Good Graces (14 page)

“Bertha? Bertha?” Ethel shrieks. She pops up and presses her ear down to her boss’s lilac blouse. I am not worried. This happens all the time. At least once a week, Ethel is sure that Mrs. G has sucked in her last breath.

While Ethel’s still down on her chest, Mrs. Galecki’s eyes fly open and she says in the meanest voice, “What’re you doing? Trying to steal my locket like everything else?”

That completely flabbergasts me. How dare she say something so cruel about the woman who gives her bubble baths and wipes the drool off her mouth and sometimes her heinie?

Before I can suggest to Mrs. Galecki that she should count her blessings, Ethel lifts her head off her chest and says back so kindly, “Locket’s safe, Miss Bertha.” My good friend stands and pulls me a few steps away. “She’s been gettin’ more and more confused the last coupla weeks. This mornin’ she went yelly about how her emerald necklace was missin’.”

I don’t understand why this is bothering her so much. Being a nurse, Ethel should know the same way I do that old ladies’ brains can really go to pot when their arteries get hard. Our other granny changed her name from Margie O’Malley to Marie Antoinette on her eighty-sixth birthday.

“Where did ya end up findin’ it?” I ask.

“Tha’s the funny thing. I looked and looked for that necklace, but it weren’t in the hatbox under the bed where it usually is or nowheres else. Bertha didn’t come right out and say so, but . . .” Ethel shrugs. “I think she’s believin’ I’m the cat burglar who’s been sneakin’ around.”

I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t help it. I burst out laughing. Ethel is way too big to sneak around anywhere. When she’s somewhere, you know it.

I remind her, “Once somebody’s mind takes a turn around the bend like that, not only do their memories get backed up, but they can start sayin’ strange things.” What I’m trying to tell her as politely as I can is that Mrs. Galecki’s brain has gone as stiff as her hair. “Granny Marie Antoinette used to misplace stuff all the time and then blame her husband, Louie, for stealin’ it. Her husband’s name was Alvin.”

Ethel looks at me and, for the first time ever since I have known her, she doesn’t have anything to say. Her eyes that are usually gentle brown pools look stirred up when she returns to Mrs. Galecki’s side and places her strong hands on the chair that she starts pushing carefully toward the back door of the house so her patient, who is snoozing again, doesn’t get a bumpy ride. “She was real attached to that necklace,” Ethel tells me. “Her husband gave it to her the night ’fore he went off to the war.”

I lay one of my hands on top of hers. “Don’t you worry. It’ll turn up.” I scurry over to open the screen door so Ethel can push the wheelchair past me. “I’ll help ya look the next time I’m over,” I say once she’s inside. “You know how great I am at findin’ things.”

Out of the dark hallway of the house, my beacon of light, my Land Ho! my Ethel says, “That’d be fine, Miss Sally,” but she doesn’t sound like she means it. She sounds like the wind has gone outta her sails.

N
ow I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take,” Troo and me mumble by the side of our bed. I’ve been meaning to talk to her about saying something else before we turn in. That prayer does not help me keep my sunny side up at all.

Troo rolls onto the sheet and reaches for Daddy’s sky-blue work shirt that I used to keep under my pillow when we lived on Vliet Street. After we moved over to Dave’s, I knew she needed it more than me, so I slipped it under hers.

Once I’m over on to my side of the bed that’s closest to the wall, my sister leans over to give me a butterfly kiss on my cheek. That’s what Daddy always did when he tucked us in. “Night, Sal, my gal,” she says. “We’re gonna win the pennant this year.”

I flutter-kiss her back and say, “Night, Trooper. Lew Burdette has a hell of an arm,” and just like everything else Daddy said, he was right. The Braves beat the Yanks in the World Series two months after he got buried. Mr. Burdette pitched three times and won them all. That’s what I was told anyway. I bought a bag of salty peanuts and tried to listen to the games, but just couldn’t.

Troo rolls away from me and I get ready to do what I do every night. We used to take turns, but she gave up rubbing my back for Lent and didn’t start up again the way she was supposed to after the Resurrection. That’s fine. I don’t mind. She may have Daddy’s shirt in one hand and her Annie doll in the other, but I got her to soothe me. She feels like a baby blanket. Especially around her edges, which are usually satiny. But in this kind of heat that is making the O’Malley sisters feel like cookies baking away at the Feelin’ Good factory, I gotta sprinkle some of the powder I keep on the windowsill over Troo’s back. My hand won’t glide if I don’t.

