The Friendship Doll (14 page)

Miz Junkins stopped by the next morning. “I can’t stay; I’ve got a long route today. But I wanted to see how things were going.”

“We are getting along real good,” Willie Mae said. “And I’m reading her
Tom Sawyer
!”

Miz Junkins exchanged a glance with Olive, who was standing behind Willie Mae in the doorway.

“You’d never believe it, Sarah.” Olive wiped her hands on a dish towel. “This girl’s like tonic for that old—I mean, for Mrs. Weldon.”

They chatted a few more minutes and then Miz Junkins went on her way.

“You scarcely touched your biscuits,” said Olive, frowning over Willie Mae’s breakfast plate.

“I’ll save them for dinner.” Willie Mae didn’t have much appetite. Maybe she was just that eager to run up to Mrs. Weldon’s room. The old lady’s tongue was as sharp as Ma’s sewing shears, but her stories! She had lived. She had traveled. Willie Mae would have borne heaps of words sharp as needles in order to listen to Mrs. Weldon’s yarns. She’d ridden a camel in Egypt and hunted pheasants with a duke in Austria.

“After my husband passed, I made up my mind not to let one moment go by without living life to the fullest,” she’d told Willie Mae. The day she described her trip to Peru, Willie Mae had a headache herself thinking about fighting for a good breath in those high, high mountains with their thin, thin air.

Miz Junkins stopped by for a real visit one afternoon during Willie Mae’s third week. “You feeling all right?” she asked. “You look a little peaked.”

Willie Mae shook off the question. “I dreamt last night about pyramids. Did you know Mrs. Weldon’s been to Egypt? And Spain? And that she dug for fossils in Peru?”

Miz Junkins poured a cup of tea from the pot Olive had prepared. “I had heard some such.” She added a teaspoon of sugar and took a sip, satisfied now that a bit of pink had sprung into Willie Mae’s cheeks. “How’d
Tom Sawyer
make out?”

“Oh, it was the best book I ever read!” Willie Mae dunked an icebox cookie into her own teacup. “That is, until we started reading about Huck Finn.” She bit off the soggy sliver of cookie and swallowed. It scraped the entire way down her gizzard. Must’ve taken too big a bite. She swallowed again. “Miz Weldon has more books in that room of hers than a hound dog’s got fleas.”

Miz Junkins laughed. “Well, our library could surely use some of those fleas.”

Willie Mae didn’t hold Miz Junkins to fault for her comment. She’d learned from Olive that the liveliest topic in town was what would happen with all of Mrs. Weldon’s impressive possessions after she passed.

The gossip held that Mrs. Weldon planned to leave her collections—including her books—to the Natural History Museum, in Lexington. What was left of her husband’s money would be divided between her daughter and the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Willie Mae didn’t like to think about such, even though she knew everyone died sometime. Still, she did lie awake a night or two wondering about Miss Kanagawa.
The fossils and shells and the like at the Natural History Museum would hardly be suitable company for her. Miss Kanagawa would prefer to be with people, plain and simple. Why, any doll would. Willie Mae could tell by the way those dark eyes seemed to warm up, like embers after you blew on them, when she went to Mrs. Weldon’s room. Willie Mae took another sip of tea to soothe her throat. Where the doll would land after Mrs. Weldon was gone was something she’d never heard speculation about. She dunked her cookie again, determining to say her prayers this very night that it would be a long, long time until the doctor came up to the great door of this house, black bag in hand.

It wasn’t that the Good Lord didn’t heed Willie Mae’s prayers in general. It was this latest one He paid no nevermind to. That very night, the doctor pounded at the great front door. The house lights were all aglow as he stamped his feet on the Aubusson rug in the front hall. “Take me to the patient,” he said.

Though Olive answered his knock, it was Mrs. Trent who showed him up the stairs. He started right, toward Mrs. Weldon’s room, but Mrs. Trent stopped him. “That way,” she said, pointing to the stairs Olive was now climbing.

Mrs. Weldon opened her bedroom door, peering out. “I told you she’d bring the plague into this house. I told you she’d be trouble.” She leaned hard against her walking stick.

“I sincerely doubt it’s the plague,” Dr. Pemberton said
evenly, easing his ample body around the bend in the landing. “The influenza’s more like it. Going round up in the hills. Most likely that’s what’s ailing her.”

“It’s a plague all the same.”

“Mrs. Weldon, why don’t you let me see to the little one and we’ll go from there?” Dr. Pemberton climbed the stairs and firmly shut the door between him and the old lady below. “Well, hello there, Willie Mae. How are you?”

He received no answer from the bed. Crossing the room in a manner completely unexpected for a man of his girth, he was at her side in an instant, one hand on her forehead, one on her wrist for her pulse. He took notice of Olive, in the corner, wringing a tea towel in her hands.

“This is no time for faint hearts,” he told her, proceeding to rattle off a list of instructions for the pale patient’s care. At the conclusion of his commands, he paused, brushing back the small girl’s unruly hair from her face. “These holler children don’t have much in reserve. But we will do our best.”

Olive flew into action to carry out the doctor’s orders. For the next few days, the household moved through its normal course, but always there was one ear cocked toward the tiny upstairs room.

“Why is my luncheon late again?” complained Mrs. Weldon on Tuesday.

“It has been ages since I’ve heard
Huck Finn,
” she grumbled on Friday.

“All this fuss over a small girl,” she clucked the Tuesday next. “What about me? I’m feeling quite faint.”

“Have an egg,” said Mrs. Trent, carrying in a breakfast tray. “It will bolster you up.” She set the tray on the small table in her mother’s room but didn’t stay to crack or peel the egg on it. “Oh, I think I hear her coughing.” She grabbed a pitcher of ice water and flew to the stairs.

