Moxy Maxwell Does Not Love Stuart Little (5 page)

Mark! It must have been Mark!

“Did you turn on that hose so you could get a picture of Mother’s dahlia garden drowning?” she asked Mark.

Mark shrugged at her as if to say “What? Do you think I’m crazy?” and took another picture.

Pansy! Pansy must have turned on the hose. But how long ago? Moxy knew Mark had been watching. “How many billions and trillions of gallons of water have been pouring into Mom’s prize dahlia garden for how long?” she demanded of Mark.

Mark shrugged. Then he said, “For as long as it takes for a bunch of dahlias to drown.”

Moxy’s mother was
looking up. Her mouth was open and her eyes were open, but she looked, well, not asleep, but as if she couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

And then Moxy saw it too.

Mudd was digging
up dahlias like mad. Dahlias were flying out behind him. They were so spectacular, those pink and yellow flowers exploding across that sky, that they looked like fireworks in daylight.

“I wonder if Mudd buried a bone in the dahlia garden,” Moxy said out loud.

“Ya think?” said Mark. Mark could be so sarcastic—a character trait Moxy did not enjoy. Then he snapped another picture.

Mrs. Maxwell did not appear to be breathing. Mark did not seem to be moving, but his camera kept shooting.

“Come! Mudd, come!”
Moxy shouted. But Mudd wasn’t listening. After all, he had
never
listened, so why should he listen now? Instead, he kept tossing dahlias into the air.

A dahlia splashed on Moxy’s head.

“Come, Mudd, come!” Moxy tried to call again, but her lungs were plugged with the fragrance of freshly launched flowers. It was like inhaling the color green, Moxy thought.

By now dozens of dahlias were airborne. Seven dahlias pelted Moxy’s arm; an eighth and a ninth lashed her leg. Three landed in her mother’s hair. Two dahlias were stuck in Mark’s camera strap, and the red head of a third was tangled in his lens cap.

Dirt was flying too. It was a good thick pudding sort of mud. It wobbled in great gobs across the lawn like chocolate Frisbees and when it fell, it stuck like superglue to anything it found. Including Pansy.

Mudd sent another volley of dahlias out of the garden. Up, up, up they went like
water in a fountain. Mudd was almost done. He fired a final round of flowers, and the last of Moxy’s mother’s prize dahlias slammed into the hammock.

Here is a photograph Mark took of Mudd after he was finished making Moxy’s mother’s prize dahlias fly
.

And here is a photograph Mark took of part of Pansy partly covered in mud
.

Moxy heard
the screen door slam and suddenly Ajax was standing there.

Mrs. Maxwell was
on her hands and knees picking up green dahlia stems with no dahlias on them. Moxy was the slightest bit worried about her. But when she saw Ajax treading carefully between the mud and the puddles to reach her mother, it was a relief. Thank goodness Mother had someone to help keep her calm. Eventually Moxy would have to go off to one of seventy-three Possible Colleges and she often worried about what her mother would do without her. It was nice to see old Ajax picking up the slack.

Mudd stuck his tail out of the mud hole and backed almost all the way out, then stopped and went back in again. Moxy lay back in the hammock and put her hands behind her head and crossed her legs. She was exhausted.

“Get up,” Ajax
said.

Moxy jumped. Ajax could be very abrupt. She struggled to stop the hammock—wasn’t this just the sort of occasion that called for an automatic hammock-stopping machine?—and stumbled to her feet.

“Now help your mother lie down,” he said.

“Mark! Pansy!” snapped Moxy. “Get over here this minute and help Mother get in this hammock.”

This is where a photograph of Mrs.
Maxwell holding a little bouquet of flowerless stems should be shown. But Mark was actually helping Ajax and Pansy put Mrs. Maxwell into the hammock, so he could not take a picture. If there had been a photograph, you would have seen Moxy in the corner supervising everything.

“Moxy Anne Maxwell!”

Moxy was almost at the screen door.

“Come back here right now!”

Moxy paused to consider.

“I said
now
!”

“But Mother, there’s so much mud,” Moxy called. “I don’t think I can make it back without risking a fall.”

Suddenly Sam was standing there. The second hose was wrapped around his shoulders. He looked like a fireman.

“I’ll help you,” he said, and before Moxy
could tell him how much, how very, very much she did not want his help, Sam was leading her across that treacherous terrain between the back door and her mother.