Her snoring tonight is reminding me so much of the Hiawatha train that chugged down the tracks that ran behind our farm. Between that good sound and the steamy night and how tired I’ve gotten from chasing her, I can feel myself falling into dreamland face first, which is not like me at all.

When I wake up in the dark, I feel dopey and confused. That’s why I don’t right away shake Troo awake when I hear the clawing noise. I tell myself it must be left over from a nightmare. Bobby Brophy’s long fingernails made that kind of raking noise across his shorts zipper after he set me down in the lagoon grass. But once I hold my breath and listen, no matter how hard I try to convince myself, I know the sound isn’t part of a bad dream that’s going to fade away. That awful noise is in the here and now. And so is the putrid smell. Both of them are coming from right outside our bedroom window.

My heart is galloping, but I can’t move my arms or legs, and my mouth won’t make words. It feels like I’m being held down to the sheet by the rough hands of an invisible bully. It’s not until the clawing sound finally goes away, taking some of my scared away with it, that I can reach for my sister and say into her ear, “Wake up! Wake up!”

Troo answers back, thick and groggy, “What?”

I lift my nose into the air and say, “Do you smell that?” When she doesn’t say she does, I tell her louder, “Breathe in, breathe in,” and give a little jab to her ribs to wake her up even more.

Troo bats my arm away and says, “I don’t smell nothin’ ’cept for the cookies. And you. Did you wet the bed again?” She slides her hand sleepily down the sheet to check.

“No . . . I . . . there was a clawin’ sound on the screen and the smell of . . .” I think again and realize it wasn’t exactly the smell of pepperoni I breathed in, but close enough. Maybe it was some other kind of Italian sausage. “I’m sure it was Greasy Al tryin’ to get in here. I gotta go wake up Mother and tell her to go get Dave and his gun outta bed right away!”

I try to hop over her, but Troo wraps both of her arms around me and says, “Don’t you dare. She’ll get mad and tomorrow she’ll be worse crabby than she usually is. It was just your dumb imagination.” She pushs me off and starts her
choo
. . .
choo
snoring again in no time.

The longer I lie here and think about it, the more I know Troo is right. If I wake Mother up, she won’t rush upstairs to knock on Dave’s door and tell him to go after Greasy Al. Just like my sister, my mother will think it’s my imagination, she always does no matter what I tell her, but she especially won’t believe me in the middle of the night.

What I need is some kinda proof that Greasy Al was about to break in and murder Troo.

I slide on my tummy to the end of the bed, tiptoe through the kitchen and out the back door. I’m trembling so hard that I can barely keep a hold of my under-the-covers reading flashlight when I take baby steps around the corner of the house. I need to make sure. I promised to keep Troo safe.

The bedroom window screen
does
look like somebody used their fingernails on it, but that’s not enough to convince Dave to call in the troops. I search harder. Lift up branches and run my hands over the grass, but I don’t come up with a pizza cutter or anything else sharp that Greasy Al coulda used to slice open our screen and Troo’s neck.

When I inch back around the corner of the house, worried that Molinari could still be lurking around, that’s when I see my sister. She’s not out here looking for me. She didn’t even notice I wasn’t lying next to her anymore. Sometimes in the night, she starts missing Daddy too much and thinks too long about how he’d still be here if she hadn’t accidentally killed him, so she’ll come out to the glider in the backyard and smoke a cigarette and rock really fast. I can’t let her know that I’m watching. I want to rush over and tell her that accidents happen, but the last time I tried that she shoved me down on the ground and kicked me. She didn’t mean to hurt me. She just can’t stand it if anybody sees her not pretending to be brave, not whistling in the dark. But tonight, Troo isn’t gliding and puffing away like usual. She’s lying on her tummy next to the vegetable garden, breathing in the dirt smell that Daddy always had on his overalls after a hard day in the field. I can hear some cursing mixed in with her crying. I want so bad to put my arms around her, but she’d hate it if I did. All I can do is slink back to our room on still shaky legs and wait.

