He had an odd name, Flimnap O’Dougherty. “Flimnap?” said Annie. “Where have I heard that name before?”
“It’s Icelandic,” explained Flimnap, grinning at her. “There are Flimnaps all over the place in Reykjavík.”
Did Irish-Icelandic people have big noses and lank brown hair? It didn’t matter. Whatever Flimnap’s origins, he seemed to know what he was doing. Working indoors, Annie could hear small thuds from outside as he moved his ladder, clicks and creaks as he opened and closed the windows. Mostly there was no noise at all. It was oddly exhilarating to work on her wall while Flimnap looked in from outside.
It turned out that he could do anything he set his hand to. When a truck arrived and tipped a load of cow manure down beside the vegetable garden, Annie called a halt to the priming of the window frames and sent Flimnap down the hill to dig it in.
The manure was supposed to be well rotted, but it wasn’t. It was fresh and green and reeking. Would he object to a dirty job? For a moment Annie watched him drive his spade into the heap. He showed no reluctance. He was attacking it with a will, heaving up sloppy spadefuls, dumping them on last year’s weedy dirt, forking them in.
Then Annie forgot about Flimnap and thought about Jack, who was coming out today. What would she say to him? She didn’t know.
And then she forgot about Jack too, and bent her head to look at the books lying open on the table.
They were collections of folktales and nursery rhymes and picture stories for children. Babar the King lay on top of The Arabian Nights. The cherry nose of Asterix the Gaul glowed from a dog-eared paperback. And there were beautiful new books by Annie’s fellow illustrators—the dazzling wild colors of Miguel Delgado’s Big Book of Clowns, the clever simplicities of Jemima Field’s ABC, the thick round bodies and crazy perspectives of Gulliver’s Travels by Joseph Noakes, the spidery interlocking details of Margaret Chen’s Yellow River Folk Tales.
The books were her obsession. Since childhood, when she had sat beside her father on the sofa among a listening mass of siblings, she had stared at the pictures in the books while he read the stories aloud. She had fallen into the pictures, lived in them, loved them. Loved them too much, because one day bad girl Annie had scribbled all over the precious stories and the wonderful pictures, wanting to write them and draw them herself, and she had been spanked. Even now she couldn’t just look at the books and turn the pages and look again. She had to scribble on them in a new way, she had to use them somehow.
One way was to distill them into her own picture books, to make new editions of Jack and the Beanstalk and The Owl and the Pussy-cat. They were compendiums of everything her eyes had wondered at—the thorny trees of Rackham, the purple seas of Wyeth, the bewitched line drawings of Bilibin and Shepard, Blegvad and Williams.
The other way of using the old stories was to put them on her wall. Annie sat at the newspaper-covered table and made greedy lists. She crossed out Treasure Island and The Enchanted Castle, then put them back and added more.
When a car drove up outside, she thought, Jack! and ran to the door.
But it wasn’t Jack. There were two cars in the driveway and a giant moving van. Of course, it was her new tenants. They were moving in.
“Welcome,” said Annie politely, as Robert Gast climbed out of a big Ford Bronco and grinned at her. Roberta Gast came forward too, emerging from a bright-blue Mazda convertible with daughter Charlene and the little boy named Eddy.
Flimnap O’Dougherty appeared suddenly, coming up from the vegetable garden, his manure pitching all done. Annie introduced him to the Gasts—mother, father, Eddy, and Charlene.
Flimnap nodded courteously and Bob said, “How do you do?” and shook his hand.
Charlene wrinkled her nose and said, “Pee-yoo, you stink.”
Her father was shocked. “Charlene!”
“It’s all right,” said Flimnap. “She’s right. It’s cow manure.” He paused, then said, “I stink, therefore I am.”
Annie burst out laughing. Bob Gast laughed too. Roberta didn’t get it.
O’Dougherty vanished. Annie too made herself scarce. Sharing a house was going to call for tact, even though their two sets of living quarters were separated by an insulated wall and a workshop. The Gasts should be able to come and go without interference. So should she. It wouldn’t be difficult. Her front door was on the north, theirs on the south.
Afterward, when the moving vans lumbered down the driveway, Annie wondered about the Gasts’ two cars. When the realtor had brought them to look at the house they had been driving an aged Chevy. She had been charmed by their simplicity, their enthusiasm, their apparent poverty, and at the realtor’s suggestion she had cut the rent in half.