Good Graces (7 page)

When Mother smiles, I swear to Mary, the kitchen goes three shades lighter. “I’m so glad you’re enjoying it, Sally, but remember what I told you the last time. The proper name for this dish is chipped beef on toast points.”

“Six a one, half dozen of another,” Granny says, throwing in under her breath, “A sow’s ear.”

Dave stays out of it, but gives me a wink when I look his way. I really would like to question him while I have him. He’s been so busy working day and night that I haven’t had the chance to ask him the number one question that’s been burning itself into my mind. I’ve been hoping what Henry told us at the drugstore was wrong. It gets awfully loud at the baseball games. He coulda misheard what Dave told his dad.

“Is it true that Greasy Al escaped from reform school?” I ask.

Dave stops buttering his bread in midair and looks over at Mother. When she nods, he says, “Girls, I have been meaning to talk to the both of you. Especially you, Sally. I don’t want you to get yourself in a tizzy over—”

“He means he doesn’t want you to be a fruitcake in the imagination department,” Troo butts in.

I’m surprised that Mother doesn’t say anything about her minding her p’s and q’s, but she doesn’t, and I know why when I look down at my sister’s plate. You can see her reflection in it. When we were busy talking about my coughing, Troo musta slipped it under the table and Lizzy chowed down.

Troo purses her lips and kisses her fingers the way French people in the movies do after they get done eating. “My compliments to the chef. Supper was
magnifique
.”

Mother says, “Why thank you, Troo.”

“No, no . . .
merci beaucoup
to you, Helen.” Mother is lapping it up. I’ve noticed that when it comes to compliments of any kind, there is no bottom to her bowl. Troo musta noticed that, too. “I’m goin’ over to the playground. See ya tomorrow . . . I mean Friday, Granny.”

Granny says back like she always does, “Not unless I see you first, you little banshee.”

So I’m left to push the SOS around on my plate while Dave and Mother talk some more about Mr. Kennedy and his wife, Jackie, who dresses so stylishly, and Granny tells us that Uncle Paulie has been keeping very odd hours, and then the three of them go into other neighborhood news until everyone is done eating except for me. (I was so thankful that Granny didn’t bring up the annulment-letter-from-the-Pope problem. She likes Dave a lot, but she is one of the main people who thinks that Mother is living in sin.)

After removing Mr. Como from the Hi-Fi and reapplying her lipstick, Mother comes back into the kitchen. “I know that you’re savoring every single bite, Sally, but you need to finish up by the time I get back from taking your grandmother home. Dave and I have plans tonight.” This means she wants to play footsie with him. “Ready?” she says, guiding Granny toward the front door so she can drive her back to her tiny bungalow.

“Sally?” Dave says, once they’re gone.

He’s got a grave look on his face. He musta noticed me and Troo feeding Lizzy the SOS under the table. After all, he is a detective. He won’t shout at me the way Mother would. Dave has only been a father for a little while so he’s still learning how to be mean. What he’ll do is clear his throat and give me a calm sermon about the nature of good and evil. Since he’s a police officer
and
the treasurer of the Men’s Club up at church, knowing the difference between right and wrong are the subjects dearest to his heart.

Or maybe not. In the movies, cops smack you with a rubber hose when they want you to tell the truth, which I’m sure Dave wouldn’t do, but things can happen when you least expect them. I didn’t think Hall Gustafson would throw Nell down on our kitchen floor last summer or that Bobby would try to kill me either. And I was so sure that Dave was the one who was murdering and molesting little girls in the neighborhood. I used to think I was a good judge of people, but I’m not. I am unreliable. I can’t count on myself anymore.

“Do you have something you want to tell me?” Dave asks, steepling his fingers below his chin.

I’m going to beat him to the punch. I’m going to confess. “I’m really sorry,” I blurt out. “I won’t ever do it again, I promise, and I’ll make Troo swear, too.”

