Flora

“Oh, please, call me Flora. And whatever I can do to help you, just let me know. I’m Helen’s caretaker for the summer while her father’s away, but I’ve got plenty of free time for housework.”

“Oh, my routine more or less runs me,” said Mrs. Jones. “I would get all turned around if someone was to try to help. I do the downstairs in the morning, and then if it’s warm like today I eat my lunch upstairs on the south porch, and in the afternoon I turn out the upstairs rooms.”

“Well,” said Flora, “in that case, I guess I’ll go up and work on some lesson plans. I start teaching school in the fall. I’m in the Willow Fanning room.”

“Yes, ma’am, I know. I do that room first, after I’ve swept the upstairs porches.”

“Well, don’t worry, I’ll make myself scarce. I have some shelf reorganizing I want to do in the kitchen. But I already went and stripped my bed for you.”

“That was thoughtful, but there was no need.”

I lurked about while Mrs. Jones scrubbed the kitchen floor on her knees and went over her life. I tried some more of my library book, but my own life seemed more urgent and mysterious than the girl researching someone else’s old house. I walked around our house, forcing myself to acknowledge more signs of decay, and fantasized that we would somehow come into money and make everything nice again. I heard my father forbidding me to risk becoming a woman with the shrunken legs of a child, and pictured Brian Beale’s ten-year-old legs withering this very minute beneath the covers of his hospital bed. I knew I should be writing a note to him in time for postman to take it away, but couldn’t make myself do it. I thought of Finn, with his pointy features and carrot crew cut, rushing over to the lonely old lady on his motorcycle whenever she remembered something she’d forgotten to order. He’d roar up in front of her modest little house that didn’t have a refrigerator and tell her it was no trouble “a- tall.” I prepared some interesting things I would say to him next time—if I could get them in before Flora interrupted and brought things down to her level.

I materialized when I heard Mrs. Jones starting on my grandmother’s room.

“I can still feel her in here,” said Mrs. Jones, holding her feather duster aloft in front of the blinds like a conductor raising his baton.

“I had this dream.” I got right to the point. “She told me she wanted me to move into this room. She said you would understand.”

Mrs. Jones clasped the duster to her breast. “She mentioned me?”

“She said, ‘Mrs. Jones respects dreams and is partial to the supernatural.’ Those were her exact words.”

“Dear me if that doesn’t sound just like her. The dead can speak to you anytime they like, whether you’re awake or asleep. Whether you listen or not is up to you.”

“She said I was to ask you to make up her room for me.”

“Did she say we should empty out drawers, or what?”

I considered a moment. “No, just make up the bed. I’ll go through her things myself.”

“That’s what I did with Rosemary’s things. I went through them a little at a time and let them bring her back.”

“You know, I think I am growing up,” I said.

“Well, surely you are.” Mrs. Jones had laid aside her duster and started on the bed, as though being guided by Nonie.

“No, I mean I’m understanding things this summer that I couldn’t understand even this past winter.”

“Like what, dear?”

“Well, like Rosemary’s diphtheria and my mother’s parents in the flu epidemic, all in the same year. Before, I just couldn’t get my mind around it. Your seven-year-old daughter and those people from such a long time ago. It was the same year, 1918, but I just couldn’t see how they could all fit into that same time period.”

“That’s the thing about the dead,” observed Mrs. Jones happily, lifting up the mattress pad and giving it a vigorous shake. “They make you understand that time isn’t as simple as you thought.”

She let me help make up the bed. “It’s the right thing that you should have this room,” she said. “You’re the lady of the house now.”

“But I’m not going to tell Flora about the dream.” Here I had to remind myself that Nonie had considered the whole truth too much even for Mrs. Jones. Even I had almost forgotten that Nonie’s voice in the garage told me to say the instructions came to me in a dream.

“Well, that’s up to you, dear.”

“Flora is very—” I hovered between wanting to betray and wanting to appear loyal. “I’m not sure she’d be able to understand. I’m just going to tell her moving in here was something I decided to do and leave it at that.”

“Well, like I said,” Mrs. Jones reiterated, “you’re the lady of the house now.”

AT SUPPER I let Flora go on about all she’d accomplished while Mrs. Jones had been cleaning the house. In the morning she’d answered Juliet Parker’s letter and walked it down to the box just in time for the mailman, which made me feel guilty because I hadn’t written my note to Brian. Then she’d worked up some fifth-grade geography lesson plans and created a behavior chart for her class: “You know: neatness, courtesy, self- control, so they’ll know what I expect from them.”

In the afternoon she had reorganized the cupboard shelves and the refrigerator. “I kept thinking how that nice delivery boy said so many people still don’t have them and I felt positively luxurious.”

“His name is Finn.”

“Is that his first name or his last?”

“He just said Finn. He was in the war until his lung collapsed, so he’s not exactly a boy anymore.”

“You two really had a conversation, didn’t you? I heard you talking a lot with Mrs. Jones, too. You miss your friends, don’t you, honey?”

“Mrs. Jones was helping me move into my grandmother’s room.”

“Oh, well, goodness, that’s a change.” I could see she was taken aback.

“It’s something I decided to do,” I said. I quoted the voice in the garage: “It was her place and now it will be my place.”

“It certainly is a nice big room,” said Flora, “if you’re sure it won’t make you sad.”

“I’m sad already, so I might as well be sad in there.”

I COULD HARDLY wait to go to bed that night, but there were amenities to be gotten through first. Flora said I wasn’t getting enough exercise for a young person, so after supper while it was still quite light we pitched into the rutty driveway, giggling and steadying each other, and walked down to the hairpin curve on Sunset Drive where the thick woods sloped off to the right and my grandfather’s shortcut reproached us with its unsightly neglect. “Wouldn’t it be great if we could repair the path, somehow,” said Flora, “and surprise your father when he gets back. Only I wouldn’t know where to begin, would you?”

“You’d have to cut down years of overgrowth,” I said. “It would take really serious tools. And the handrails are all rotted, they’re dangerous even to touch. And someone could fall into that crater and be badly hurt. It would have to be filled in and for that you’d need to get dirt from somewhere.” I was sounding like the adult, talking the child out of an impractical idea.

Tuesday evening there was a mystery program Nonie and I liked, and Flora and I sat curled on the sofa with our shoes off, listening to the cabinet radio with the big speakers. We agreed not to turn on lamps so we could be more scared. This one was about a little girl who gets separated from her mother in a department store. They look and look for her, the store detective, the manager, the police, but she just isn’t anywhere to be found, and night comes and the store has to close, and the distraught mother lets herself be convinced that the girl wandered out of the store and the police will have to continue an all-night search through the town. But the little girl has fallen asleep behind some crates in a stockroom and when she wakes up she’s at first frightened because her mother is gone, but then all these nice, elegant, well-dressed people, even some well-dressed children, come out from the shadows of the department store and befriend her. By the time daylight comes, she has decided to accept their offer to become one of them because they have convinced her it’s a better world. In their world, they tell her, she can never get lost or feel abandoned again.

“Oh, God,” cried Flora, wriggling and hugging herself in the gloom, “I knew that was going to happen! I just