Rabble Starkey by Lois Lowry

remember that all my life," I told Sweet-Ho, "even if I get to be a hundred. But I don't expect I'll ever be alone, because I plan to have a lot of children."
    "Good. I'll be a grandma."
    "Sure. You can live with us and bake cookies and help tend the babies."
    Sweet-Ho chuckled sleepily. She lay down and hugged her pillow. "You won't make me do the ironing, will you?"
    I thought that over while I marked my place in my book and put it on the table beside the bed. "No," I decided, and turned the light out. "You won't have to do anything you don't want. You can be
lazy,
if you like."
    "Indolent," Sweet-Ho said, yawning. "I'll be indolent when I'm old."
    Shoot, Sweet-Ho always had me beat in words. Even now, with my thesaurus.

10
    Fall continued on and began to turn into the beginning of winter, the way it does. Halloween pumpkins that had been standing on people's steps and porches turned rotten and their faces caved in like the faces of old people, squinched and wrinkled. Sometimes in the mornings, walking to school, Veronica and me could blow steam out of our mouths, and we pretended to be horses, snorting and prancing about.
    We fell into the habit, afternoons after school, of stopping by Millie Bellows's house. We didn't do it because we
wanted
to. We did it for Sweet-Ho and for Mr. Bigelow, who asked us to, and only after we argued a bit.
    "She's too old to be all alone all the time," Sweet-Ho had said. "She just needs someone to check and see she's okay."
    "You could call her on the phone," I pointed out.
    "Of course I could call her on the phone. But I'd
feel better if someone looked in and
saw
her regular. And I can't always do that, with Gunther to tend and all."
    "Just a hello would be enough," Mr. Bigelow said.
    "A
cheerful
hello," Sweet-Ho added, glaring at me.
    Veronica and me made faces at each other. But we did it, each day on our way home from school. At first we just looked in and said hello—a cheerful hello. But before long we was actually going inside, making her some tea, helping her a bit about the house. Millie Bellows grumbled and fretted, complaining that we was always hanging about and in the way. Shoot, I couldn't fault her none for that; nobody wants people always poking their noses in your business. But there was always something that needed doing: one day a light bulb to be changed in a place she couldn't reach without standing on a chair—and she wasn't too steady on her feet, so it would have been downright risky for her; another afternoon, her kitchen sink all clogged up so that we fixed it with the plunger, something she wasn't strong enough to do. Most days it was just her few dishes in the sink, or some little bits of laundry. We noticed that if we didn't do those things, she ate off the same dishes again without washing them, and wore the same clothes too long without changing.
    She never thanked us, not once. She only sat in the front room watching her dumb old TV shows, and if we got to laughing in the kitchen she called out that we was too noisy. But after we finished the chores and
made tea, she would turn off the set, get out her old photograph albums, and show us the pictures while we sat with her.
    At first we only looked to be polite. But after a while, after she showed us the same pictures again and again, it got so's we felt we knew all those people with their high, stiff collars in the faded photographs. We got to wheedling her into telling us stories to go with the names.
    "What was your brother Howard like when we was little?" Veronica asked. We was passing around Howard, in a picture where he was little and wearing an old-fashioned sailor suit with long white stockings, his hair down to his shoulders like a girl.
    "Remember when we dressed up Gunther like a ballerina, he tried to act all graceful and pretty? When your mama dressed Howard up with long curls and stockings, did he act that way?" I asked.
    "Good heavens, no," Millie Bellows said, and took the photograph