Mavis looked around. Clumps of blackberry bushes and wildflowers were peppered among the weeds and large patches of dry red dirt. Not the best place for a club meeting, but maybe she could find something better later.
“I guess so,” she said.
Then she sat on the log next to Rose and said, “I’ll be president and you be vice president.”
Rose nodded.
Then they talked about things they could do for Mr. Duffy.
Decorate the gatehouse with crepe-paper streamers.
Make cupcakes with sprinkles.
Twirl batons.
“What’re y’all doing?”
Mavis looked up to see a girl with hair the color of cantaloupe skipping toward them.
“Nothing,” Rose said, crossing her arms and turning red in the face.
“Who are you?” Mavis asked the girl.
“Amanda Simm.” The girl tossed her cantaloupe hair over her shoulder and repeated, “What’re y’all doing?”
“Nothing,” Rose said again.
“Having a club meeting,” Mavis said.
“What kind of club?”
“A Best Friends Club. Want to join?”
Then she felt the sharp jab of Rose’s elbow in her side.
Amanda’s eyebrows arched up. “Do you live in Magnolia Estates?” she asked, plopping down on the tree trunk next to Mavis. Her skin was pale and covered with freckles, as if someone had sprinkled cinnamon on her.
Mavis told Amanda about the little apartment over Rose’s garage that she had moved into two days ago.
“And y’all are already best friends?”
“Yep,” Mavis said. “Right, Rose?”
Rose nodded.
“Wanna join our club?” Mavis asked Amanda again.
Then she felt another sharp jab of Rose’s elbow in her side.
“No, thanks,” Amanda said.
“Why not?”
Then this freckled girl named Amanda told Mavis about the friends she had. Girls who lived in the big houses in Magnolia Estates and took gymnastics lessons and were on the swim team. She showed Mavis her beaded bracelet she had made at a sleepover the night before and told her about the tennis camp she was going to later in the summer.
“All the girls in Magnolia Estates are going,” she said. Then she glanced over at Rose and added, “Well, almost all.”
Mavis felt a twinge of envy. She had been so happy to have one friend. Imagine having as many as Amanda did. Maybe if her mother would stay in Landry long enough, she could.
“What do you even do in your club, anyway?” Amanda asked.
“Well, right now we’re trying to think of ways to cheer up Mr. Duffy,” Mavis said. “Right, Rose?”
Amanda rolled her eyes. “Oh, brother,” she said. “He’s crazy.”
Suddenly Rose jumped up, stalked across the vacant lot, and marched up the road toward her house, leaving Mavis staring gape-mouthed after her on the log beside Amanda.
ROSE
Rose was not one to get mad very often.
Especially at her best friend.
Not that she’d ever really had a best friend.
Besides Ida Scoggins.
And she had never gotten mad at Ida Scoggins.
But now she was mad at Mavis for asking Amanda to join their club yesterday. She was also mad at Amanda for saying that mean thing about Mr. Duffy.
Rose’s anger made her feel hot and heavy and dark and bad.
Yesterday Mavis had been her best friend, and now she was someone who wanted Amanda Simm to be in their Best Friends Club.
Why would Mavis want that?
It was true that Mavis didn’t know about Amanda sticking gum in Rose’s hair at church one time. On purpose. And she didn’t know that Amanda had told some kids at school that Rose used to wet the bed. Mavis didn’t know that she and Amanda used to be friends, but now Amanda and those other girls whispered to one another right in front of her.
But then, maybe Mavis didn’t really care about the club as much as Rose had thought she did.
Maybe Mavis would rather go to the mall with Amanda.
Well, that was fine. Rose would stay up here in her bedroom.
She arranged her books in alphabetical order by author.
She cut pictures of dogs out of magazines and glued them into a spiral notebook.
She drew a hummingbird on her wrist with a pen and then tried to wipe it off, leaving a big blue smudge.
Once or twice, she went to the window and pressed her face against the glass to see if Mavis was in the yard. She tried to see the vacant lot across the street, but the roof of the front porch was in the way.