“Well, I never.” Mrs. Weldon pushed the soft-boiled egg aside and ate three pieces of toast with butter and apricot jam. It was a breakfast that would probably send her into diabetic shock. Severe diabetic shock.

But she was still on her feet at noon. “Where’s my meal?” She rang for Olive.

“In a moment, ma’am.” Olive flew past her, up the stairs to the room of that girl, bearing a tray with bouillon and sugar toast.

“I am on my last legs!” Mrs. Weldon called after her. But there was no answer. “I suppose I must starve in my own home.” She pressed her right hand to her left breast. “Or die alone. All alone.” Feeling abandoned and forlorn, she moved around her room, touching this object and that, taking complete inventory.

Her hand came to rest on a small speckled stone on the windowsill. She recalled the morning that Willie Mae had named the Egg Stone and held it to her ear. “Yep,” she’d said. “I can hear some kind of rock baby in there, pecking its way out.” She’d laughed at her silliness. Thinking of that laughter brought a sad smile to Mrs. Weldon’s own lips. Even in the dreary days of December, her room had felt full of light and springtime. Ever since that girl had arrived.

She paused in front of Miss Kanagawa.

“Well, I suppose if you could speak, you’d be in a dither about her, like the rest of this household. Everything topsy-turvy.” She fussed with the knot in the doll’s obi. “In my day, children weren’t allowed to cause a fuss. Such demands for attention would be met with the business end of a switch.”

At that moment, she looked at the doll. Really looked at her, as she had the day of the auction.

This old woman needs my help or her heart will shrivel up completely like a dried plum. My sway over adults is limited, though she heard me when I encouraged her to bid at the auction. Something in those cautious eyes told me she was the one I should go with.

Thank goodness she heard me then. But will she hear me now?

She was a child once, herself, was she not? Perhaps I need remind her of that child.

I sense a sickroom in her own past. And something else. Plums? No. Not plums. Another fruit.

Into Mrs. Weldon’s room from somewhere wafted the summertime fragrance of apricots. Not just any apricots, but the Moorparks that her mother had lovingly tended. She remembered being about the same age as that holler girl, carrying a brown transferware bowl full of them up
to her mother’s sickroom when her father stopped her with news that sent the bowl shattering to the floor.

After her mother’s death, she followed her father’s lead and turned inward, determined to be sufficient unto herself. That attitude had stood her in good stead throughout her life. Until recently.

It seemed everyone thought her selfish, including her own daughter. She’d learned too late that friends needed cultivating, too, like her beloved mother’s apricot trees. Solitary in her room, she’d had nothing to do but take inventory of her increasing aches and pains, wondering if the next inhale would be her last. Of course, there hadn’t been much time for such since Willie Mae had come to stay.

She caught her breath after this particular thought. She found she couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a headache or a neck ache or any sort of ache. For years, she’d felt like a neglected pocket watch tossed in a drawer. Since Willie Mae’s arrival, she’d felt properly wound up, in tune and ready to tick.

All because of an urchin from the holler. She glanced at the doll. “Her name’s Willie Mae,” she said. “I didn’t care for it at first, but it suits her. Sharp little thing, too. And not a bad reader. Reads almost as eloquently as I do.” She tapped her cheek with her forefinger.
That
was the ticket. Nothing like a read-aloud to send the punies flying. She herself knew that firsthand. Mrs. Weldon searched for the copy of
Huckleberry Finn
. Then she recalled she’d let the girl—let Willie Mae—take it to her room.

“Never let it be said that Ernestine Weldon does not have a Christian bone in her body,” she declared. She would visit the child. Comfort her. Bring her succor.

Mrs. Weldon refreshed herself—washing face, combing hair, reanointing with her favorite toilet water—then prepared to venture out of her own room and up to the child’s. It was the farthest she’d been in … Well, she couldn’t remember in how long. But surely a woman who had ascended Machu Picchu in her youth could climb a set of stairs in her own home.

She grabbed her walking stick and started for the door.

Something pulled her back. One took something to the ill, did one not? It was out of season for apricots, certainly. What could she take?

She glanced around her room, ajumble with the detritus of her unconventional life, looking for an appropriate sickroom gift. Her eyes landed on just the thing. She galumphed across the floor, gathered up the target of her gaze, and started for the stairs. It felt as if she were back on Machu Picchu, earning each step, her lungs struggling for each sip of oxygen. But after a small eternity, she was at the landing, thumping her way up the stairs.

“Mrs. Weldon!” Olive scurried to meet her at the door. “What? How?” She gathered her apron and her thoughts about her. “It’s not wise for you to come in.”

“Pish posh.” Mrs. Weldon tapped her stick on the floor by Olive’s feet, scaring the woman out of her way. “She’s only a child.”

“A very ill child, and you are—” Olive stopped in midsentence.

“A very old lady.” Mrs. Weldon progressed into the room. “What of it?” She shifted the object she toted to her other arm. “Move aside.” She clumped toward the bed.

“Willie Mae, we are behind in
Huckleberry Finn.
” She peered at the pale face, paler than the pillowcase on which it lay. “At this rate we shall not finish before your time is up.” Her hand flew to her cheek. “I mean, before it is time for you to return home.”

“Mrs. Weldon—” Olive stepped forward as if to pull the older lady out of the room.

The girl stirred. Coughed. Coughed again. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” Willie Mae offered in a voice as wispy as an angel’s robe. “I aim to be up soon.” As if to prove the point, she struggled to sit up under the coverlet.