Dave leans in and he smells good. He slaps on Old Spice when he’s done shaving. He points down at my SOS that now looks exactly like the fake vomit they sell at the toy store. His lips, which aren’t poofy like Mother’s and Troo’s but on the thin side like mine, are curled into a smile. “Between you and me, I can barely get it down myself. Got my fill of it in the Army,” he says, putting my plate down in front of Lizzy, whose tummy is just bulging. “Now that we got that settled, I’d like to further answer the question you asked me earlier about the Molinari boy.” He leans back in his chair and stretches his long legs out in front of him. “Yes, he escaped from the reform school last week.”

“But how . . . he could . . . what if they don’t catch him and he comes back here and does something bad to . . .” There are so many ways that Greasy Al could hurt Troo. I try my best to keep my eyes on her at all times, but she is so good at outfoxing me.

“I know this might be hard for you to understand, Sally, but it’s not like Alfred’s a hardened criminal. Sure, he’s gotten himself into a few fixes, but he’s just a boy not much older than you.” Dave runs his hand over his mouth. He does that when he is trying to come up with a good explanation about why I shouldn’t be afraid of something. “When Alfred got polio . . . his family didn’t . . . the Molinaris are a tough bunch.”

No kidding.

“He’s not a lost cause,” Dave adds on. “All the boy needs is someone to care about him.”

Poor man. If that’s what he thinks, that all Molinari needs is some TLC to set him straight, he’s wrong. I heard that his father used to hit him with fists. And I’ve seen with my own two eyes that even his own mother doesn’t love Greasy Al. She’s the hostess at Ristorante Molinari where Dave takes us to eat sometimes because Mother adores their butter-drenched bread. Before Greasy Al got sent to reform school, on the nights he used to work at the family restaurant being a busboy, Mrs. Molinari would yell at him from her podium up front, “Hey, Chester, clean up . . . table six,” because her boy walks like that guy in
Gunsmoke
. Everybody in the dining room would crack up, no one louder than her. And Troo.

“Sally?” Dave says from a distant land where I bet things look clearer to him than they do to me. “Please, don’t.”

I’m so glad Mother’s not here to see me blubber. She’d run a pretend bow over a pretend violin and sing
Cry Me a River
.

Dave stacks his big hands on top of mine. “There’s nothing to worry about. You’re safe now.”

That’s the same thing Mother and him always say when I wake up screaming after one of my nightmares. Bobby is still alive when I bolt up in bed. I can smell his leather belt and hear him whispering how much he loves me and that he’s going to make me his bride. Or sometimes it’s Daddy who comes to me bloody in my dreams holding Sampson by the hand, telling me with a rotted mouth to fly like the wind. By the time Mother rounds the corner to our room and Dave comes pounding down from upstairs, my sister is already up on her knees, yelling, “Sally, wake up!” doing her darndest to hold my still running legs down on the sheet soaked with my sweat.

I know that Dave and Mother mean well, but they can never, will never, understand what I’m feeling twenty thousand leagues deep. Only my sister does.

T
roo snuck off and stuck me with the supper dishes again. By the time I get over to the playground, she’s already made her way through the line of kids waiting to take their turn at the pole, which has become the biggest challenge. Last year it was dodgeball and before that it was box hockey, but this summer, everybody has gone cuckoo for tetherball. Anyone who can runs over here straight after supper because if you’re the last one serving when they turn off the lights for the night, the counselors will congratulate you and give you a box of free Wheaties, which is the Breakfast of Champions and very popular.

My sister is squaring off against beefy Willie O’Hara. Just like us, Willie isn’t from around here originally. He moved to Vliet Street from Brooklyn, New York, with his mother the same summer we did because his father ran off with his hubba-hubba secretary. Mrs. O’Hara has relatives around here who are helping her get back on her feet. Willie used to be Troo’s boyfriend, but he’s moved on to greener pastures.

Trotting over to stand with the rest of the kids who are watching the game, I shout, “Go, Troo, go!” and wish that Debbie the counselor would quit hovering over us and do a somersault or the splits or something else really cheerful to distract Troo. My sister looks like she is about to charge at Willie and take a big bite out of him. That’s what he looks like with his bright red hair and chubby tummy. A juicy burger with ketchup.

“Why’s she got her undies in a bundle?” Mary Lane, who left the front of the line and came back to keep me company, says over my shoulder. “Molinari?”