She heard the steady hum of the vacuum cleaner downstairs.
Rose jumped when her mother stepped into her room and said, “For heaven’s sake, Rose, what are you doing up here?”
“Nothing.”
“Then go find something to do. Miss Jeeter needs to get in here.”
“There isn’t anything to do,” Rose said. The very instant that those words came out of her mouth, Rose wanted to take them back.
Gather them up like butterflies in a net.
But it was too late.
Now her mother was telling her all the things there were to do, starting with playing with Amanda Simm and ending with going up the street to see the new garden made by the Junior Garden Club.
Rose plodded downstairs and out the front door. When she stepped out of the air-conditioned foyer and onto the porch, the Alabama heat felt thick and heavy. She gave Pete and Larry each a pat on the head and made her way slowly to the end of the driveway.
She needed to talk to Mr. Duffy.
But how was she going to get past the vacant lot where Mavis and Amanda were probably having a Best Friends Club meeting? Or maybe they were doing gymnastics in Amanda’s front yard with some other girls from Magnolia Estates.
And even if she made it to the gatehouse without them seeing her, Mr. Duffy might not feel like talking to her. He might not say, “Hey, Rose Petal!” or, “What’s shakin’, bacon?” He might not give her butterscotch Life Savers or make up another funny story about how he lost the tip of his finger or any of the other things he always did that made her feel better no matter what.
Rose went back to the front porch and sat on the steps between Pete and Larry. She rested her chin on her knees and closed her eyes and let misery snuggle up beside her. She knew what her mother would say if she saw her sitting here.
“Stop moping, Rose,” she would say.
But Rose didn’t care.
She moped.
And while she moped, a dragonfly flitted among the flowers in the garden beside the screened porch. The neighbor’s fat, grumpy cat sauntered across the lawn. And from somewhere in the woods behind the houses across the street came the loud and mournful howl of a dog.
HENRY
Somewhere in the woods, someone reached a freckled arm through a wrought-iron fence.
The dog backed away, his heart racing.
Then that same someone whispered to him.
Soothing words that made his racing heart settle down.
The whisper was calling him Henry, a name the dog had never heard before.
Trying to coax him out of the bushes.
Telling him everything would be okay.
But when that whispering someone reached toward the bushes and tried to touch him, he turned and ran deeper into the woods.
MAVIS
When Rose had jumped off the log and stormed away up the street, not even stopping when Mavis called her name, Amanda had laughed.
She told Mavis that Rose acted like a baby and wouldn’t go to sleepovers. She told her that Mr. Duffy couldn’t remember anybody’s name and fell asleep in the gatehouse, and lots of people in Magnolia Estates were not very happy about that. Then Amanda had disappeared up the side of the road, leaving Mavis sitting alone on the tree trunk.
That night, Mavis sat in the little apartment over the gara
ge feeling sorry for herself while her mother complained about having to wash and iron curtains.
“Who in the world even does that?” her mother said, rummaging through her purse for another piece of gum.
Mavis wanted to tell her mother how bad she was feeling about Rose, but she didn’t. Her mother was liable to say something mean about Rose. So she just sat there, feeling sorrier by the minute. She’d only been in Landry for three days, and already her new best friend was mad at her.
* * *
The next day, Mavis fixed herself half a peanut butter sandwich and ran down the apartment steps and around front, where Rose was sitting on the porch between those concrete lions.
“Hey,” she called to Rose.
Rose stared at the ground and mumbled a very quiet “Hey.”
Mavis ran over and sat on the porch next to her. “Want some of my sandwich?” she asked.
Rose looked a little surprised and shrugged.
“What’s the matter?” Mavis said. “How come you left the club meeting?”
Rose brushed something invisible off her shorts and shrugged again.
“Because of Amanda, right?” Mavis said.
“Maybe.”
Mavis flapped a hand at her. “She can’t be in our club.”
Rose’s head shot up. “She can’t?”
“Nope.”
“How come?”
“Because she’s mean.”
