Except that her mother had a key.

This was a new situation—it had just happened the week before—and Lizzy was still quietly fuming about it. Mrs. Lacy had apparently lifted Lizzy’s spare key from its hook by the back door and taken it to Musgrove’s Hardware, where she said that her daughter wanted her to have a copy. Lizzy knew about this bald-faced lie, because Mr. Musgrove had happened to mention it to her when she stopped in to get a new rubber plug for her bathtub. She hadn’t yet decided whether to tell her mother to hand over the copied key or have Mr. Musgrove install new locks on the front and back doors. Either way, there was going to be a battle.

But Lizzy always tried to see things from both sides of the question and give the other person the benefit of the doubt. On balance, she felt that her mother probably wouldn’t use the key very often, and she was determined not to let it disturb the pleasure she felt each time she put her very own key in the lock of her very own door and turned it.

“Come on, Daffy,” she said, as the cat rubbed against her ankles, purring an enthusiastic welcome. “Let’s get you some milk.”

Stepping inside, Lizzy took a deep breath of the faint lemony fragrance she used to polish the furniture and savored the quiet that fell on her like a shawl every time she came in. On the left, a flight of stairs led up to two small bedrooms. On the right, a wide doorway opened into a little parlor, which she had furnished with a very nice Mission-style leather cushioned sofa, a chair she had reupholstered in dark brown corduroy, and a Tiffany-style lamp with a stained-glass shade. She had paid seven dollars and fifty cents for that lamp—far too much, she knew, but she had fallen in love with its amber-colored light, which gleamed richly against the refinished pine floors. Behind the parlor was the kitchen with a tiny dining nook, just big enough for two, looking out on the garden. At the end of the hall was a large storage room, part of which she had converted into a bathroom with a claw-footed tub, tiny sink, pull-chain toilet, and newly tiled floor. (Mr. Flagg had used the privy behind the garage.) It was the most perfect house in the world, she felt, and—after all the quarrelsome years she had lived with her mother—a perfectly private place, almost like a sanctuary.

She went down the hall to the kitchen, Daffy running eagerly ahead of her, and stopped stock-still in the doorway. In the middle of the oilcloth-covered table was her last-year’s blue felt cloche, newly decorated with exquisite peacock feathers and glass beads, all shades of blue—a gift from her mother, no doubt. Beside it was a folded note.

Her eyes narrowing, Lizzy picked it up. It was written in her mother’s hand, telling her to look inside the refrigerator, where she found four thick slices of Sally-Lou’s meat loaf (one of Lizzy’s favorite dishes), a large bowl of potato salad, two ripe tomatoes, and two pieces of apple pie. The note said that since there was enough food for two people, Mrs. Lacy was planning to join Lizzy for supper at six o’clock.