and wouldn’t buy her another one.
“When you leave nice things in the driveway, you don’t deserve to have nice things,” she had said in that mean way of hers.
Just then Rose appeared in the doorway. “Do you want to meet Mr. Duffy?” she asked.
“Sure! Can I use this skateboard?”
“Um, I guess.”
“Is it yours?”
Rose nodded. “My uncle AJ gave it to me, but I don’t really know how to use it and my mom doesn’t want me to, anyway.”
“Why not?”
“Too dangerous,” Rose said. “She won’t even let me go barefoot. That’s how you get ringworm.”
“I go barefoot all the time. Do I look like I’ve got ringworm?” She held her arms out for Rose to examine.
Rose shook her head.
Mavis grabbed the skateboard and headed toward the door of the garage. “Well,” she said, “if I were you, I’d do it anyway.”
“Do what?”
“Go barefoot.”
“You would?”
“Sure,” Mavis said. “It’s summer. You’re supposed to go barefoot in the summer.”
But Rose just looked down at her sandals.
Then off they went to the gatehouse, Mavis riding the skateboard and Rose running along behind, her sandals slapping on the asphalt road.
HENRY
Somewhere in the woods, a very skinny dog lay curled up tightly on a bed of rotting leaves. The dog was white with a large brown spot in the shape of Texas on his side. His nose was long and thin. His legs were long and thin. His tail was long and thin.
Suddenly he was awakened by a noise.
Slapping noises and the whirring of wheels on the asphalt road.
The skinny white dog stood up and cocked his head. Maybe he should follow the noises instead of hiding in the woods.
But then again, maybe not.
Maybe he should stay right here.
So he sat in the leaves and let out a tiny whine as the slapping and whirring grew fainter and fainter.
ROSE
“This is Mavis,” Rose said to Mr. Duffy. “Her mother is working for us now, and they moved into the apartment over our garage.”
Before Queenie died, Mr. Duffy would’ve said something like, “Well, hot dang! We should have a cupcake party.” Or, “Glory day, ain’t that nice?”
But today he smiled a half-hearted smile and shuffled over to his beat-up desk chair, where he spent the day opening the gate for cars and trucks to drive in and out of Magnolia Estates. He dropped into the chair with a sigh. “That’s nice,” he said.
“Why is there a gate?” Mavis asked, peering out of the little sliding window over Mr. Duffy’s desk.
“To keep the riffraff out,” he said, giving Rose a wink.
Rose felt her cheeks grow hot. Riffraff was the word her mother used to describe the people who weren’t allowed to come into Magnolia Estates.
“Rose said you do magic tricks.” Mavis pushed at her tangle of curls. “Wanna see one I can do?”
Mr. Duffy nodded, but Rose could tell he didn’t care that much about Mavis’s magic trick.
“I used to be really good at it, but I haven’t practiced in a while,” Mavis said, pulling a penny out of her pocket. She closed her fingers over it and then waved her other hand dramatically and said, “Abracadabra sis boom bah!”
Then she opened her hand, and there in the middle of her palm was the penny. Mavis said, “Dang!” and stamped her foot, making the penny fall out of her hand. It bounced across the linoleum floor and settled right in the middle of Queenie’s bed beside Mr. Duffy’s chair. The fluffy round dog bed with QUEENIE embroidered in blue.
Rose and Mavis and Mr. Duffy stared at the penny.
Rose could practically see Mr. Duffy’s sadness hovering over him and then coming to life right there in the gatehouse. It flopped over the little television on the desk and snaked in and out of the coffee cups and newspapers and wrinkled paperback novels with cowboys on the covers. It climbed over the droopy begonia on the windowsill and wrapped around the coffee maker on the file cabinet. And just when Rose thought that sadness would gobble them up like Godzilla, she hurried over and scooped the penny off Queenie’s bed. Then she stood there, breathing in the thick, awkward silence until Mavis started jibber-jabbering about how she needed to practice that trick and how she did it perfectly in a school talent show last year.
Rose tried to make her eyes stare down at her sandals, but instead they looked over at Queenie’s water bowl in the corner.
Then they looked at Queenie’s leash hanging from a nail by the door.
Then they glanced down under the desk at Queenie’s dirty stuffed monkey with the squeaker torn out.
Don’t look at Mr. Duffy, Rose told herself.
But she did.
Mr. Duffy’s shoulders drooped, and his weathered hands lay limply in his lap. His thin gray hair stuck out every which way under his cap.
Was this sad old man the same one who used to dance around the gatehouse whistling his made-up song, “The Boogie-Woogie Whistle Dance”?
If Rose co
uld do any magic trick in the world, she would bring Queenie back.
She would say, “Abracadabra sis boom bah,” and there Queenie would be, curled up in the middle of her bed with her chin resting on her toy monkey. Then she would sit out in the shade with Rose and Mr. Duffy and wait for them to give her a bite of bologna. She would stick her head out the window of Mr. Duffy’s rusty old truck, her ears flapping in the breeze. She would chase squirrels gathering acorns beside the gatehouse and wag her tail as she watched the kids at the school bus stop.
And she would not be old.
But, of course, Rose couldn’t bring Queenie back, and Mr. Duffy was as sad as a person could be.
MAVIS
Mavis had been told about a gazillion times that she must not go inside the Tullys’ house unless she was invited.
“Just because I’m in there making potato salad to put in a sterling silver bowl doesn’t mean you have a free admission ticket,” her mother said. Then she mumbled something about crystal goblets she had to wash by hand and linen napkins she had to iron and then added, “Well, la-di-da is what I think about that.”
She examined herself in the mirror on the closet door, patting her hair and then tying the apron Mrs. Tully had given her around her waist.
“So,” she said, turning to Mavis, “please don’t do anything to make that woman any more irritable than she already is. We’ve only been here two days, and clearly the honeymoon is over.”
Mavis shrugged and headed outside, where Rose was waiting at the bottom of the apartment steps.
“Where should we go?” Mavis asked. They were having their first club meeting today to talk about how to cheer up Mr. Duffy.
“I know a good spot,” Rose said.
Mavis followed her through the hydrangea garden, up the flagstone path along the side of the house, down the winding driveway, and across the street to a vacant lot.
BUILD YOUR DREAM HOME HERE read the sign in the middle of the lot. Beyond that, at the edge of the woods, a large pine tree had fallen. Rose sat on the tree trunk and said, “Is this a good place for a club meeting?”
Wonderland Page 2
