Free The Sweetest Thing by Elizabeth Musser

coming home with me.”
    She was standing in that grand entrance hall, talking to skinny ol’ Jimmy as if they were good friends. She turned to me and, with a huge smile on her face, said, “I just knew you’d invite me. Yes, of course I’ll come! Let me get a few things.” She spun around in a circle and then hurried up the stairs.
    Jimmy raised an eyebrow but said nothing. Dobbs came back downstairs with her pitiful suitcase and called out to Parthenia, who was down the hall in the kitchen, “I’m going over to the Singletons’ with Perri.”
    The little girl came into the hall, holding a wooden spoon, her hands on her hips. I laughed behind my hand, seeing the colored girl in her pinafore walk up to Dobbs—she didn’t even come to her shoulders—and challenge Dobbs with her big black eyes. “Ain’t proper to impose yourself on people who is grieving,” she said.
    Dobbs was unperturbed. “It’s none of your business, Parthenia. You just relay the message to Mrs. Chandler when she gets back.”
    As Jimmy drove us up the long, winding drive that led to my house, I marveled at the heaviness that came over me. I stared at the home that had been called an architectural treasure of Atlanta, a house that Daddy had helped his father build when Daddy was a young teen.
    Eventually, when Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind was published in 1936, everyone started calling the house Tara because it fit that description, but this was 1933, and we had not heard of Tara or Scarlett O’Hara at the time.
    Perched high up on a hill on Wesley Road, with a driveway that climbed and twisted around, our house appeared from behind a forest of trees as if in a dream—a three-storied white-brick mansion with six white columns out front and black shutters on the big windows, with front and back porches and big magnolia trees that surrounded the house. Everything that had at one time meant home and comfort and beauty now looked gray, as if a thin layer of ash had swept in on the breeze and settled on our house and yard.
    A sickening feeling hit me hard in the stomach, just as real as if my little brother had punched me there, which happened occasionally. Dobbs noticed—she noticed everything—and looped her arm through mine as we walked up to the house. She called back to Jimmy, “Thank you kindly for the ride.”
    Mamma met me at the front door, and she looked just as ashy gray as the house, and I thought no amount of makeup would have been able to cover up her grief. She grabbed me and held me tight, strangling tight, for a long minute.
    Struggling out of her embrace, I asked, “Mamma, is it all right if Mary Dobbs stays with me tonight? I’d really appreciate it.”
    Sweet Mamma, thin and bone weary, reached out her delicate hands, took Dobbs by the shoulders, looked her straight in the eyes, and said, “It would be our great pleasure to have you with us tonight, Mary Dobbs.” What I read on Mamma’s face was a whole lot of gratitude.
    I found I couldn’t grieve for long with Dobbs around. Life for her was such an adventure, and she found excitement in every detail. Upstairs in my room, which she proclaimed “extravagant,” she waltzed over to one of the walls where four photos of our house and yard, taken at different seasons, hung in simple wooden frames. She stared at them and then at me and then at them again. “These are magnificent. Perceptive. They’re yours, aren’t they?”
    I gave a little nod. “Yes. I took the photographs.”
    â€œI knew it! The minute I set eyes on you, I knew you had potential.”
    â€œPotential?” Honestly, Dobbs talked in enigmas sometimes.
    â€œTo see the world from a different perspective. You know—‘the eye is the window to the soul.’ ”
    I nodded, recalling the words written in that little blue book, and said, “Oh