“Your daddy wrote a letter to get a letter?” asked a fourth girl.
Frida nodded, a serious expression on her face.“It was an important letter.”
“But how did he know the letter hadn’t arrived if it hadn’t arrived?” asked a fifth girl, evidencing a keen logic.
This had Jackie stumped for a while, but she quickly rallied.“He must have had a letter telling him he’d get the letter, which is how he knew he didn’t get the letter. The second letter, I mean, not the first, which is when he wrote the third letter.”
Nods of understanding made the girls’ heads bob up and down like a stadium wave, but then Mabel drew their attention to the problem at hand once more.
She was still holding the letters in her grubby little hands.“So what now?” she asked. She’d discovered that the letters were closed, the flaps tucked neatly into their designated opposite flaps, and that there were nice stamps on the letters, and an address written in a sort of spidery scrawl. If she’d been a regular visitor to the doctor, she wouldhave recognized the near-illegible handwriting as typical for your up-and-coming medico. But since her reading skills weren’t all that well-developed yet, she had a hard time deciphering the address.
One of the other girls said they all seemed to be addressed to the same street: Harrington Street. And Mabel, whose daddy sometimes talked shop during dinner, said,“This means that all these letters are for people on this street.”
“So let’s post them,” Jackie suggested. “And let’s make all the people happy.”
The idea warmed Mabel’s heart. The notion of an undelivered letter gave this mailman’s daughter the pip, and so the mission quickly took on the nature of a sacred assignment. A mission to help all mail-persons the world over.
The next few minutes were spent separating the stack of letters into equal piles, to be divided amongst the members of the troop. It took a while, for there were sixteen letters in all, but only five members, and sixteen doesn’t divide by five, so one of the girls was going to have to distribute six letters instead of five. But since Mabel had made this great find, she took it upon herself to carry the extra load.
And it must be said, she did it with gusto. If one good deed promises an uplifted heart and a happy community, imagine what six good deeds will do!
And as Marge Poole idly gazed out of the window, nursing a cup of coffee, and wondering why five girl scouts were rummaging through the pile of attic detritus her husband had placed on the sidewalk, the love letters Tex had written to her more than twenty-five years ago, during a brief but intense courtship, were now on the verge of being redistributed amongst the couple’s friends and neighbors.
CHAPTER 3
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Popular opinion has it that cats don’t enjoy the company of other cats. That we’re solitary animals and won’t tolerate the kind of intrusion to our peace and quiet other cats—or even dogs—bring. And I have to say that on the whole I don’t mind living in a household with three other cats. But sometimes it gets too much. Like today, for instance. I’d just plunged into that pleasant state of drowsiness that is so rewarding, when a sharp voice hauled me out of my slumber.
“Max! What are you doing?”
It was Harriet, entering the bedroom, clearly on the lookout for yours truly.
“I was sleeping,” I announced, lazily opening one eye to take in the newcomer.
“How do I look?” she asked, and since I know that Harriet won’t take satisfaction from just a cursory glance, I opened my second eye to give her the once-over.
“You look… like you always look,” I said, hedging my bets.
“In other words…” she insisted, not letting me off the hook.
“Great!” I said, injecting a modicum of cheerfulness into my voice, inasmuch as one can be cheerful to the person who’s just interrupted a perfectly nice nap.
“You could be more specific, Max,” she lamented. “Great is so generic.”
“Well…” I said, going through my mental thesaurus. “You look, um, amazing?”
But her grimace told me I was wide off the mark.“You, Dooley?” she said.
Dooley, who’s often slower than me in the waking-up department, blinked and stared at our friend, not comprehending. “Me Dooley,” he said finally. “You Harriet?”
“Oh, for crying out loud!” Harriet said, rolling a pair of very expressive green eyes. “Can I get some constructive criticism here,por favor?”
Brutus, who’d also wandered into the room, now said, “You look radiant, sweet pea. Your fur is shinier than the brightest diamond, your eyes are like the twin pools of a crystal mountain lake, and your visage the epitome of loveliness.”
Brutus had clearly been reading love poems again. Lately he’s taken to browsing websites that cater to the amateur poet, and it showed.
“Oh, sweetie pie,” said Harriet, her voice suddenly a purr. “Nowthat’s the kind of stuff your budding model likes to hear. You don’t think I’m too fat, do you?”
“Not too fat,” said Brutus quickly. “Slim like a reed swaying in the breeze.”
“Mh,” said Harriet. Clearly this particular simile wasn’t as apt as the others.
“What’s all this about a budding model?” I asked. I might have been napping, but that didn’t mean my brain had been fully switched off.
Harriet preened a little.“Guess who’s been selected to feature on the cover of next month’sCat Life?”
“Fifi?” Dooley suggested, referring to our canine neighbor.
“CAT Life, Dooley,” Harriet snapped. “NotDog Life.”
Dooley thought hard, then finally brightened.“Shanille?”
“No, not Shanille!” Harriet cried. “Me, Dooley, me!”
“You?” asked Dooley, and his surprise was so palpable it took the bloom off the rose of Harriet’s excitement, for she directed a dark frown at my friend. Dooley, being Dooley, hardly noticed. “But why you?” he insisted. “You’re not a model.”
“Well, I’m a model now, so you better get used to it,” she said. “And incidentally, you’ve all been recruited as members of my team.”
“And what team is that?” asked Dooley innocently.
“Team Harriet, what else?” she snapped, her patience wearing thin.
“I didn’t know you played football,” said Dooley, interested.
“Oh, Dooley,” Harriet sighed, then turned to me. “I want you to be my spotter, Max.”
“Your what?” I asked, stifling a yawn.
“Spotter. You’re going to keep a close eye on me and tell me if anything is off.”
I stared at her. I could see a lot that was off, but didn’t know if it was a good idea to tell her. Her lack of respect for a person’s nap time, for one thing.
Brutus, who could see I was struggling with the concept, now piped up,“A person changes from day to day, Max. And the weird thing is that you don’t always notice such changes yourself. So it’s up to others to draw your attention to them.”
“And what changes would this be?” I asked carefully.
“The luster of my coat, for one thing,” said Harriet, holding out a paw. “Or the absence of spots on my nose, for another.”
“So Max has to spot your spots?” asked Dooley, trying valiantly to keep up.
“Yes, Dooley,” said Harriet with an expressive eyeroll. “Max has to spot my spots.”
“And me?” asked Dooley, who seemed to like this new game. “What do you want me to do?”
Harriet gave him a look of such disdain it would have frozen a lesser cat dead on the spot. But not Dooley, who was genuinely excited about the prospect of becoming something big on Team Harriet, whatever it was.
“You can watch my diet,” she said after a moment’s reflection. “Make sure I don’t eat anything fattening, or generally designed to disagree with me.”
“So you want me to chew your food for you?” asked Dooley, puzzled.