Rose perked up. “Really?”
Mavis nodded. “She said mean things about you and Mr. Duffy after you left.”
“She did?” Rose’s shoulders slumped.
Mavis’s mind raced. Maybe she shouldn’t have said that.
“Let’s go fix some lunch for Mr. Duffy,” she said. “Come on.”
Then she ran off up the flagstone path along the side of the house, through the hydrangea garden, up the Tullys’ back steps, and right on into their kitchen, with Rose running behind her.
When Mavis burst into the kitchen, her mother looked up from the butcher-block island with shiny copper pots hanging above it.
“Mavis!” she said. “What in the world?”
She had been chopping boiled eggs, and now she began to rant at Mavis about the rules she had already forgotten while she waved the knife around in the air, sending pieces of egg flying in every direction.
“We’re going to take lunch up to Mr. Duffy,” Mavis said.
“No, ma’am,” her mother said. “You are not.”
Mavis stomped her foot and was preparing to go on a tirade when Mrs. Tully walked into the kitchen. When she saw Mavis, she said, “Oh, my, well…”
“She was just leaving,” Miss Jeeter said, glaring at Mavis.
“When will the egg salad be ready?” Mrs. Tully asked. “I have guests coming any minute now.” Then she turned to Mavis and said, “Rose needs to have her lunch now.”
Then a most surprising thing happened.
Rose lifted her chin and said, “Mavis and I are taking lunch up to Mr. Duffy.”
But then she added a quick “Okay?”
Mavis watched in delight as Rose didn’t wait for an answer. She scurried around the kitchen grabbing bread and cheese and chips while her mother’s face turned red with disapproval.
Mavis’s mother went back to chopping egg salad, slamming the knife hard against the butcher block.
Bang
Bang
Bang
Then Rose and Mavis gathered everything into a grocery bag and hurried out the door.
ROSE
When they got to the gatehouse, Mr. Duffy was in his desk chair snoring away. Rose tapped him lightly on the shoulder. His eyes popped open, and he jumped right up out of the chair.
“Jupiter, Mars, and Pluto, Rose!” he said, clutching his heart. “You’re gonna scare me right into my grave.”
Rose felt her cheeks burn, and she looked down at Mr. Duffy’s scuffed-up brown shoes.
“Sorry,” she said. Then she held up the grocery bag. “We figured we could have lunch together. Maybe outside.”
Mr. Duffy glanced toward the gatehouse door, where a light summer breeze rustled the leaves of a mimosa tree. Then he sank back into the desk chair. “Well, that’s darn nice of y’all,” he said. “But I better stay in here. I got myself into some hot water the other day when I stepped outside for one gol-dern minute and didn’t hear Mrs. Larson’s sister buzzing away on that dang buzzer.” He took his cap off and rubbed a hand over the top of his bald head. “Besides,” he added, “I don’t have much of an appetite these days.”
Rose’s heart sank. Mr. Duffy always had an appetite. She had seen him eat a whole jar of bread-and-butter pickles followed by a meat loaf sandwich and banana pudding and then still eat the leftover hushpuppies she had brought him. When her mother had ladies over for lunch, Rose often gathered cucumber sandwiches and little tea cakes with sugary violets on top when her mother wasn’t looking. Then she would laugh and laugh when Mr. Duffy pretended he was Reynolds J. Snootbottom III, Mayor of the World, popping them into his mouth one by one and holding his pinkie in the air when he drank tea from an invisible cup.
“Then we’ll just eat ours in here,” Mavis said, opening the grocery bag. But as she was about to reach inside, she suddenly pointed at some fishing gear propped in the corner of the gatehouse and said, “Hey, Mr. Duffy, you going fishing?”
Rose was surprised when she saw the fishing gear. Mr. Duffy lived in a trailer beside a lake on the outskirts of town. Nearly every day, he and Queenie had gone fishing. He almost never caught anything, but he always seemed to enjoy it.
Why was his fishing gear here?
