“What are you doing here?” Adair MacKenzie appeared in the doorway. Short and somewhat stocky with a face that was perpetually tanned and dressed as he was in a white suit and large white panama hat, he looked like a permanent part of the scene about him. Nan, as she looked at him felt proud. Despite all his blustering, his ordering of people around, and his abrupt manner, he was kind and gentle at heart. This, she knew, was the reason for his success. This was why everyone who had ever known him liked him and loved him.
Now, characteristically, he followed his abrupt question with a piece of information that laid bare his softness and unfailing thoughtfulness.
“Get inside, all of you,” he ordered, “there are long distance calls coming through for each of you from your parents. Can’t have you mooning around,” he muttered, “waiting for mail in order to find out whether or not your mothers and fathers are well. You, Nancy, your call is waiting now. Just talked to Jessie myself in Memphis. She’s fine, just fine. Never felt better in her life she says. Might have known it in the first place. The Blakes are strong people.”
With this, he walked away. “No nonsense, now,” he grumbled as he disappeared and each of the girls went in to talk from a telephone booth on the southern border of the United States to her parents in the north.
How exciting it was to talk over that great distance! How good it seemed to the girls to hear their mother’s voices! Nan talked to both her father and mother in Tennessee, and as she did, she imagined just how they looked, the expressions on their faces when they said certain dear, familiar things and the look in their eyes when they laughed. It was almost like having them in the same room with her.
As she hung up, a wistful expression crossed her face, one that Adair MacKenzie, standing off to one side of the room noted. “What’s the matter, Nancy?” he asked in a softer tone than Nan had ever heard him use.
“Lonesome?” Adair questioned further.
“Oh, a little bit,” Nan smiled. “Sometimes, I miss Momsey a great, great deal.” As she spoke her thoughts slipped back to those first days at Pine Camp recounted in the first volume of the Nan Sherwood series when it was so hard to fight off the wave of homesickness that came over her.
“Not going to back down on me and go home, are you?” Adair MacKenzie asked the question half in fun and half in seriousness.
“Oh, no,” Nan laughed. “I couldn’t do that.”