Women!
Rosalie’s gone.
Uncle Dock came back from his walk alone and looking grim. We pounded him with questions, wanting to know where Rosalie was.
“Gone,” he said.
“Gone?” Sophie said. “She can’t be gone. She just got here—”
“Gone,” Uncle Dock repeated. “Gone, gone, gone.”
Then everyone was asking questions a mile a minute, wanting to know where she went and why she went and if she was coming back.
Uncle Dock said, “She had some plans she couldn’t change. She’s leaving tomorrow for Spain.”
Then Sophie said, “Go get her!” and Brian said, “Stop her!”
Uncle Dock shrugged. “She’s got a mind of her own, that Rosalie.”
Brian and Sophie kept saying “Go get her!” and then, I don’t know where this came from, but I said, “Why didn’t you ask her to marry you or something?”
“I did,” Uncle Dock said.
“Way to go, Dock,” Uncle Mo said.
I said, “So what did she say? Why did she go?”
“Like I said, she has some plans.”
“But what did she say about the getting married part?” I asked.
Uncle Dock stood there tossing a lone green apple up and down with one hand. “She said it was too soon—”
“Too soon?” Sophie said. “You’ve been waiting your whole life. You’ve been pining away—”
“Shoot,” Uncle Dock said. “Can’t a guy have any secrets around here?”
Then somebody said maybe Rosalie would change her mind or maybe she would go finish her plans and come back, and then Sophie said, “If you two ever do get married, you’re not going to make her do all the housework and stuff, are you?”
Uncle Stew, who had joined us by then, said, “Okay, enough of this chatter. What are we going to do about the looking-after-Bompie question?”
“I may have solved that one,” Uncle Dock said.
“How?” Uncle Stew said.
“I’m going to stay here,” Uncle Dock said. “I’ll stay here in England. I’ll look after him.”
Everyone else seemed relieved and seemed to think it was a good solution. Later, though, when Brian and Sophie and I were packing up our things, Brian said, “I think it’s sad. Uncle Dock just found Rosalie, and then he loses her again. And now he’s going to give up everything and stay here to take care of an old man.”
I told him that Bompie wasn’t just an old man, that he was Uncle Dock’s father.
And then Sophie started wondering if maybe Rosalie would change her mind someday, and if Bompie might get better, and then I said maybe we could visit them in England, like in the summers, and then Sophie said, “And maybe we could all take another trip on The Wanderer.”
“Cool,” I said. “We’ll all take a trip and we’ll sail really far—”
“Not too far,” Brian said. “Not too soon.”
And Sophie said that if Rosalie wasn’t back by then, we could all go searching for Rosalie, oh, Rosalie!