Excerpt from The Last List of Miss Judith Kratt by Andrea Bobotis, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I turned to Olva, in search of a shared laugh, but she was staring out the window.

"I'm planning on doing some spring cleaning," she said.

"It's springtime, so your timing is germane."

Her gaze floated back into the room. "Sometimes, all the things must be taken from their boxes before they can be put back again."

"Don't you go moving around things so I can't locate them," I replied. "I've got my inventory to think of."

My eyes sifted through the contents of the sunroom—the silver-plated butler's tray, the Amsterdam School copper mantel clock, the Hamilton drafting table. My younger sister, Rosemarie, is still living, but no one should be fooled into thinking she might be another source of information about our family's heirlooms. She hasn't set foot in Bound for ages. A month ago, we received another blank postcard from her, postmarked from Huntsville, Alabama. Over the years, Rosemarie's blank postcards have turned up, all addressed to Olva and hailing from different cities along the East Coast: Lowell, Baltimore, Englewood, and more. "All mill towns," Olva once remarked. "Or once were." I asked Olva if she didn't think the one from Alabama was insultingly close, but she merely gave a half smile and resumed her dusting.

Leaving those postcards blank was a melodramatic gesture, but that is Rosemarie for you. One spring during our grammar school years, she adopted a family of slugs that had taken residence on the retaining wall of our front porch. I found her early on a Sunday morning lying belly down, her head telescoped out over the edge of the porch, watching the slugs squander their riches in long glistening trails. So lost was she in this diversion, it escaped her notice that her new companions had also feasted on Mama's petunias.

Rosemarie was wearing a white cotton frock, one of the pieces of Easter clothing that Aunt Dee had sewn for us. I had watched her cavort around in it with Easter service still a week away. The frock had already scaled the tallest water oak in our front yard and scuttled beneath the canopy of our crepe myrtle, flush with buds.

"You'll ruin your frock," I said, my arms folded, standing behind her outstretched body. I studied the hem of her dress, fringed with dirt.

"No," Rosemarie replied, watching her slugs. Her head lifted only once to follow a group of colored boys making their way along the road toward the fields. This was another indication it was Easter time, the beginning of cotton season.

"You'll ruin your frock," I repeated, louder this time, tightening my arms across my chest, as if making my body more compact would distill my message.

Her head swiveled toward me. As she propped herself on her forearm, I saw how the brick floor of the porch had pricked up the white material on her chest.

Her mouth snapped open. "I will not ruin my frock," she said. "This is your frock."

Then her face almost broke in two with that smile of hers. We dissolved into giggles right there on the spot, and I squatted down next to her, mussing my own gingham skirt in the process. I sometimes lost track of myself when spending time with Rosemarie.

But I always managed to find myself again.

The morning after Easter service, when our preacher had made note of my sullied dress, his lips puckered in disappointment, I took matters into my own hands. I salted her slugs and, for good measure, also daubed them with a slurry of molasses and arsenic, which we used on the boll weevils that sometimes plagued our cotton. A whole year slid by before Rosemarie forgave me. And how could I have known that her gray-marled cat, a grizzled thing and already far too old at the time, had a taste for molasses?

"Olva," I said, breaking from my contemplation. "I would enjoy some coffee at the moment."

"Would you like to give me a hand?"

I didn't answer quickly enough, because she lifted herself from the chair and disappeared into the kitchen.

Excerpted from The Last List of Miss Judith Kratt Kratt by Andrea Bobotis. © 2019 by Andrea Bobotis. Used with permission of the publisher, Sourcebooks. All rights reserved.