“You’re the bossiest girl,” Neil protested with some reason, more than once. “I wish you’d go back to Chicago where you came from.”
“Then you’d get no more cookies,” Jacqueline told him. “Aunt Martha hasn’t got time to make ’em for you.”
There she had the whip-hand of them all. For if she chose, she could give a fellow a broken cooky hot from the pan, and if she didn’t choose—My, you should have seen her the day she caught Neil sneaking a cooky! Smack, smack went her brown little hands, hardened in good outdoor exercise under the California sun, and schooled (to Aunt Edie’s horror!) in certain boxing tricks by the new Uncle Jimmie. Neil sniffled with amazement and anger, perhaps, more than with pain. But he didn’t tell tales. They fought out their battles, he and Jacqueline, and on the whole she gave him more cookies than smacks.
It was no joke, cooking in a hot kitchen, and sleeping in a room, warmed through with the sun. It was no picnic to be waked, just when the early morning hours were cool and refreshing, by the gurgling and cooing of Freddie and Annie, and to face another day of endless step-stepping and chores that never seemed done. But there were compensations. Suppers, picnic fashion, to save washing dishes, in the side-yard, or the orchard, or the knoll by the river, where you could watch the sunset, while you ate maple-sugar sandwiches and chunks of blueberry cake. Berrying expeditions to far pastures, with Ralph at the wheel of the Ford. A Sunday School party in Longmeadow, where Jacqueline felt as if she were at a masquerade in one of Caroline’s faded, scanty ginghams and a freshly ironed hair-ribbon, but ate her ice-cream (three plates of it!) and two kinds of cake, as heartily as the uninvited young man in the limerick.
Of course what made the summer weeks, with their heat and hard work and meager pleasures, endurable was the fact that Grandma Conway was all the time getting better. Slowly, oh! very slowly, but surely. Ever since the day when she found her beloved old green-dragon cup at her lips once more, she had shown an interest in life, and so she had begun to live again. She sat up in bed now, and her patient smile was like her old smile, and her eyes twinkled and understood. You didn’t talk with her long, for fear of tiring her, and the children still played far from the house, so that she should not be disturbed. But she was the least bit stronger every day, and she began even to talk of the time when she could leave her bed.
“Wish we had a wheelchair for her,” Aunt Martha confided to Jacqueline over the peaches that they were preserving, in the cool of the morning. “But if wishes were horses, beggars might ride.”
“They wouldn’t want to ride to-day,” Jacqueline replied. “They’d all want Lizzies, at the very least.” To herself she made a promise: “I’ll get a wheelchair for Grandma—the best wheelchair in all Boston—just as soon as Aunt Edie comes.”
For Aunt Edie and Uncle Jimmie had promised to come in September. And if they didn’t keep to their plans, well, at any rate Caroline would be coming back from the beach, and Jacqueline would be released from her promise, and have her clothes, and her pocket money, and be able to do things again in her old lordly way. She would do so many things then to make Grandma and Aunt Martha and the babies happy! She always dwelt upon their happiness, when she counted the days to September. She took great pains not to think about Caroline. She had more than a suspicion that poor Caroline was going to be anything but happy.
Naturally since she was Aunt Martha’s right hand and mainstay and dependence, Jacqueline didn’t go often to the village, in those August days. Once she rode to town with Ralph and Freddie, and at the general store saw the youngster fitted to a pair of new sneakers, a delicate task which she and Aunt Martha had agreed was beyond Ralph’s masculine capacity. Again she went to the village with the four young Conways to the Sunday School party. Then quite unexpectedly came her third opportunity.
Aunt Martha was going to the north end of the town to see Mr. Asa Wheelock, who might perhaps lease a portion of her land next season. She meant to stop on the way and buy a lot of little things that were wanted at the house—cheesecloth, the coarse kind that you need when you strain the nice hot fruit juice that cools into jelly, bone buttons for the children’s underwear, five yards of elastic to run into little rompers, a spool of black sewing silk and one of white cotton, and some boracic acid and a cake of good white soap for Grandma, and a box of talcum powder. Ralph never in the world would get them right.