I pushed away from the counter and went over to him. I grabbed a can of Tasty Tenders from the cupboard. “Okay, you can have Tasty Tenders and I’ll have the peanut butter and banana sandwich.” I reached down to stroke the top of his head.
He licked his lips and pushed his head against my hand.
I got Elvis his breakfast and a dish of fresh water. He started eating and I eyed the two dry crusts and brown banana. The cat’s food looked better than mine.
I reached for the peanut butter jar, hoping that maybe there was somehow enough stuck to the bottom to at least spread on one of the ends of bread, and there was a knock on my door.
Elvis lifted his head and looked at me. “Mrrr,” he said.
“I heard,” I said, heading for the living room. It wasn’t seven o’clock, but I was pretty sure I knew who it was at the door.
And I was right. Rose was standing there, holding a plate with a bowl upside down like a cover. “Good morning, Sarah,” she said. She held out the plate. “I’m afraid my eyes were a little bit bigger than my stomach this morning. Would you be a dear and finish this for me? I hate to waste food.” She smiled at me, her gray eyes the picture of guilelessness.
I folded my arms over my chest. “You know, if you don’t tell the truth, your nose is going to grow.”
Rose lifted one hand and smoothed her index finger across the bridge of her nose. “I have my mother’s nose,” she said. “Not to sound vain, but it is perfectly proportioned.” She paused. “And petite.” She offered the plate again.
“You’re spoiling me,” I said.
“No, I’m not,” she retorted. “Spoiling implies that your character has been somehow weakened, and that’s not at all true.”
I shook my head and took the plate from her. It was still warm. I could smell cinnamon and maybe cheese?
There was no point in ever arguing with Rose. It was like arguing with an alligator. There was no way it was going to end well for you.
“Come in,” I said, heading back to the kitchen with my food. I set the plate on the counter and lifted the bowl. Underneath I found a mound of fluffy scrambled eggs, tomatoes that had been fried with onions and some herbs I couldn’t identify and a bran muffin studded with raisins. Rose was a big believer in a daily dose of fiber.
It all looked even better than it smelled, and it smelled wonderful.
Rose was leaning forward, talking to Elvis. She was small but mighty, barely five feet tall in her sensible shoes, with her white hair in an equally sensible short cut.
I bent down and kissed the top of her head as I moved around her to get a knife and fork. “I love you,” I said. “Thank you.”
“I love you, too, dear,” she said. “And thank you for helping me out.”
Okay, so we were going to continue with the fiction that Rose had cooked too much food for breakfast. “Could I get you a cup of . . .” I looked around the kitchen. I was out of coffee and tea. And milk. “Water?” I finished.
“No, thank you,” Rose said. “I already had my tea.”
I speared some egg and a little of the tomatoes and onions with my fork. “Ummm, that’s good,” I said, putting a hand to my mouth because I was talking around a mouthful of food. Elvis was at my feet looking expectantly up at me. I picked up a tiny bit of the scrambled egg with my fingers and offered it to him.
He took it from me, ate and then cocked his head at Rose and meowed softly.
“You’re very welcome, Elvis,” she said.
“Why don’t my eggs taste like this?” I asked, reaching for the muffin. Scrambled eggs were one of the few things I could make more or less successfully.
“I don’t know.” Rose looked around my kitchen. Aside from the two crusts of bread, the empty peanut butter jar and the mushy banana on the counter, it was clean and neat. Since I rarely cooked, it never got messy. “How do you cook your eggs?”
I shrugged and broke the muffin in half. “In a bowl in the microwave.”
She gave her head a dismissive shake. “You need a cast-iron skillet if you want to make decent eggs.” She smiled at me. “Alfred and I will take you shopping this weekend.”
I nodded, glad that my mouth was full so I didn’t have to commit to a shopping trip with Rose and her gentleman friend Alfred Peterson.
It wasn’t that I didn’t like Mr. P. I did. When Rose had been evicted from Legacy Place, the seniors’ building she derisively referred to as Shady Pines, I let her move into the small apartment at the back of my old Victorian. Mr. P. had generously made a beautiful cat tower for Elvis as a thank-you to me. He was kind and smart and he adored Rose. I didn’t even mind—that much—that Alfred had the sort of computer-hacking skills that were usually seen in a George Clooney movie and he was usually using them over my Wi-Fi.
It was just that I knew if I went shopping with the two of them, I was apt to come home with one of every kitchen gadget that could be found in North Harbor, Maine. Rose had made it her mission in life to teach me to cook, no matter how impossible I was starting to think that was. And Mr. P. had already—gently, because he was unfailingly polite—expressed his dismay over the fact that I didn’t have a French press in my kitchen.
Rose smiled at me again. “Enjoy your breakfast,” she said. “I need to go clean up my kitchen.”
“Do you want to drive to the shop with me?” I asked. “Or Mac and I can come and get you when we’re ready to head out to Edison Hall’s place.”
Rose worked part-time for me at my shop, Second Chance. Second Chance was a repurpose shop. It was part antiques store and part thrift shop. We sold furniture, dishes, quilts—many things repurposed from their original use, like the teacups we’d turned into planters and the tub chair that in its previous life had actually been a bathtub.
Our stock came from a lot of different places: flea markets, yard sales, people looking to downsize. I bought fairly regularly from a couple of trash pickers. Several times in the past year that the store had been open, we’d been hired to go through and handle the sale of the contents of someone’s home—usually someone who was going from a house to an apartment. This time we were going to clean out the property of Edison Hall. He had died over the winter and clearing out the house had turned out to be too much for his son and his sister.
Calling the old man a pack rat was putting it nicely. Rose and Mac were going with me to get started on the house, along with Elvis, because I’d heard rustling in several of the rooms in the old place and I was certain it wasn’t the wind in the eaves.
“Why don’t I just come with you?” Rose said. “That will save you having to come back and get me.”
“All right,” I said, picking up a piece of the muffin and wishing I had coffee. “Does half an hour give you enough time?”
She smiled at me. “It does.”
I put down my fork to walk her to the door, but she waved one hand at me. “Eat,” she ordered, already heading for the living room. “I can see myself out.”
I stuffed the bite of muffin in my mouth and waved over my shoulder as the door closed behind her.
I finished my breakfast, sharing another bite of the scrambled eggs with Elvis. He followed me into the bathroom, washing his face while I brushed my teeth. When we came out of the apartment, Rose was just coming out of hers.
“Perfect timing,” she said, bustling over to us, as usual carrying one of her oversize tote bags.
Ever since I’d seen the movie Mary Poppins, I’d thought that Rose’s bags were like the magical nanny’s carpetbag. You just never knew what was going to be inside. This one looked as if it had been made from the same blue-striped canvas as a train engineer’s hat.
“I have coffee just in case we’re out,” Rose said, patting the side of the carryall with one hand.
“Just coffee?” I asked as I picked up the canvas tote at my own feet. Mine was filled with a stack of thrift store sweaters that I’d brought home and felted for my friend Jess.