Mavis slapped a hand on Rose’s shoulder and said, “Don’t worry. I’ve got good gut feelings. Shoot, one time I told Mama I had a gut feeling there was a black snake in the trunk of her boyfriend’s car, and, sure enough, there “was. So I have this gut feeling that we’re going to find that dog in the woods and that he won’t belong to anyone and that Mr. Duffy will love him and everything will turn out good.”
“I’m not allowed in those woods,” Rose said.
Mavis rolled her eyes. “Oh, good grief, Rose,” she said. “No one’s gonna even know we’re there. Besides, that’s a dumb rule.”
“But what if Amanda’s back there?”
Mavis let out a big, heaving sigh and ran a hand through her hair. “Who cares about Amanda?” she said. “Besides, she won’t even see us. We’ll be sneaky. I’m really good at being sneaky.”
“But if she does see us, she’ll tell her mama and her mama will tell my mama and—”
“Okay,” Mavis said. “If you don’t want to come with me, that’s fine. I’ll go by myself.”
So she headed toward the driveway, walking real slow to give Rose time to chase after her. Sure enough, Rose ran up beside her and said, “Wait! How about if we go this afternoon? Amanda has diving lessons at the pool.”
“Well…” Mavis looked toward the driveway, then back at Rose. “I suppose. Then what are we going to do now?”
“Let’s go see Mr. Duffy.”
“Okay.”
“But don’t say anything about another dog, okay?” Rose said.
“Okay.”
So the two of them headed off up the road toward the gatehouse.
* * *
Mr. Duffy was wearing the same plaid shirt he’d worn yesterday. His baggy pants dragged on the floor as he ambled around the gatehouse, watering the droopy, yellowing begonia.
“I guess I’ve been neglecting this thing a bit,” he said.
Mavis took the clipboard off Mr. Duffy’s desk. “Is this today’s list of visitors?” she asked.
Mr. Duffy shook his head and frowned at some papers on his desk. “That baby they hired to work the night shift went and mixed up all my stuff.” He tossed some papers into a drawer. “Kid’s only got one oar in the water, if you ask me.”
Mavis nodded at some packages in the corner of the room. “What are those?”
“Some packages that came for the Grahams over on Mimosa Drive when they were on vacation last week,” Mr. Duffy said.
“Did you tell them they’re here?” Rose asked.
“Of course I did,” Mr. Duffy snapped. “Believe me, those biggety folks’d be flinging a hissy fit if I hadn’t.” He took a sip of coffee from a mug that had GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS NATIONAL PARK on the side with a picture of a bear.
“But naturally, I didn’t tell them fast enough,” he said. “Everybody’s so all-fired impatient these days. They wanna eat the corn pudding before the corn’s even planted.”
Mavis pointed to the dog bed beside Mr. Duffy’s chair. The fluffy round bed with QUEENIE embroidered in blue. “You ought to give that to the Salvation Army. I bet there’s lots of people who could use it for their dog.”
Mavis jumped when Rose jabbed her with her elbow.
Hard.
“That’s Queenie’s bed,” Rose said.
Mr. Duffy looked at the bed with sad, watery eyes and scratched his chin.
“I reckon I ought to get rid of that thing,” he said. “That do-nothing Jarvis who works the weekend shift keeps grumbling about it.”
“Or you could save it for another dog,” Mavis said.
Rose widened her eyes at Mavis and shook her head.
Uh-oh. Mavis had gone and done it again.
Sorry, she mouthed silently to Rose.
“I have to go,” Rose said and marched out of the gatehouse, her sandals slapping on the linoleum floor.
Then the phone on Mr. Duffy’s desk rang, making him jump. Somebody on the other end of the line was hollering and a car behind the appliance repair truck honked and Mavis decided it was time to go home.
* * *
While Mavis sat on her bed and watched TV in the little apartment over the garage, her mother heated leftover macaroni and cheese in the microwave and complained.
“I don’t know why they have to eat every meal in that dining room. Would it kill them to eat in the kitchen like normal people do?” she said. “But no. I have to schlep that precious china in and out about a hundred times a day.”
Mavis turned the television up a little louder.
“And you’d think maybe they could use a paper napkin once in a while so I wouldn’t have to wash and iron those fancy cloth napkins of theirs.” She wrote a big T in the air with a finger and added, “Monogrammed, of course.”
She scooped macaroni and cheese onto a paper plate and brought it to Mavis.
“Tomorrow I’m supposed to make melon balls,” she said. “Who in the world has even heard of melon balls?”
Then she jerked open the tiny window over the sink and lit a cigarette.
“This might’ve been a big mistake, May May,” she said after blowing a stream of smoke through the window screen. “Oh, and you should’ve heard her when I used a dust rag on that ole painting in the library,” she went on. “You’d’ve thought that ugly thing was the Mona Lisa or something.”
She stubbed her cigarette out in the sink. “Library,” she said, rolling her eyes, and then let out a little pfft. “I’m telling you, May May, that woman’s got her nose so far up in the air she’s gonna drown in a rainstorm.”
She flopped down on the bed and draped an arm over her eyes. “The best part of the day is taking the garbage out when Monroe Tucker is in the garden,” she said. “He’s a bit of a looker, don’t you think, May?”
But Mavis didn’t answer.
She was too busy thinking.
She was thinking about Rose, who was mad at her for mentioning getting another dog to Mr. Duffy when she had promised she wouldn’t.
She was thinking about why she was so bad at being a best friend.
And she was thinking about how she was going to find that dog, Henry.