day off since the rest of us had already had most of the week off, Jo and Laurie had had their fight and were not speaking as far as I could tell, and my hands were only beginning to lose the lobster-red color they’d acquired that day on the lake.
Rotten rowboats.
And rotten Hannah for accepting Marmee’s offer of a day off.
Wasn’t anybody going to do any work around here anymore?
With Hannah off, there was no fire in the kitchen, no breakfast in the dining room. No breakfast?!
With that bracing thought in mind, I offered to help Meg, who’d wanted to surprise Marmee with breakfast in bed.
But even preparing a simple meal like breakfast proved a challenge in the 1800s. Meg had obviously never done so before, and while I had, there were no Pop-Tarts nor was there a microwave to be found.
Suffice it to say we burned everything, which Marmee didn’t seem to mind at all.
Then Jo informed us she’d make our dinner. Apparently, while we were busy upstairs delivering the burned breakfast to Marmee, Jo was busy putting a letter in the post office for Laurie. She’d invited him to dinner, I guessed to make up for the argument she’d instigated.
I didn’t offer to help Jo like I had with Meg.
But that was okay, Jo said, she had everything under control.
“I may not know how to make a salad,” Jo said, wrapping an apron around her waist, “but I’ve a book here that will tell me.”
“You don’t need a book to make salad,” I said. “Just rip up some lettuce and toss it in a bowl!”
“How would you know?” Jo looked down her nose at me. “And anyway, I’m fairly certain there’s a lot more to it than that!”
“Not much.” I grabbed an apple from the bowl on the table. “But suit yourself.”
As I exited the room, I heard Jo muttering something about lobsters and strawberries.
It was going to be a fun dinner.
And it would have been a fun dinner, if Pip hadn’t died.
“Poor Pip is dead!” I heard Beth scream, her voice trailing off into a heartbreaking sob.
With no clue what she was talking about, I raced through the house after the sound of her.
When I found her, she was using the hem of her skirt to wipe at her eyes as sobs shook her shoulders. In the room with her was a birdcage, inside of which lay a dead canary.
Huh. I hadn’t even noticed we had a canary!
“There, there,” I soothed.
Awkwardly, I fitted my arms around Beth. I’d never been very good at the whole hugging thing, but I was sad to see her so upset, even if it was only over a bird.
Then, before I knew it, the others were in the room with us. When Beth tried to blame herself for Pip’s death, because perhaps she had forgotten to feed him during her week of leisure, the others pooh-poohed this. One of my brain-surgeon sisters even offered to put Pip in the oven in the hopes of reviving him.
“We can have a funeral right after my dinner party,” Jo offered, a bit self-absorbedly I thought—after all, we’d had a death here!—but it seemed to calm Beth.
Sooooo …
Jo went to market, Marmee went out to dinner, a gossipy spinster named Miss Crocker—who was apparently a friend of the family even though I’d never met her before—showed up expecting to eat with us, Laurie came, Jo rang the dinner bell an hour late, and the food she made was gross.
Salt instead of sugar with strawberries?
I think not.
And then we had the funeral.
As we stood in the backyard, Laurie—being the only man and therefore the strongest, as he would no doubt want people to know—used a small spade and dug a hole in the earth where Beth could lay Pip before the cats got to him. In fact, she’d been carrying his dead body in her pocket all day to avoid the problem of the cats, in spite of my warnings that it might not be the healthiest thing to do. Unfortunately, I couldn’t tell her that any self-respecting health inspector would shut this place down in a minute for all the violations—Beth had gone from cradling a dead canary to the table without a hand-washing in sight!
But none of that mattered now as poor Pip was finally laid to rest.
It was as Beth bravely tossed the first clod of earth over his body that the first involuntary sob broke from me. I don’t know why. Maybe it