I’m pretending that I am so interested in watching the game that I don’t hear her.

“Hey. Helen Keller.” She stabs me in the back with a bony finger. “I know ya know that Greasy Al broke out of reform school. Troo just told me.”

If only that juvenile delinquent would’ve stayed put like he was supposed to. I already started writing a letter to that school with some reform ideas of my own:

Mary Lane says, “I bet you’re havin’ a conniption.”

I
am
. And not just about Greasy Al escaping.

The day we got back from camp, even though I have lost almost all of my faith, I right away went up to church and lit candles. I prayed for the kind of summer days where you can stick your nose into a peony bush and breathe so deep that everything goes pink. Or spend a whole morning reading under a shady tree or making lanyard after lanyard at the playground. But here we are only three weeks into summer and there’s a convict on the loose and a cat burglar and Troo is acting like a wilder animal and Sampson is gone and Mother is sulky and we’ve got a runaway kid.

What is God thinking? Hasn’t He ever heard of good news?

Before Mary Lane can start in on how Molinari is going to make mincemeat out of Troo when he catches her, I’m gonna ask her if she heard any details about Charlie Fitch’s disappearance. She has to know more than me. She’s a peeper who lives two houses down from the Honeywells. I’d like to help out. It bothers me to see Artie looking like the Lone Ranger without his Tonto.

“You got any idea why Charlie Fitch ran off?” I ask her.

“Uh-uh.”

“Do you think Mr. and Mrs. Honeywell coulda changed their minds about takin’ him in and that was more than he could stand?” That’s still the only reason I can think of why he’d run away right before he was going to get adopted. Our Brownie troop went up to the orphanage at Christmas and brought those poor kids bars of soap and holy cards wrapped with red curly ribbon. Their eyes lit up over those crummy presents, that’s how desperate they are for someone to take them home.

Mary Lane says, “The last time I peeped on ’em the Honeywells seemed all set. They fixed up their spare room and it looked really good with pennants on the wall and two new yo-yos were sitting on the madras bedspread.” She shrugs. “I guess it’s possible they coulda found out between then and now that Fitch was bad news. Ya never know what you’re gettin’ with an orphan.” She hitches up her shorts because they’re always falling down. “There was that kid who was livin’ up there for a while before he got adopted. Teddy Jaeger? He picked his boogers and ate ’em. I know mosta them kids are nice at St. Jude’s and all that, but there
could
be a few bad apples just like everywhere else in the neighborhood.”

I would have to agree with her. Teddy Jaeger
was
a booger-eating orphan and there are a few people around here that
are
rotten to the core. The entire Molinari family, for instance.

Mary Lane says, “Maybe right before the Honeywells were headin’ over to St. Jude’s to bring Charlie home somebody knocked on their door and told ’em something terrible about him.”

“Like what?” I ask.

“Like . . . like he was the long-lost son of Ed Gein or something.”

“Ed who?” I ask, not recognizing the name. “What block does he live on?”

“Gein
,
”
Mary Lane says. “He’s not from around here. He killed a buncha women around the state capitol and took ’em home and hung ’em upside down in his living room like they were deer until all the blood drained outta them. Then he peeled off their skin and made lampshades out of it and a little suit he wore around the house and he was a grave robber, too. The cops found shriveled heads at his house and skulls on his bedpost and . . .”

This is one of her no-tripper stories. Next she’ll go on about how Charlie didn’t run away from the orphanage. That he was kidnapped by gypsies. Somehow she’ll work wienies into the story. I don’t know why, but a lot of Mary Lane’s stories are about gypsy kidnappings and wienies and my tummy already is not feeling so great.

I turn back to the game, put two fingers in my mouth and whistle good and loud. Dave taught me how. “You got him where you want him, Troo.” She is punching the tetherball two-fisted and springing for it when it comes whipping back. Even with all her sweat and wild hair she is a beautiful kid.

Mary Lane must be thinking the same thing that I am because she props her chin on my shoulder and says, “Too bad Molinari’s gonna rearrange her face when he shows up.”

“But . . . how would he get back here?” I ask. I’ve given this a lot of thought in the middle of the night. “Ya know, his polio leg.”