By the time Troo comes back to bed, I think hours musta gone by. I wasn’t worried because I was sure she fell asleep out in the yard the way she does sometimes. But when she spoons me, she smells like something else besides baby powder and grass. I can’t put my finger on it. I know I’ve smelled it before, I just can’t remember where or when. It has a rusty odor.

I bolt up and ask her where she went, but she laughs and says, “What are you talkin’ about, numnuts? I been here the whole time. Go back to sleep.”

I wouldn’t even if I could. I’m sure that after she cried herself out in the backyard over Daddy’s being gone, she decided to believe me about pepperoni-reeking Greasy Al being outside our bedroom window. I bet she flew into the night, tryin’ to sniff him out. She might even try again. That’s why I’m gonna stay on my toes until I hear Mother wake up with the clanking of the milkman’s bottles to put on her face.

At the breakfast table, freshly shaved and smelling like starch, Dave tells me over crispy bacon and scrambled eggs, “Good news, Sally! Alfred Molinari was spotted in a park yesterday afternoon by the Racine police.”

“I . . .” I desperately want to tell my father that those cops should get their eyes tested. Let him know that if I hadn’t woken up last night, Molinari would’ve slid over our windowsill, stuffed Troo under his arm and took off to someplace where he could torture her in private before I was able to scream bloody murder. But in this sunny kitchen with the smell of just-cut grass coming through the window and the birds singing their hearts out and coffee percolating, I keep my lips zipped. Troo’d never talk to me again if I give Dave a clue to Molinari’s recent whereabouts. My sister doesn’t want Detective Rasmussen to be the one to catch Greasy Al.
She
needs to be the one who hangs him by his thumbs.

Dave flaps open the
Milwaukee Sentinel
and sticks his nose in the sports section, his favorite part. “Big game tonight,” he says.

He doesn’t mean that the Braves are playing out at County Stadium. He’s talking about the one that’s going to happen over at the playground later on. The one game of the summer that nobody in the neighborhood misses.

Mother, who looks lovely in a creamy blouse, lights up a cigarette and says, “We’ll be there rootin’ for you, right, girls?”

The urge to tell Dave about Greasy Al paying us a visit last night is so powerful, but I can’t face the rest of my life with my sister not speaking to me, I just can’t. So I tell him, “Wouldn’t miss it for the world. Go get ’em, tiger.”

Troo doesn’t wish him good luck. She gives Dave a dirty look, stabs her fork down at her plate and doesn’t even thank him for making her
French
toast.

I
will always love baseball the same way Daddy did. Unfortunately, coming to these games puts me in a pickle. I spend most of every inning thinking about how much he would love being here on a hot summer night and how bad I miss feeling his hairy arm pressed against mine, the look of his chipped-tooth smile after a really great play and how he’d jump to his feet and shout, “That’s showin’ ’em who’s boss!”

How do you make yourself forget?

It’s the Policemen (The Clobbering Coppers) versus the Feelin’ Good Cookie men (Chips Off the Old Block) under the playground’s big lights tonight. I’m sitting high up so I can get a bird’s-eye view, but not of the action out on the diamond. I’m memorizing the faces of the people coming and going. I’m looking for Greasy Al. It would be so simple for him to blend into this crowd and bide his time, especially if he was wearing a disguise like a black beard or something. After the ninth inning, he could stream out the gates with everybody else and hurry to hide between houses to follow a little girl named Troo O’Malley home. When I least expected it, that’s when he’d reach out from behind a tree and grab her. I gotta keep my eyes peeled and this is no easy job.

The bleachers around the diamond are always packed when these two teams go at each other. The last time they played it got kinda heated up and nobody talked to anybody for about a week. Mr. Jessup, who is the regular ump, is pretty strict. He got on everybody’s nerves so bad reciting the rules of the game that one of the factory men yelled out from the crowd, “Shut up already with the sermon on the mound,” and then somebody else offered Dave ten dollars to shoot Mr. Jessup and it went downhill from there.

That’s why Father Mickey is behind home plate tonight. Nobody would dare question his infallible calls. Troo is chatting up a storm with him. Usually she doesn’t like people to fidget with her, so I’m shocked when Father licks his finger and rubs it across a smudge on her cheek and she doesn’t seem to mind at all. Her religious instruction must be going really, really well, so that’s at least one thing I can like about him.