Flora

sure he liked pork and of course bringing in the marvelous Juliet, who had discovered how to bathe wartime rations in a wonderful sauce.

I shut myself in my old room. Its window was brighter for daytime reading, and also I felt I was making amends to it for my abrupt desertion. I lay on top of my old silk baby quilt Brian and I had used for reading, but didn’t open the book yet. Mrs. Jones had brought it from the library when she returned the one I hadn’t finished. This one, Hitty, didn’t look too promising—it was about a doll—but Mrs. Jones had chosen it herself, after consulting with the librarian, and I knew I would have to at least skim enough that I could “report” on it so her feelings wouldn’t be hurt.

Finn was coming to dinner on Sunday. Flora had invited him for six o’clock. I had heard that much before she started in on how nice for us some company would be and launched into Juliet and the wartime pork. I was reminded afresh that my biggest fear concerning Flora was how her lack of reserve would reflect on our family. How, people would ask, could someone as picky as Principal Anstruther go off and leave his daughter, who had just lost her irreproachable grandmother, with a young woman who didn’t know any better than to read letters from the dead woman to the funeral guests? How exactly was this Flora related to the Anstruther family? Well, she was first cousin to Helen’s mother: the two girls grew up together in Alabama. Oh, her mother, I see.”

So far, only Lorena Huff had pronounced on Flora as “that emotional girl” who had read the letters, and Father McFall probably had his own reservations after quizzing her during the drive home from church. If Flora would only show more reserve, I could cover for her, but she would babble the most embarrassing things when least expected. It was bad enough when we were alone, but who knew what she might say to Finn?

At least she had been offered a job and had accepted. What if all three letters had said no? Would my father have felt sorry for her and found it a convenience for himself to keep her on? After having given it some careful thought, I no longer dreaded he might marry her. He was too critical, she wasn’t his type, he would always be rolling his eyes and leaving the table and carrying fresh drinks up to his room. The idea of them sharing a room was preposterous. But my father was perfectly capable of keeping her with us to serve his needs. She could cook. (When I finally came around to admitting that Flora cooked better than Nonie, it made me think less of cooking.) My father would teach her to drive Nonie’s car and it would be Flora who picked me up from school. Lorena Huff would be right, after all: I would have a live-in governess.

But now it wasn’t going to happen because Flora had a job and she had written to accept and they were going to send her the schoolbooks and schedules so she could start planning. She would be gone from Old One Thousand the last week in August and my father would be back with his burnt grilled cheese sandwiches and his cocktails, complaining about his job kowtowing to small-town faculty egos and waiting to be replaced by some younger man with connections.

And why should I care about what Finn thought of Flora? From the beginning he had been “my” person, someone I had connected to before Flora flew out of the house. I looked ahead to more conversations when he would ask me about my thoughts and to future adventures when he would teach me more things and praise me for my bravery. Yet I was sophisticated enough already to perceive that he was something of an outcast type himself. He had admitted to mental problems (I was eager to hear more about those), and if you looked at him critically, as someone like my father would certainly do, he was a little ridiculous, with his sharp, pointy features and orange spikes of hair and skinny body, dancing a jig in a hole in the woods. And on the motorcycle, when I had held him around his waist and laid my face against his damp back, his rank male smell made me screw up my nostrils.

My father liked to trap people in epithets. Brian was Little Lord Fauntleroy and Annie was Lady Uncouth. Nonie’s stepbrother, in tears at the funeral home because he couldn’t “see Honora,” was the Old Mongrel. What would my father’s epithet for Finn be?

Nonie preferred an indirect approach to judgment. “Is she the kind of person we’d like to invite to dinner?” she had asked my father on the evening he brought home the girls’ hygiene booklet Miss Waring said she could not teach. What would Nonie have said about Finn? I couldn’t hear her initiating a dinner invitation, but suppose Flora had said to her as Flora had said to me, “Maybe we should ask him to dinner, or would that be wrong?” Nonie would have responded exactly as I had done (this realization cheered me): she would have first asked, “Why would it be wrong?” This response, I now understood, would have given her more time to think about the rest of her reply. And what would that have been? Here I drew a blank, though in time I would become so proficient at channeling Nonie’s responses that they would become inseparable from mine. Or rather, from what mine would have been if I hadn’t had Nonie inside ready to speak for me before I knew what I wanted to say.

But still, I was impatient to see Finn on Sunday. If only I could be sure Flora would not ruin everything with her eagerness and disregard for what should be left unsaid.

In the new library book, a doll was writing a memoir of her first hundred years. I had to remind myself that Mrs. Jones’s Rosemary had still been in the doll-playing stage when she died of diphtheria. The librarian had told Mrs. Jones that all the books in the series I liked were checked out and said this doll one was suitable for readers through the age of twelve. If all the books in my series about girls and houses with mysteries were checked out, the fickle librarian must have been recommending them to other people besides me.

I leafed through the illustrations again, the first one of the doll (Hitty) taking up a quill pen to begin her memoir. Hitty had a square face, a thick neck, goggle eyes, and an ill-natured smile. I had been able to deduce from the chapter titles (“In Which I Travel,” “In Which I Am Lost in India”) that this was one of those books grown-ups dote on because it sneak-feeds young minds with plenty of history and geography.

I heard the phone ring, but it couldn’t be my father because he called in the evening. Maybe it was Finn calling back to say he couldn’t come on Sunday. I imagined him hanging up the phone at the store and thinking, I can never get through a dinner with that excitable woman who sounds desperate to have company. If it was just Helen and me it would be different.

Flora was knocking at my door (at least someone had taught her to knock). “Helen, it’s for you.”

“Who is it?”

“It’s your friend Annie. Why don’t you talk to her on the upstairs phone? I’ve got things to do in the kitchen and you’ll have your privacy.”

“She doesn’t sound so bad,” said Annie as soon as Flora had hung up downstairs.

“Oh, Annie.” My sigh spoke volumes.

“Just thought I should let you know I’m leaving town this afternoon.”

“This afternoon!”

“They’re cutting the phone off in a few minutes, and I didn’t want you to call me up and hear ‘That number has been disconnected.’ Not that you have called me up a single time.”

“I didn’t realize you were leaving so soon!”

“I guess time runs differently up there at Shangri-la. I said three weeks, and it’ll be three weeks on Monday.” There was a frosty tone beneath her usual teasing.

“Oh, Annie, things have been so— Oh, I don’t know what to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything, Helen. Actually, I called to say a few things to you.”

“What?”

“Remember our lemon squeezes? You would tell me what I did that really bothered you and then it would be my turn to tell you. One time you told me I chewed with my mouth open.”

“We haven’t done a lemon squeeze since third grade.”

“No, but I remembered it and I make sure nobody sees the inside of my mouth anymore. In fact, I was having a moment of gratitude toward you just now because when I’m making my new friends in the flatlands I’ll know not to do it. So, thank you.”

“You’re welcome, but—?”

“So I’ve decided to do you a favor and tell you a few lemon-truths before I ride out of your life forever.”

Where was this heading?

“I don’t have long, so here goes. Mammy saw Mrs. Huff downtown and Mrs. Huff said your behavior had really hurt them.”

“My behavior! What did I do?”

“It’s not so much what you did as what you didn’t do. You stayed in their house for a whole week. You slept in Rachel’s room and swam in her pool for an entire week and haven’t called her since. You never even sent a thank-you note.”