I could see Mom wasn’t going to like the idea and if she didn’t I wasn’t going to either, but because she felt so sorry for the lady and wanted her to get well fast, she quick thought up a way to say, “Yes,” without hurting Mr. Everhard’s feelings or her own.
“If you will borrow me too, that will be fine,” she said cheerfully, and he answered, “Certainly, it will soon be time for afternoon tea anyway.”
“What about me?” I said, all of a sudden trying to be funny and probably not being very. “Anybody want to borrow a good-looking, red-haired, homely-faced boy?”
I didn’t much want to go though on account of some of the gang might come over to play with me, but Mom said quickly, “Certainly, Son, come right along.”
And so it turned out that I went with Mom and Charlotte Ann and Mr. Everhard, I carrying a gallon thermos jug of cold, iron-pitcher-pump water to earn my twenty-five cents for that day.
Say, the first thing I noticed when we came to within a few yards of the green-canvas, ranch-house-style tent was that one of the tent’s wings with the green roof and the mosquito netting sidewalls had in it a baby’s play pen, and in the pen was a lot of things for a baby girl to enjoy—a doll, a pink teddy bear, a very small broom like the one Charlotte Ann helps Mom sweep with and a little tea set for playing house. Beside the tent, hanging by a rope and a spring, was a jumper swing like the one that used to hang from the limb under the plum tree in our yard in which Charlotte Ann used to sit and bounce herself up and down and laugh and gurgle and have the time of her life—but now it’s too little for her.
“The poor, dear girl,” Mom said with a sigh kinda under her breath and in my direction—Mr. Everhard having gone on into the tent to tell his wife she had company. Mom was looking at the baby things with a sort of faraway expression in her eyes. I could hear voices inside the tent and it sounded for a minute as if there was a half argument. Then the canvas flap of the tent opened and Mrs. Everhard came out.
Mom gasped when she saw her, maybe on account of the way she was dressed and what she had in her hand.
“Such a pretty dress,” Mom said, half to me and half to nobody.
I hardly ever paid any attention to what anybody was wearing, especially a woman or a girl, on account of it didn’t seem important, but I guess any woman or maybe even a boy would gasp at the green and brown and yellow and also red summery-looking dress Mrs. Everhard had on. It had a lot of milkweed flowers on it with pretty swallow-tail butterflies with spread wings on each flower. Her yellowish hair was the same color as the sulphur butterflies that fly around our cabbage plants with the white ones and I noticed it was still combed like it had been in church, with some kind of sparkling pin in it. She was wearing a pair of dark glasses and green and yellow shoes.