The Darling Dahlias and the Silver Dollar Bush

Usually, Lizzy sauntered along the street. But Grady would soon be there and she was in a hurry to get home. So she walked fast, thinking about what she was going to wear to the movies and looking forward to the ride to Monroeville on such a nice spring evening. She hadn’t seen Grady in a week or so, and she wanted to catch up on all his news.

A few moments later, she was climbing the front porch steps of her house and greeting her sweet orange cat, Daffodil, who always sat on the porch swing, waiting for her. Daffy jumped down and followed her as she unlocked the green-painted front door and stepped inside, feeling the special pleasure that always settled over her like a comfortable shawl when she stepped into the tiny front hall. She had wallpapered it with tiny pink roses on a white background and hung a gold-framed oval mirror she’d rescued from a pile of discards when Mr. Harrison’s son had cleaned out his house. The mirror was hung beside a row of brass-plated coat hooks, where she kept her ragged green sweater and her straw garden hat.

Her house had been a “rescue,” too. It had belonged to old Mr. Flagg, who had lived across the street from Lizzy and her mother for as long as she could remember. After he died, the dilapidated frame bungalow was put up for sale. Through Mr. Moseley, Lizzy had arranged to buy it—without saying a word to her mother about what she was doing. She was afraid her mother would interfere. And she was half afraid that her mother would try to stop her. It was better to hire workmen and get the place entirely finished and ready to move in, and then tell her. So all Mrs. Lacy could do was watch the renovations and wonder out loud who in the world was putting all that work and money into that little old house.

And it was little. In fact, it was a miniature, like a little dollhouse. It had a postage-stamp parlor, a minute kitchen, two small upstairs bedrooms with slanted ceilings, a narrow front porch just wide enough for a white-painted porch swing, and a little screened-in back porch. But the backyard was ten times bigger than the house, with sunflowers and a fig tree and pink roses on the trellis, and a kitchen garden just a step away from the back porch. As far as Lizzy was concerned, her dollhouse was perfect, and it was perfect because it was hers.

Mrs. Lacy had always been a domineering mother, and when she found out that it was her daughter who had bought the old house and renovated it—without so much as a by-your-leave—she pitched a fit. A widow, Mrs. Lacy had planned that Elizabeth, her only child, would live with her until she got married, and then she would have a home to go to when she couldn’t (or didn’t want to) manage for herself—not a plan that Lizzy could endorse with any enthusiasm. And even though her new house wasn’t quite far enough away to serve as an escape from her mother’s daily interference—it was, after all, just across the street—it gave Lizzy at least some of the privacy she craved.

And that privacy was her deepest joy. For the first time in her thirty-plus years, Lizzy held the key to her own life. She could step into her own sweet little house, close the door behind her, and be perfectly at home. Lizzy didn’t need company: she loved books and dreamed of one day writing one herself. And if she wanted to hear a human voice, she could talk to Daffy, who never ever talked back.

But while the house was plenty big enough for Lizzy and her cat, it wasn’t big enough for two people, and therein lay the rub, at least as far as Grady Alexander saw it. He and Lizzy had been dating for several years, and if he’d had his way, they would have been married by now—if only she hadn’t gone and installed herself in a miniature house that would be a very tight fit for a man and his wife, not to mention a man and his wife and his sons (and maybe a daughter or two or three, if the sons were slow in coming).