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.”
Mr. Duffy looked up at her from under his bushy eyebrows and said, “I got nothing left in me to give a dog. Look at me. My fingers are all whomper-jawed with arthritis. I practically gotta stick my finger in a light socket every morning to start my heart pumping enough to get out of bed.”
He took his baseball cap off and rubbed the top of his head. “Shoot,” he said, “even my old gray hair got the heck out of Dodge.” He lowered his head so Mavis could see how shiny and bald the top of it was.
“Nope,” he said. “Ain’t no dog wanna spend a life with an old man crazy as a bullbat and ugly as a mud dauber. And if that ain’t enough, I’m so poor I can’t afford to pay attention. Nope. No dog for me.”
Mavis stomped a foot and said a little louder than she’d meant to, “Well, that’s about the sorriest thing I ever heard. There’s all kinda dogs out there needing somebody to give ’em a home and love ’em. Dogs don’t care about bald heads or money or any of that stuff.”
Mr. Duffy put his cap back on and picked up his clipboard. “Shoot, before you know it, Saint Peter’s name’s gonna be on this list, ’cause he’s coming to get me. Maybe I can be the keeper of the pearly gates.” He winked at Mavis. “Assuming I’m going to heaven, but that might be questionable.”
Then he looked up at the ceiling and said, “Keep the coffee warm up there, Edna. I’ll be joining you soon.”
“Who’s Edna?” Mavis asked.
“My wife. So sweet she could give you a toothache. Been gone six years, three months, one week, two days, eight hours and”—he pulled out a pocket watch and squinted at it—“twenty-four minutes.”
Then he told Mavis about Edna. The pound cake she made and the dresses she sewed and how she called him Mr. James Earl Duffy when she was mad, which wasn’t very often.
“If I had a dollar for every time I met another gal as sweet as Edna, I’d be flat busted broke,” he said. “Now she’s up there in heaven with my precious old Queenie. The two of them left me down here lonely as a pine tree in a parking lot.”
“That’s why you need another dog,” Mavis said. “Right, Rose?”
But instead of helping her convince Mr. Duffy that he needed another dog, Rose sat there in a pool of pity, looking weepy-eyed and quivery-chinned.
“Well, you two just beat all,” Mavis said.
“Aw now, Mavis,” Mr. Duffy said. “Don’t go gettin’ your knickers in a knot. Truth of the matter is, this old sorry life of mine is all vines and no taters, and even my vines aren’t looking too good anymore. Ain’t a dog on this earth needs a pitiful geezer like me.”
Rose sniffed and swiped at her cheeks while Mavis stomped around the gatehouse going on and on about how dogs make things better and they only want a little love and a piece of chicken once in a while.
“A dog could put taters on your vines,” she said, trying her best to keep her irritation from making her holler.
At that, Mr. Duffy began to laugh. It started as a weak smile that turned into a rattly chuckle that turned into a laugh that ended up as a wheezy cough.
He wiped his eyes with a handkerchief, pushed himself up out of his chair, and put his arm around Rose. “What you so down and out about, Rosie?” he said.
Then, much to Mavis’s surprise, Rose stood up and began an honest-to-goodness rant.
“I wish you wouldn’t talk about Saint Peter and the pearly gates,” Rose said in a loud, very un-Rose-like voice. “It scares me when you tell Edna to keep the coffee warm,” she went on.
Mr. Duffy kind of stuttered, saying, “Well … but … I…”
Then Rose plopped down into Mr. Duffy’s desk chair, crossed her arms, and stared at the floor. “I don’t even know what that vines-and-taters thing means, but I wish you wouldn’t say it,” she muttered.
Mavis had an overwhelming urge to strut right over to Rose and give her a high five. But she stayed still while Mr. Duffy said he was sorry and called her “Rose Petal” and promised he wouldn’t tell Edna to keep the coffee warm anymore.
And then a funny thing happened. The irritation that Mavis had felt earlier went marching out the door, and jealousy came slithering in, like a snake in the grass. It wrapped itself around her heart and gave it a squeeze when she saw what good friends Rose and Mr. Duffy were and how much they cared about each other’s feelings.
But, Mavis being Mavis, she pushed that jealousy aside and said, “Y’all wanna play the bottle cap game?”