“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 could 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.