Every night I got sleepy. The last night of meeting, I tried to get Mama to let me go lie down on the quilts where all the babies were sleeping, but she said I was much too big to be sprawled out on the floor by the side of the pulpit. Yet, the very next minute, when I told her I wanted to go sit on the mourners' bench so I could get baptized in the swimming hole down at Rocky Head Creek, she said I was too little for that. I decided I'd never be the right size at the right time. Summer dragged on and on. One morning in late August, a very good thing happened to me. Grandma Ming made a new flour-sack Dolly Dimple for me. She was pretty—the grandest doll ever stuffed with cotton, Grandpa Thad told me. When I ran home to show her to Mama, I thought she would meet me out on the front porch and say, "Ah, Bandershanks, what's your new dolly's name?" Then, I was going to say, "Sookie Sue!" But Mama wasn't on the porch. I hurried on into the front room. There she was, leaning against the wall, talking on the phone. She just reached down, patted my head, and kept on talking to Aunt Vic. She didn't even notice Sookie Sue. I crawled up into a rocking chair to wait. I wished I could talk on the phone—about cotton crops, or peaches, or just anything. It wouldn't do a speck of good though to ask Mama to let me try it. She'd only say I was too little. But I knew exactly how to turn the crank on the side of the phone and how to hold the ear piece. And I could remember every ring on the line. Ours was two longs and a short. Aunt Vic's was two longs. Aunt Lovie's was a short and a long. And if I was going to call up Papa's store, I'd just give the phone's crank one long twist. I didn't dare ask Mama if I could talk. She'd tell me all that business about telephones being for important matters and that when anybody called us, some grownup person should answer—not me, or Wiley, or even Mierd, who was already going on twelve years old. Then she'd say all over again that when I heard the phone ring two longs and a short, I was to get her or my big sister Bess or one of my big brothers—that is, when they were at home. They weren't ever home any more—neither Bess nor my brothers. Bess was boarding in town so she could go to high school. And Clyde and Walker were still off in that army camp, wherever it was, and Dorris was down at the Caledonia Academy. I didn't know for sure where Caledonia was, but it wasn't far away, or terrible, like being in a camp for the World War. Nobody was home any more, except me and Mierd and Wiley and Mama and Papa. Grandpa Thad and Grandma Ming were nearly there because their house was just the other side of the dying Chinaberry tree. Finally, Mama hung up the phone, turned around, and stooped over so I could hug her neck and she could hug mine. "You have a Dolly Dimple!" "She's Sookie Sue!" "Just let me look at her!" "Grandma saved that flour-sack doll pattern just for me."