“What on earth makes her want to do that?” I said one day. “Doesn’t she have sense enough to stay in bed?”
“She’s lonesome,” Mom answered. “She’s awful lonesome and she has to have lots of attention. You were that way when you were little.”
“Oh, quit telling me about when I was little years and years ago,” I said, not wanting to even be reminded that I ever had been, years and years ago.
As I started to say, getting Charlotte Ann to bed was a hard problem. It got to be my job to help Mom make her go, when Pop had to be away.
But when Mom and Pop were both away, then I had to do it all by myself—being what Pop called a baby sitter, which is a person who takes care of a baby while the parents are absent.
One very hot afternoon Mom and Pop both had to be gone to town for two or three hours and so they let me stay home to take care of Charlotte Ann, giving me orders to see to it that she took her afternoon nap between 1:30 and 2:30, or as near to that as I could get her to, and if it rained, to close all the windows—things like that.
“Take good care of her,” Mom said, as, all dressed up in her Sunday dress, she looked out the closed car door window.
“I will,” I promised and she and Pop went spinning out through the front gate, past Theodore Collins on the mailbox and onto the highway—their car stirring up a big cloud of white dust, that moved slowly off in the direction of Bumblebee Hill and the old cemetery.