The Darling Dahlias and the Naked Ladies

Lizzy sighed. More condescension. And worse, after he had come into the office one day last spring and caught Grady kissing her, Mr. Moseley never missed a chance to tease her about the relationship. That had happened just about the time that Mr. Moseley’s wife Adabelle—a willowy debutant from a wealthy Birmingham family with important political connections around the state—announced that she was going home to Mama and Daddy and taking the two Moseley daughters with her. A month or two after that, Mr. Moseley had asked Lizzy to go with him to the tent theater over in Frisco City. A few weeks later, he tried again. They had been working late, getting ready for a trial on a civil matter, and he asked her to go to supper at the Old Alabama.

Both times, she had said no. For one thing, his divorce from Mrs. Moseley wouldn’t be final for some time yet, and Lizzy had made up her mind a long time ago that she would never date a married man. For another, she thought that going out with her boss would unnecessarily complicate things in the office. Carrying a torch for him had been okay, because she had known that nothing would ever come of it. She was proud of the fact that she had successfully extinguished those unruly feelings several years before, and she had no intention of reigniting them. Anyway, there was Grady. She wasn’t going to go out with Mr. Moseley as long as she was going out with Grady, and that was that.

She frowned. “No, Grady and I did not do too much partying this weekend,” she retorted, nettled. “He’s out of town. I didn’t even see him.”

“Ah-ha! No Grady?” He quirked one eyebrow in that annoyingly superior way of his. “You mean, there’s hope for me, after all?” He straightened and held up his hand, forestalling whatever she had been about to say. “Seriously, Liz, what is it? What’s wrong? You look like you didn’t get much sleep last night.”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Lizzy lied. She lifted her chin. “I’m fine.” While she had been tossing and turning and trying to come up with a way to deal with her mother’s foreclosure, she had thought of talking it over with Mr. Moseley. He dealt with property matters all the time, and he might be able to come up with a simple solution to the problem. But she had decided that he would have to be a last resort. If he helped her out, she would be deeply in his debt. Mr. Moseley was a gentleman and would never use that to pressure her in any way, but still— She pushed back her chair and stood. “Today’s files are on your desk, Mr. Moseley. I’ll get your coffee.”

Mr. Moseley looked at her for a moment. “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll be leaving for Montgomery before lunch. Why don’t you treat yourself? Take the afternoon off. You’ve worked late several times lately. You’ve got it coming.”

“Oh, I couldn’t!” Lizzy said quickly. “There’s so much to—”

“No, there isn’t,” he said. He smiled at her. “Boss’s orders. No argument, now. You’re taking the afternoon off.” Then he turned and went into his office.

Lizzy stared after him. An afternoon off? Well, she could certainly use the time, couldn’t she? She could walk over to the bank and talk to Mr. Johnson about her mother’s foreclosure. Surely she could persuade him to put off the eviction for a few weeks—maybe even until after the holidays. It would be cruel to throw somebody out now, with Thanksgiving and Christmas on the way. And even though her mother’s house was nice and well maintained, it wasn’t likely that anybody would be interested in buying during the holidays. In fact, with so many empty houses for sale, it might not sell at all.

Feeling grateful to Mr. Moseley for letting her take some time off, Lizzy sat back down at her desk and pulled out the big leather-bound account ledger. Between the long drought and the low cotton prices, the farmers had had a difficult time of it in the past few years. Some of Mr. Moseley’s clients had begun paying their legal bills in kind, bringing eggs, boxes of figs, and lard pails full of fresh robbed honeycomb to the office, not to mention a few live chickens. Mr. Moseley always accepted these payments, told Liz how much to credit against what was owing, and then carted everything over to the Presbyterian Church for its Food for the Darling Needy program. This morning, she caught up the accounting quickly, finished typing the notes, then typed two legal documents that would be needed later in the week—with carbons, which she hated, since she had to erase every mistake and retype the correction carefully, to avoid smudging. Typing carbons slowed her down.

The bookkeeping and typing finished, Lizzy got up and went to the stack of case files that were waiting for filing in the gray metal cabinets on either side of the front windows. She was just getting started when she heard hasty footsteps on the stairs, the door opened, and Bessie Bloodworth burst in. She was wearing a lace-colored mauve cambric dress and what looked like a freshly done shampoo and set, her springy, precise salt-and-pepper curls peeking out from under her straw sailor hat.