MELBA’S SPEAKING UP IN favor of Miss Toonie’s hot fudge sundaes changed things at the store.
In the days that followed, Miss Toonie wasn’t quite so grumpy. Once in a while she let Melba take the cats for walks, a few at a time. And she taught her how to sort the new magazines and newspapers that were delivered in bundles to the store. She showed her how to make a hot fudge sundae, too, and how to twist the whipped cream can at such an angle—and release the button at the same time—that a dashing flourish of cream stood up straight on top, all ready to be crowned by the cherry.
Meanwhile, Melba was finding out that she didn’t have to blush and gulp whenever she wanted to ask Miss Toonie a question. And she certainly didn’t have to worry about talking to the cats, which she did a lot of.
In fact, those afternoons at the store became happier and happier and longer and longer until Melba was spending hardly any time thinking in her room. Melba’s mother noticed.
“You’ve found a friend?” she asked hopefully.
“Well, sort of,” answered Melba, who was not sure, even now, that Miss Toonie could be counted as a friend.
“It’s that old grouch down at Jiggs’ Drug Store,” volunteered Victor, who had somehow found out. “Everybody else hates her.”
“That’s because nobody else knows her very well,” said Melba stoutly, but then she blushed so hard that her mother had to tell Victor to hush up and let people make friends where they found them.
So Melba kept on going to Jiggs’, and business being worse than usual there, she and Miss Toonie mostly had the place to themselves. Except for Mr. Jiggs, of course, whose face, if they had noticed it, was turning yellower and meaner by the hour. Miss Toonie was right. Something more than usual was bothering the old man. Now he had taken to pacing up and down the back room, startling the cats at his heels with sudden turns and swerves. His tables were covered with open account books. Mr. Jiggs paced and figured and paced again. Finally, one dark morning while the cats looked on reproachfully, he brought his fist down in the middle of one particularly dilapidated book and stalked out to the soda fountain counter to announce the bad news.
“Closing down!” shrieked Miss Toonie. “But why?”
“Why do you think!” he roared. Then he disappeared into the back room again, took up his guitar, and struck dire chords.
In shock, Melba asked the same question that afternoon.
“But why? It’s so nice here!” By then Miss Toonie had composed herself. She answered in her snappiest voice.
“Well! Why do you think? I suppose you think you’ve been supporting the store on your measly one sundae a day. Well! You haven’t been! Jiggs has gone broke. He’s selling out.”
“But I thought you hated having customers in the store!” cried Melba.
Miss Toonie ignored her. “There’s to be a dry cleaning establishment taking over next week,” she fumed. “Think of it! Right here where I’m standing now will be a rack of plastic-covered clothes whose only aim in life is to get picked up on time!”
Miss Toonie sniffed such a fierce, sad sniff that her whiskers stood up on end.
Melba stood up too, scattering cats. Her glasses slid sideways.
“You can’t sell out,” she pleaded in a scared voice. “Jiggs’ Drug Store has always been here. What would people do without
Jiggs’?”
“Don’t talk to me about it,” said Miss Toonie. “Talk to him!” She skewed her thumb in the direction of the back room. “And as for what people will do, well, they’ll do what they do now, anyway. They’ll go to the Super Queen. No one will even notice we’ve folded. You’ll see.”
“I’ll notice!” exclaimed Melba, blushing horribly. “And what about the cats? You can’t take them home with you, you said it yourself.”
Miss Toonie looked at the counter.
“Very true,” she agreed. “Poor cats. They will, I suppose, simply have to disperse.”
“No, they won’t! They won’t go! These cats love you. They’re your family, remember?”
“Cats are cats,” said Miss Toonie with a brave wave of her hand. “They’ll go. They’ll go off to somebody else who can feed them.” She groped for her handkerchief and made a last desperate effort to look fierce behind it.
Now Melba shut her lips, and looked down at a worn place under the counter where hundreds of thoughtless feet had scraped and gouged the brittle wood. Cats had been there, too. Fuzzy strands of cat fur were snagged on splinters.
“He can’t do this to you!”
“He can do it,” answered Miss Toonie. “It’s his store.”
“No, it isn’t,” said Melba, low and threatening as a cornered cat’s growl. But her eyes were already filled up with tears. In a minute, she knew, she would have to run away to hide them. That made her angrier, because how many times can you pinch people like Irma Herring up in your room without realizing it doesn’t prove a thing? They don’t know the difference. They go on talking or eating dinner or whatever they are doing in real life and they don’t feel the tiniest prick of outrage, not the lightest drop of a tear. They go on, thought Melba, turning her head to look, playing a guitar as if nothing terrible were happening at all.
Suddenly, Melba was running, but it wasn’t out the front door. She was rounding the entrance into the back room, and even before she got there she was yelling at Mr. Jiggs.
“You spineless man!” she yelled, giving him, at last, a solid dose of his own medicine. “How can you sit here playing that guitar while our store goes down the drain? There are people who depend on this store and you’re not even trying to save it. You don’t even care!”
Then, before Mr. Jiggs, staggering up from his chair, could throw her out, shy Melba Morris stamped out of the store herself, right past Miss Toonie and all the cats, everybody staring.