Moxy was trying to think.
Think harder
, she said to herself as she marched. But the harder she thought about thinking harder, the harder it was to think. In fact, she was thinking so hard about thinking harder that she didn’t see Mudd until it was too late.

Mudd was running straight for her. There was a dahlia caught in his collar. Mudd was so proud of his dahlia that when he reached Moxy, he gave a good shake, jumped up, and pulled her down beside him, and just as she predicted not five paragraphs ago, Moxy fell into the whole muddy mess. She could scarcely catch her breath.

This is the photograph Mark took of Mudd just before he gave Moxy the last prizewinning dahlia
.

It was the last straw.

Enough is enough
, Moxy Maxwell said to herself.

“How did my
dahlias happen to drown?” asked Mrs. Maxwell. She sounded very casual. She was swinging in the hammock.

“It all started with the Peach Orchard Plan,” said Moxy.

“Peach Orchard Plan?” said Mrs. Maxwell. Moxy’s mother often did that—repeated what you’d already said but with a little spin on it.

“The plan I had to grow peaches in the backyard.”

“Why would you want to grow peaches in the backyard?”

“Well,” said Moxy, “if I make enough money selling peaches—of course, they would have to grow first—to send myself to college and dental school, if that’s the Career Path I choose …”

Moxy stopped for a moment to look at her mother looking at her. Her mother’s face had a curious expression on it, as if what Moxy was about to say next might be the most interesting thing in the world.

“Well,” Moxy began again, “if I did all that, I sort of thought you would think I was so smart I wouldn’t need to read a book about a mouse. Or anything else, for that matter. Unless of course I wanted to.”

The hammock stopped swinging. “You still haven’t answered my question—how did my dahlias drown?” said Mrs. Maxwell.

The word “character” was a fifth-grade word, but Moxy had long been drawn to it. As far as she could tell, having character meant telling the truth when it was not
absolutely necessary. And even though this struck Moxy as a somewhat unnatural thing to do, she knew it was considered by most adults to be a very good thing indeed, and just now Moxy needed to do a very good thing. Indeed.

“Pansy must have left the hose running in the dahlia garden instead of over there by the peach orchard. But it was my fault,” Moxy said. She was so startled to hear herself say this that she lurched a little to the left to get out of the way of herself.

“What do you
have to say for yourself, young lady?”

“It will never happen again,” said Moxy.

Mrs. Maxwell felt quite sure this was true. “And …”

“And?” asked Moxy. “And I don’t blame you at all, Mother.”

“What did you say?” said Mrs. Maxwell.

“I mean that in the nicest possible way,” said Moxy.

Mrs. Maxwell leaned up on her elbows.

Honestly, Moxy couldn’t understand
why her mother would want her to state the perfectly obvious.

“Haven’t I been saying for years and years that someone must, must teach Mudd to come? And now …” Moxy shrugged. “Well, just look around.”

Reader, can I describe the expression on Mrs. Maxwell’s face? It traveled from Stunned to Puzzled and back. It moved on from there to places Moxy had never visited before, places like Self-doubt and Despair. It crossed into territories like Hopeless and Surrender, and on the way it passed very near Laughter.

“Don’t cry, Mother!”
Mrs. Maxwell had her head down. She was pinching the bridge of her nose the way she did when her glasses had been on too long. Now was not the moment to suggest the aquamarine contacts. Moxy just knew this.

There was a general silence among the audience.

“What a mess I am!” Moxy said. “Don’t you think I’d better pop into the shower, Mother? It’s almost time for my daisy routine.”

Slowly, slowly, with no help from anybody, Mrs. Maxwell crawled out of the hammock and stood up. Mrs. Maxwell was quite tall. And even though Moxy had recently had a growth spurt, she still had a few more inches (as she figured it) to go before she and her mother would see eye to eye.

“I’m going to let you do your daisy routine tonight,” said Mrs. Maxwell. “But do you know why?” It was the sort of question that wasn’t asking for an answer, so Moxy was silent. “Because if you don’t, you will let the other seven petals down. It wouldn’t be fair to them.”

Moxy could not believe her luck
.

“But I am
not
going to allow you to go to the party after the show. And do you know why?”

Moxy had a feeling she did.

“Because you are going to march home as soon as it is over and go straight to your
room. And do you know what you’re going to do in your room?”

“Read
Stuart Little
?” said Moxy. Her voice was a little weak, though you couldn’t call it defeated.