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!”