“Oh yes!” said Mrs. Brookman. “Cooks up a treat. Gladys, get out here.”

Gladys was apparently skulking about the back room because she appeared through the curtained doorway two seconds later. I had my doubts about her. For one thing, as I’ve said, in books cooks were older women, so she seemed awfully young. Her look was all wrong as well. She wasn’t fat, as she should have been, but slim with a lot of frizzy blond hair and a lot of makeup. More makeup than you generally saw women wearing in these parts. And her dress was unkempt and yet the latest fashion. That’s something else you didn’t often see around here. All of us girls at school knew the latest fashions and passed about pictures from catalogs and such when we had them, but nobody we knew, not our teachers or mothers or the ladies at Brookman’s, used to making do since the war, ever dressed in these fashionable clothes. But here was someone with a fashionable dress, something many of us would have given our eyeteeth for, and yet she hadn’t bothered to keep it nice. Had it been any of us girls, lucky enough to own a dress like that, we would have kept it clean and pressed, in mint condition hanging in the closet and brought it out only on the most special of occasions. The casual way with which Gladys treated it, well, there was just something not very nice about it. In fact, there was just something not quite right about Gladys. You could tell at first glance. And she was grubby. There was at least a good week’s accumulation of dirt under her fingernails, and her hair didn’t look like it had been brushed in a while; there was a ratty bit sticking up at the back. All in all, she didn’t look like someone you’d want messing around with your food.

“Gladys, Mrs. Whitekraft is here to offer you a job.”

“Must be a mistake,” said Gladys, turning and heading back behind the curtained doorway. “Because I didn’t apply for none.”

“Get back out here, Gladys. It’s your lucky day. You didn’t apply for none—uh, one—but one has been offered to you. Mrs. Whitekraft needs a cook. You can cook.”

“No I can’t,” said Gladys.

“Yes you can. I’ve seen you,” said Mrs. Brookman.

“You’d live on our farm, of course. For the duration. It isn’t a permanent position. You’d have your own cabin. It’s reasonably nice,” said Sina, her eyes getting a little vague and uncertain about this last bit.

“There’s an outhouse,” said Zebediah encouragingly. “With bats.”

Zebediah was very taken with the outhouse. Luckily he was still being ignored.

“Well, I don’t know. I’m happy here,” said Gladys stubbornly. “I’m not sure I could work a cooking job into my schedule, you see.”

For this last, Gladys developed a snooty upper-class tone that was meant to intimidate but just made her sound like she was doing bad theater.