Rose and Mavis tagged along while Mrs. Tully showed Miss Jeeter around the house. Rose couldn’t help but notice her mother’s face each time Miss Jeeter piped in with a comment.
“Dang!” Miss Jeeter said, motioning at silver trays and pitchers and bowls on the pantry shelf. “That’s a lot of polishing!”
“You gotta be a rocket scientist to figure that thing out,” she said, pointing to the knobs on the gas stove. “But I’ll get it,” she added quickly.
“Check this out, May May!” She tugged on Mavis’s arm. “A laundry chute!”
Rose could tell her mother was getting irked. That was a word she used often at the supper table when she told Rose’s father about her day. Someone had almost always irked her.
So Rose asked Mavis if she’d like to go upstairs to her bedroom.
“Sure!” Mavis said.
Rose led Mavis up the winding staircase and down the hall to her room.
“Holy cannoli!” Mavis said as she flopped onto Rose’s bed. “A canopy!”
Then she jumped up and ran over to Rose’s closet and began to count the dresses, ending with a loud “Seventeen!” and making bug eyes at Rose.
Mavis darted around the room, touching and counting and thwacking her forehead and saying “holy cannoli” a few more times.
When the sound of Miss Jeeter’s voice echoed up the staircase from the dining room and twined around with Mavis’s voice there in her bedroom, Rose suddenly realized how quiet their house usually was.
It was especially quiet since her sister, Grace, had gone away to college last fall. Sometimes Rose went into Grace’s room to touch her things. The white leather jewelry box with gold initials. The ceramic cat with a ribbon for a collar. The flower vase filled with bird feathers.
It was boring at home without Grace, who was always so surprising. She would up and do the most unexpected things, like buy a ratty old motorbike with her babysitting money or roller-skate in the foyer when their mother’s garden club was there. Once she had brought a boy named Rocky home for supper without even asking. She just sat right down at the dining room table and said, “Pass the chicken,” without even introducing him. He had talked about deer hunting the whole time and given Mrs. Tully a headache.
Before Grace left for college, she’d given Rose the shiny silver dollar she had found on the beach in Mobile one summer. Was there anyone else in the whole world who had found a silver dollar on the beach? Rose didn’t think so.
Grace had put the coin in Rose’s palm and closed her fingers over it. “Hold down the fort, Rosie,” she had said.
When Grace finally came home to visit at Thanksgiving, she had a hummingbird tattoo on her wrist. Rose thought it was beautiful, but her parents didn’t. Grace had hurried back to school in a huff, and now she was spending the summer with her roommate’s family on a lake in Maine. Rose was trying to hold down the fort, but it sure was hard without Grace.
“So,” Mavis said as she inspected Rose’s books on the shelf under the window seat, “since we’re best friends, we should have a club.”
A club?
Rose had never been in a club before, unless you counted the Junior Garden Club her mother had made her join in third grade. But she hadn’t liked that club very much and had disappointed her mother when she dropped out after only a few meetings.
“What kind of club?” she asked.
“You know, like a Best Friends Club,” Mavis said as she examined Rose’s collection of china horses.
“Oh. Okay.” Rose wasn’t too sure about letting Mavis handle her china horses, but she didn’t say anything. Instead she said, “What will we do in the club?”
Mavis moved on to Rose’s stuffed animals in the doll bed. Rose hoped Mavis didn’t think the doll bed was too babyish like Amanda did. She was relieved when Mavis just ran her hand over each stuffed animal and then gave the doll bed a little pat of approval.
“Well, for starters,” Mavis said, “we can think of ways to cheer up Mr. Duffy.”
“Okay.”
Rose felt a tingle of excitement.
Suddenly things seemed a lot better in Magnolia Estates.