"Is your mother home?", the man at the front door asked me. He was very polite, and he was carrying a black suitcase, something like the "glad stone" bag Daddy used when he had to go away for a while. (We kids were never able to understand why a suitcase was like a happy rock!) I looked at the nice man and twisted a piece of my hair around my finger. Mother wasn't home, but my big brother was, and so I said "Just a minute", and ran to the back part of the house to call Bill.

"There's a man at the door", I told him, "that wants to know if Mother is home. What should I say?". Bill gave me one of those looks that says sisters are really dumb and went to the door.

I listened while the man told Bill about this really good chance to have a picture made of someone in the family, and it would only cost fifty cents.

"Are there any children in the family?", the man asked, treating Bill like he was grown-up, which I thought was really silly, because he was only fourteen. Bill told him that he had a little sister that would make a pretty picture, but she was taking a nap, and he didn't want to wake her up. The man offered to come back later, and dumb ol' Bill said "Okay". I called him dumb ol' Bill, because he didn't even tell the man that I was also his little sister, and I wasn't taking a nap.

But I guessed I knew why. I wasn't pretty like Toots was. She had curly blonde hair, blue eyes, and dimples in both of her cheeks.

She was almost two years old then, and we all thought she was the prettiest, cutest, best baby in the world. When Bill woke her up to get her ready to have her picture taken, Toots just smiled and said, "Sure, Billy". He scrubbed her face and hands, with her saying "Ouch" and "Not so hard, Billy!".

Then he dressed her in her pink dress with socks to match, and polished her white shoes. He spent a lot of time working on her curls, but he didn't know how to do it as well as Mother did, so they didn't look right to me. But I didn't know how to do them either, because my hair was "straight as a stick" my mother always used to say.

By the time Bill finished getting Toots all dressed up, the man had come back and they decided to take the picture outside in the yard. But Toots was kind of scared of the man, and she wouldn't let him take her picture unless "Billy" was there with her. So that's how the picture got made.

Later, when the man came back with the finished picture, all painted really pretty, it turned out to be a picture of my brother with his arm around Toots, smiling proudly beside her. And even so, Toots had a very suspicious look on her face as she stared at the camera. They couldn't even get her to smile!

Bill and Toots