Free The Darling Dahlias and the Eleven O'Clock Lady by Susan Wittig Albert Page B

interview went well, and Mr. Jackman immediately offered Lizzy the job. She said yes, closed up her house, and set off for Montgomery, the Alabama state capital and the first capital of the Confederacy. There, she began looking for an apartment for herself and her cat, Daffodil, whom she couldn’t bear to leave behind.
    The adventure turned out much better than Lizzy could possibly have anticipated. She enjoyed her new job, where there was always something different and challenging going on. Mr. Jackman’s practice was wide-ranging, and once he learned how competent she was, he delegated more and more tasks to her. He often went out of town on business or spent long days at the legislature, leaving her in charge of the office. Self-confidence had never been Lizzy’s strong suit, but working for Mr. Jackman changed that. She couldn’t explain it except to say that it was like finding yourself suddenly promoted two grades ahead in school and discovering—to your delighted surprise—that you could do the work with no trouble at all.
    What’s more, the three-room furnished apartment that Mrs. Jackman had helped her locate suited her to a T. It was at the back of one of the large old homes on a quiet Montgomery street. It had its own private entrance, decent furniture, a bookcase full of books left by the previous tenant, and a cute little kitchenette with a door that opened onto a splendid garden, where she and Daffy could enjoy warm evenings and quiet weekends. Mr. Moseley (now that they weren’t working together, he asked her to call him Bent)drove up on weekends to visit Daphne Stewart, with whom he was romantically involved. Occasionally, he would drop in at Jackman’s office to ask Lizzy to go out to dinner with him, or to a movie or a concert, and she always said yes. After all, she wasn’t working for him, she did enjoy his company, and Grady was out of the picture. Lizzy (who had always treasured stability and predictability) was learning to be comfortable with the idea of “temporary,” and it felt temporarily right to spend a few hours every couple of weeks with her former boss.
    But aside from seeing Bent, Lizzy didn’t go out. Instead, she gave herself permission to do something she’d been wanting to do for a very long time. With her second paycheck (her first went for two pretty dresses, a pair of summer shoes, and a new red leather collar for Daffy), she bought a reconditioned Royal typewriter. She put it on a little table in front of a window overlooking the garden, equipped herself with a comfortable chair, and began to write about the characters who had been living in a corner of her mind like a group of silent friends and neighbors.
    Lizzy had always been a good writer. For years, she had written the weekly “Garden Gate” column for the
Dispatch
, including notes about plants in local gardens and wild plants from the woods and fields and streams around Darling. Her readers began sending clippings to their friends in other cities, and it wasn’t long before she was receiving letters from all over the South, asking gardening questions or telling her about the writers’ experiences with the plants she had written about.
    Gardening wasn’t Lizzy’s only subject, though. She occasionally wrote a feature story for the
Dispatch
, and she kept a small notebook in her purse where she could jot down vignettes of people she met, places that seized herimagination, and events that piqued her curiosity. While nothing very big or exciting ever happened in Darling, there were always more little things to notice than you might expect, surprising crises that poked up unexpectedly out of the quiet surface of everyday life. She cherished the people who lived in her imagination, and deep in her heart, her secret heart, she half believed that if she wrote about them, if she told their stories, they might actually become real. And the only way to find out