Mr. Duffy looked sadly at the poles and tackle box and said, “Naw. I’m lending those to Fergus Mason for a while. He’s coming to pick ’em up when he gets off work.”
That meant Mr. Duffy wasn’t fishing.
Definitely not a good sign.
Rose thought and thought. What was something he might like to do? Suddenly she remembered a game they used to play on rainy days.
“Wanna play the bottle cap game?” she said, hurrying to the shelf over the desk and taking down a shoe box full of bottle caps.
Mr. Duffy had painted a circle on the floor on one side of the gatehouse and taught her how to play a game tossing bottle caps into the circle from the other side of the room. They had played about a million times, and Mr. Duffy had made a trophy out of tin cans and duct tape and told her she was the champion, even though she wasn’t very good at it.
“You teach Mavis how to play,” Mr. Duffy said. “I’ll watch.”
Rose didn’t like that idea much, but she explained the game to Mavis, who dashed over to get the bottle caps and began tossing them toward the circle.
“I’ll be good at this game,” she said.
Sure enough, nearly every bottle cap landed inside the circle.
“Wanna keep score?” Rose asked Mr. Duffy.
But he shook his head and said, “Naw.”
So Rose and Mavis played while he stared forlornly out the window, looking like he was a million miles away.
Every once in a while, a car needed to be let in. Mr. Duffy checked his clipboard to see if it was okay for him to open the gate. If the residents of Magnolia Estates were expecting visitors, they called Mr. Duffy and had him put the visitors’ names on a list on his clipboard.
Just about the time that Rose and Mavis were getting tired of playing the bottle cap game, a big fancy car with three ladies inside pulled up to the gatehouse. The lady driving rolled down her window and said, “Inez Latham and party to see Charlotte Prescott.”
Mr. Duffy put on his reading glasses and squinted down at the clipboard. “Sorry,” he said. “Not on the list.”
And then a big hullabaloo started. The lady got mad, and Mr. Duffy phoned Charlotte Prescott, and the ladies in the car were saying how ridiculous this was and did they look like burglars.
Rose could hear Mrs. Prescott right through the telephone from clear on
the other side of the gatehouse.
“I did give you those names!”
“I told you about the bridal shower!”
“For heaven’s sake, Mr. Duffy!”
All the while, Mr. Duffy nodded and said “Yes, ma’am” and “No, ma’am” and “Sorry, ma’am.” And then he opened the gate, and, after one last mumble of “Outrageous,” Inez Latham drove into Magnolia Estates.
Mr. Duffy shook his head. “I’m losing my mojo, y’all,” he said.
“What’s mojo?” Rose asked.
“It means, like, your charm, right, Mr. Duffy?” Mavis piped in. “My mom used to use it to get guys to move furniture and stuff. ‘I’m using my mojo, May May,’ she says.”
Mr. Duffy chuckled, and Rose’s heart lifted a little.
That was a start, wasn’t it?
A chuckle?
But then everything changed when Mavis snapped her fingers and said, “I know what you need! You need to get yourself another dog!”
MAVIS
Rose turned white as a ghost, and her eyes grew wide.
Mr. Duffy’s face turned as gray as his hair, and he slumped farther down in the chair until it seemed like he might slide right out of it and onto the floor.
Mavis looked from Rose to Mr. Duffy and back to Rose again.
“What?” she said.
Silence.
Rose’s chin began to quiver.
“What’s the matter?” Mavis asked.
“No more dogs for me,” Mr. Duffy said.
“How come?”
“Too old.”
“Too old?” Mavis looked at Rose, who shook her head the tiniest bit, as if sending a signal.
“Too old,” Mr. Duffy repeated.
“That’s crazy,” Mavis said.
Now Rose’s head shook faster, and Mavis understood. Rose didn’t want her talking to Mr. Duffy about getting a new dog. But Mavis had never been one to take no so easily. She hurried over to Mr. Duffy, slumped down and miserable-looking in his chair. Then she put both hands on the arms of the chair and said, “Nobody’s ever too old to get a dog.”
Wonderland Page 3
