“I wish Harry could walk in right now,” Mama kept saying. “I’ll bet Harry’s never met anybody like Rosetta, don’t you, Mrs. Friend?”

While the ladies were drying their hair in the backyard among the elderberry bushes and sunflowers, Lena and Marcia took turns trying on the performer’s rose costume and flapping their arms about to make a rose, until Marcia put her stout boot through the silk where Mama had mended it, so they hastily put the whole thing back in the trunk. Florrie had whizzed around in her walker and gouged out the chocolate frosting on a newly baked cake that Mama had set on the windowsill to cool, so the children, chastened by their misdemeanors and aware of imminent correction, tried to entertain themselves in more pious ways, such as washing dishes. On Marcia’s inspiration they tried shampooing Florrie’s scanty blond curls to shrieks of rage. When the three ladies came in, still giggling from mysterious secrets, Mama was so excited she did not notice the mischief they had created. The women sat before the dresser mirror in the downstairs bedroom trying their hair in new ways Rosetta recommended from pictures in the Sunday Cincinnati Enquirer. Mama read aloud “Durandel’s Gossip” and “Clarabelle’s Chatter of Women and Their Ways” from the paper. Rosetta ordered some soap from Mama’s Larkin Soap Catalogue and enough geranium toilet water to win Mama the special premium of a hand-painted jardiniere. She would send the money from Mansfield where the troupe was performing next week.

“Don’t forget to look up Harry,” Mama said. “He’ll be at the Parker House till Wednesday. Harry Willard, care of London Furniture Company.”

“It’ll be a real pleasure, dear,” Rosetta assured her warmly. “I’ll have George give him free passes to all the tents. I’ll tell him you suggested it, dear.”

Mama was beaming at thought of the pleasure Harry was soon to have all due to her, and perhaps at the thought of this indirect way of being in touch with him. She and Mrs. Friend sat in the bedroom talking excitedly in their kimonos long after the carnival man had come to take Rosetta and her trunk away. They cut up the cake Florrie had ruined and Mama only laughed about it because she was so excited at what a thrill Rosetta was going to have meeting Harry and how astonished Harry would be at meeting such an unusual friend of his wife’s. Before dark they washed their hair again to get the white of egg out of it because, as Mrs. Friend ruefully put it, the egg dried like glue in the hair, no fault of Rosetta’s of course, but their own for not doing it right.

That night Mama moved back in her own bedroom and she let Lena sleep with her because she had an earache. Marcia stayed upstairs alone for a little while and then came down purposefully.

“I have an earache, too,” she stated firmly.

Her mother laughed.

“All right, climb in, rascal,” she said.