The Friendship Doll (12 page)

Olive shook her head. “Not even a dash. I know Mrs. Weldon has a touchy stomach.”

“Yes. Well.” Mrs. Trent lifted one eyebrow and let the lid drop back on the pot. “Send the girl—what’s your name again?”

“Willie Mae.”

“Send Willie Mae out to me when she’s finished eating. Make sure her hands are clean. And see if there’s a comb you can run through her hair.” She turned and left the kitchen.

“I’m finished. Thank you.” Willie Mae picked up her plate. “Where shall I wash this up?”

“Don’t mind the dish.” Olive took it from her. “You are going to have your hands full enough with Mrs. Weldon. Come on, then. Let’s get you cleaned up and presentable.”

Her fingernails and neck and ears scrubbed pink and her hair parted and plaited and tied with two blue bows, Willie Mae was led to the parlor where Mrs. Trent sat knitting. “Well, don’t you look sweet.”

Willie Mae listened for a hint of phony in her words but heard none. Maybe she really did look sweet. Imagine! Wait till she told Theo!

“Let me show you your room.” Mrs. Trent set her knitting aside and stood. She led the way out of the parlor and up a wide set of stairs with two landings. At the far end of the second landing was a closed door. “That’s my mother’s room,” she said, pausing briefly. They climbed another, narrower flight of stairs.

“I hope you’ll be comfortable.” Mrs. Trent opened the door.

“It looks like a picture in the Monkey Ward catalog,” Willie Mae blurted out.

Mrs. Trent laughed. “Well, it’s hardly that fancy.”

It might not have been fancy to someone like Mrs. Trent, but to Willie Mae, this room was a Cinderella surprise. A tidy bed, covered in a chenille bedspread of blue and pink roses, was tucked snug under the dormer. Willie Mae moved to it, running her fingers over the bumpy chenille. She imagined herself lying there—a whole bed all to herself!—and looking through those sheer white curtains to the sky outside.

Mrs. Trent pointed around the room. “There’s a desk there, and feel free to use all the drawers in that dresser.”

All of Willie Mae’s possessions would easily fit in one of the drawers. Imagine owning so many clothes that you needed a whole dresser.

“The bathroom is down the hall, that way.” Mrs. Trent smoothed a tiny wrinkle from the bedspread.

No running to the privy on a dark, cold morning! Willie Mae could scarcely take in such luxury.

Olive had followed them up the stairs. “I sleep on this floor, too,” she said. “If you need anything in the night, have a bad dream—anything—you call out and I’ll be right in.”

Willie Mae nodded her thanks.

A clock chimed somewhere in the hall. “Seven o’clock already?” Mrs. Trent fiddled with her necklace again. “It’s time to meet Mother. Come, child.” She led the way down the stairs and across the landing to that closed door.

Mrs. Trent hesitated a moment, then knocked.

“Come in.” The voice sounded pleasant enough to Willie Mae’s ears. She followed Mrs. Trent inside the room.

“Oh!” She couldn’t contain herself as she took it all in. There wasn’t a place her eyes could light that didn’t hold something to take her breath away. Look at that seashell the size of Ma’s teakettle! Willie Mae bet a person could hear the ocean in such a shell. And shelf after shelf was lined with baskets and bowls and bins, overflowing with rocks that put her to mind of planets and dinosaurs and mysteries.

“Close your mouth, child.”

The words caught Willie Mae up short and she clamped her lips together.

“You can talk, can’t you?” Now Willie Mae saw the speaker, an old lady who looked like one of those apple-core dolls, all wrinkled of face; a mane of white duck down flared out above her forehead and behind her ears.

“Yes, ma’am.” Willie Mae didn’t know if she should curtsy. She ducked her head. “My name is Willie Mae Marcum.”

The lady stuck her neck out like a banty rooster. “A holler girl? And you can read?” It was a question that implied the answer must be no.

“Yes, ma’am. Miz Junkins says I’m one of her best readers.” Willie Mae scratched behind her left pigtail.

“Melba, she doesn’t have fleas, does she?”

Mrs. Trent sighed so quietly that only Willie Mae could hear. “She comes from a good family, Mother. No fleas.”

“Doesn’t look like she eats regular.” The apple-seed eyes squinched up. “She won’t get sickly on me, will she?”

Willie Mae didn’t wait for Mrs. Trent to answer. “I’m healthy as a horse, ma’am. Even when Marvel and Ma got the grippe, it skipped me clean over.”

“This won’t do at all.” The apple core lady tugged at the shawl draped over her shoulders. “She’s probably a carrier.”

“Mother, don’t be ridiculous.” Mrs. Trent nudged Willie Mae forward. “What would you like her to read to you this evening?”

Now it was Mrs. Weldon’s turn to sigh, only it wasn’t quiet. In fact, it was so loud Willie Mae couldn’t imagine it really came from that frail body. “I suppose she’ll make an utter mess of
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,
” she finally said.

Willie Mae scanned the rows of books behind the old
lady. As luck would have it, the words “Tom Sawyer” jumped right off one of the spines. She walked straight across the room, took the book, and opened it up. Her heart fluttered in her chest like a Kentucky warbler as she began to read.

