The Sweetest Thing by Elizabeth Musser Page A

the most wonderful news. The absolute best in the world.”
    â€œWhat are you talking about? And why are you all dressed up?”
    â€œWell, I don’t have anything else except my school uniforms and my potato sack.” She flashed me a smile. I expected Dobbs to start twirling around, but instead she grabbed my hand, pulled me back to the car, and said so sweetly, “Jimmy, can you please take us to the Chandlers’?”
    Jimmy gave her another one of his suspicious looks but nodded.
    We hopped in the back seat of the Buick, and Dobbs started explaining, “Well, it came to me in the middle of French class yesterday. After that I could not pay one bit of attention, and when I got home, I went straight to Aunt Josie and told her my idea and she thought it was fabulous, and we have already gotten Hosea and Cornelius working on it out in the barn, and even Uncle Robert smiled when I told him—and you know he can be quite a sourpuss. He said, ‘Mary Dobbs, I believe that is a very sensible idea and may even prove to be helpful in a financial way,’ and so anyway, it’s almost as good as done. So I—”
    She would have continued, but I was not particularly in a mood for her wild tangents. “Slow down, will you? What in the world are you talking about?” I thought of Peggy’s criticism of the way Dobbs launched into her speech in history class.
    â€œThe darkroom!” she said.
    â€œThe darkroom?”
    â€œ Your darkroom! For you to develop your photographs.” She said this as if her words made the most perfect sense.
    â€œI’ve told you I already have the use of the school’s darkroom.”
    â€œBut that’s so inconvenient. You can only go there when the school is open. This is going to be all yours. A little room built right in the Chandlers’ barn, right next to Dynamite’s stall. You can come any time of the night or day. Pretty soon—I’ve got it all figured out—you’ll be selling your prints for a nickel apiece, and then, well, who knows? You’ll establish yourself in the community, and it will be money for the family. I just know it will work!”
    I wanted to be mad at Dobbs. I wanted to ask her who in the world she thought she was, waltzing into my life and making plans for how I could help my family. I had always been perfectly competent at planning, and I liked to do things in an orderly way. But as she rattled on with her cockamamie idea about a darkroom in the Chandlers’ barn and the freedom to work there anytime night or day and the fact that perhaps I could sell my photographs, something in me perked up, so that by the time we arrived at the Chandler property I was truly excited about the possibility, and I hopped out of the Buick and let Dobbs pull me along to the barn. Then I actually felt butterflies flittering in my stomach as I watched Hosea and Cornelius hammering away, building a little room right beside the stall of a small bay mare. And eventually I felt the slightest twinge of hope settle in my soul.
    â€”——
    Two weeks after Daddy took his life, Mamma let boys start coming to see me again. Up until his death, on weekdays, when I’d get home from school, I’d sit in the formal living room in cold weather, or on the front porch of the house when it warmed up enough, and entertain several young men from Boys High or college boys from Emory and Oglethorpe and Georgia Tech. And on Sunday afternoons, many girls at Washington Seminary, like me, had front porches filled with boys. Pop-calling was the term we used. We didn’t have a date; boys just “popped in” to see us.
    On that Sunday, I heard the doorbell ring, and I leaned out my upstairs window in just the right way—no one could see me, but I could see them down below—as Mamma opened the front door. I felt a little hiccup in my heart when I recognized the young man as Spalding Smith, a junior at