“I’ll have Olive bring your warm milk up in an hour, Mother.” Mrs. Trent sidled out of the room.

“I’m going to get a fractious head if I have to strain so to listen.” Mrs. Weldon patted the seat of the chair next to her. “Come closer. Sit here.”

Though she is scarcely dressed in silk, I sense a fellow samurai in the room. One who knows that the carrot, not the rod, makes the donkey move.

Willie Mae eased across the room like she would in the presence of a skittish animal and lightly perched on the edge of the chair, all the while reading. She stumbled a few times, which triggered some thorny words from Mrs. Weldon, but they hardly counted for anything. Pap would’ve said this little old lady was all growl and no snap.
Willie Mae would have to pinch herself when she went to bed this night. Imagine, getting paid to read
Tom Sawyer
! Wait till she wrote Theo!

Within a few days, they’d settled into a routine. Willie Mae would read to Mrs. Weldon after lunch and dinner and await her call at other times for odds and ends. When she wasn’t with Mrs. Weldon, she had time to read and write on her own. Mrs. Trent had seen her scribbling the second night she was there and the very next day presented Willie Mae with one of those new coil-spring notebooks. “Let me know when this one is filled and you need another,” she’d said. Willie Mae had felt exactly like Sara Crewe did when the Indian Gentleman arranged to have presents sent to her while she was living in Miss Minchin’s attic. She’d written Theo all about it that very night.

During the day, when she wasn’t needed by Mrs. Weldon, she also made herself helpful to Olive even though Olive said that wasn’t part of her chores. But pitching in helped the time pass more quickly. Olive found out that Willie Mae had a weakness for icebox cookies, so she baked them every day. “Those squalls from up there”—Olive tossed her head toward Mrs. Weldon’s second-floor realm—“have quieted considerable since you came. These cookies are small thanks for your part in that.”

“All I do is read to her or listen to her,” said Willie Mae. “That’s nothing.”

“It’s something to us,” said Olive. “I swan—Mrs.
Trent’s been so lighthearted she could put the star atop the town Christmas tree without a ladder.”

On the fifth day, Mrs. Weldon rang for Willie Mae before she’d finished her oatmeal. Willie Mae cleaned up real quick and flew up the stairs, two at a time.

“You sound like a horse, panting so,” Mrs. Weldon grumbled. She sat behind a long desk, nearly hidden by piles of stones. “This isn’t a racetrack. But perhaps coming from the hills you wouldn’t know how to behave in a proper home.”

Hot words boiled in Willie Mae’s mouth, but she swallowed them down. Pap always said you could catch more flies with honey than vinegar, but it appeared Mrs. Weldon didn’t know that. Willie Mae stood, forcing herself to breathe as quietly as possible to cool off. When she felt she could speak in a normal voice again, she asked, “Was there something you needed my help with, ma’am?”

Mrs. Weldon’s wrinkled lips pursed so tight they looked like some kind of creature all to themselves. It took powerful control for Willie Mae not to out-and-out stare.

Mrs. Weldon’s hand rested on a large gray rock with white streaks folded through it. “I have decided it is time to organize my rock collection.” She smacked her lips in dismay. “I suppose it’d be hopeless to try to teach you how to categorize them.”

Willie Mae moved closer to the table. She picked up two stones on the edge of the desk, nearest her. “These look like the same sort of rock. What are they called?”

“Lucky guess.” Mrs. Weldon sniffed. “They are the same type. Sedimentary. Formed when stones are cemented together by mud and such.”

Willie Mae reached for another rock. “Is this sedimentary, too?”

“Yes, yes.” Mrs. Weldon waved her hand impatiently. “Put them in that box there.”

Willie Mae did as she was told, and then she picked up a small stone that put her to mind of a speckled bird’s egg. “This one’s different than those sedimentary ones,” she said.

Mrs. Weldon sat back in her chair, seeming to really look at Willie Mae for the first time. “It is. That’s called igneous. It’s created when molten rock, or magma, cools.” She waved her hand toward a second box. “That type can go in there.”

“Since there are three boxes, there must be three kinds of rocks,” Willie Mae said. “What’s the third called?”

“Metamorphic.” Mrs. Weldon patted the dark stone with the white swirls in it in front of her. “ ‘Metamorphosis’ means ‘change.’ These are rocks that are changed by the earth’s pressure or heat.”

Willie Mae reached for a rock that looked like a slice of the creek bank, all different shades of mud layered together. “Is this metamorphic?” she asked. She tried to imagine where you might find such a rock. Where Mrs. Weldon had found all of these rocks. It must have taken her a long time to gather up such a collection.

“What do you think?” Mrs. Weldon replied sharply.

Willie Mae’s answer was to place it in the third box. Soon, she had a rhythm going, hefting rocks, looking them over carefully, and deciding which box to place them in. It was like the game she used to play with Mary Rose and Ma’s button box, sorting the buttons by size or color or shape. Mrs. Weldon twitched like the cat that didn’t catch the mouse when Willie Mae got them all sorted to a T.

“That’s the last one.” Willie Mae dropped the final knobby rock into the “sedimentary” box.

“Bring me that box there.” Mrs. Weldon snapped her fingers impatiently.

Willie Mae took the box she’d indicated from the shelf. “Oh!” she said, startled.