Good Graces (25 page)

Another firework goes off, but I don’t look up. I’ve still got my head turned to Troo. That’s when I see him out of the corner of my eye. About ten feet behind and to the left of us, Father Mickey is leaning against a tree pretending to listen to one of his parishioners, but he’s not. He’s watching us, staring straight at Troo and me.

My sister says, “I know ya left Artie a jar of cod liver oil on his porch, but he doesn’t need it. He’s not imaginin’ anything. He’s not a fanatic like you. What he told ya about Father Mickey bein’ up to no good is the truth. I got proof.” Troo must feel the priest’s eyes screwing into the back of her neck the same way I can because she scootches up closer to me, slides her hand down to the front of her shorts and takes something out that she keeps balled up in her grubby hand. “If I show ya this,” she whispers, “ya gotta promise ya won’t tell a soul and especially
not
Dave.”

Since I take them so to heart, I don’t ever promise anybody anything if I don’t know what I’m getting myself into. Except for my sister.

“Promise.”

She wiggles even closer, her warm skeeter-bit arm presses against mine. When she opens her hand, Mrs. Galecki’s missing emerald necklace is lying in her palm, just glimmering.

F
or the past two weeks, things couldn’t
be
more topsy-turvy around here.

Me and my sister are doing the dishes together, trying to guess what mystery food Mother made us tonight. When she placed it down on the table, she said, “Ta-
daaa
” and called it “Brains a la King,” but she had to be kidding around. That’s how good of a mood she’s been in. She sings along in her warbly voice when a tune she likes comes on the radio and she hasn’t done that for the longest time. Her newest favorite, she goes giddy when she hears it, is
Puppy Love.
She stops whatever she’s doing and makes Lizzie get up on her hind feet so they can dance around the kitchen. She’s not doing her puzzles in the backyard on the TV tray anymore. Mother has been spending most of her day cutting pictures out of magazines and driving around in her new red Studebaker. She looks mouthwatering in that car. After tying a chiffon scarf around her hair and knotting it in back, off she goes to expand her horizons. She’s in her bedroom right this minute getting ready to go pick up Aunt Betty. They’re driving downtown to Chapman’s, which is the fancy store Mother’s been wanting to shop at for the longest time.

“That Helen,” Troo says, handing me a sorta rinsed-off plate outta the dishpan. “Brains a la King. What a kidder,” she says, not doing her
hunh
ing but her regular old Chopstick laugh that sounds just like when she plays it on the piano.
Ha . . . ha . . . ha . . . ha
. . .
ha
. . .
ha
.

Just like Mother, Troo’s mood has been fabulous, too, these last couple of weeks. She had the gall to say to me yesterday when we were taking out the garbage, “Boy, I feel happy! You should try it sometime, Sal.”

My sister wants us all to believe that she’s turned over a new leaf since the Fourth of July. She’s not making me call her
Leeze
anymore. And when Dave and Mother discuss the wedding, which is going to take place on September 24th, Troo doesn’t look like she’s about to burst a blood vessel. She’s doing her chores before she’s asked and once this week—this was really awful—she rubbed my back when I got done rubbing hers. Even worse than this Shirley Temple mood she’s been in, my sister has this annoying smile plastered on her face all the time. Even when she’s sleeping, she’s dreaming about something that makes her look like a cat that ate a canary and two of its cousins.

Her acting so cheerful is terrible, but what’s driving me most up the wall is that no matter how much I badger her, she won’t cough up how she got her hands on Mrs. Galecki’s green necklace. I’ve tried about a hundred times to get it out of her, but each and every time she reminds me of the promise I made her at the lagoon on fireworks night not to tell a soul, especially
not
Dave. And then she says mysteriously, “Soon
aaalll
will be revealed,” sounding very much like the fortune-teller up at the State Fair.

I think my sister snuck next door and took Mrs. Galecki’s necklace, but I don’t know why she would do something like that. Since she is so light-fingered in general, it even crossed my mind that Troo could be the cat burglar. So I looked and looked, but did not find a candelabra or any other stolen loot stashed around our bedroom. That’s why I’m still 99.9 percent positive it’s Mary Lane who’s been taking stuff out of people’s houses. It’s gotta be.

Even though Troo’s not acting like it on the outside, of course she can’t fool me. She’s still spitting mad at Father Mickey for getting Mother the annulment. She hasn’t asked me to smooch her with the red wax lips and doesn’t swoon anymore when she hears Father’s name. And she has stopped going up to the rectory for her extra religious instruction. Mother and Dave haven’t noticed that she’s been skipping. Their spirits are too high to pay much attention to Troo and me these days. Both of them are on cloud nine.

And so are a lotta other people in the neighborhood. The burglaries have stopped. The cops are still looking, but the high-top footprints they found outside the Holzhauers’ house ended up belonging to Hank Holzhauer, the kid who lives there, so that was a dead end. Since no more valuables are being stolen on a weekly basis, the search for the cat seems to have taken a backseat. (That talk I gave to Mary Lane in the library lavatory musta done some good.)

So leaving to go look for the burglar is not why Dave told Mother he was going to skip supper tonight and grab something up at the Milky Way, the lucky dog. He went over to the house of his sister, Betsy, and her husband, whose name is Richie Piaskowski, to take the sheets off their furniture and spruce the place up a bit. They’re coming for a visit and Dave hopes he can convince them to stay longer than a week at their house on 56th Street across from the church where their daughter, Junie, had her funeral. I can see her grave when I go to sit next to Daddy’s at Holy Cross Cemetery every Saturday. How they could bear leaving their girl beneath that mound of dirt, I don’t know. Dave takes his niece a bouquet on all the holidays except at Christmas, when he brings her a wreath trimmed with angel hair and blue bulbs to decorate her gravestone, but that’s not the same. I could never move away from Daddy, not even for a little while, but I am not going to throw stones at their house. They’re my aunt Betsy and uncle Richie now and they could be Troo’s, too, if she’d let them, which she won’t because they’re related to Dave. (Since their last name ends in
ski
, after meeting them she’ll right off the bat tell a
huge
Polack joke. I’m gonna have to take them around a corner and explain that they shouldn’t take it personally.)

Well, my sister can stand next to me here at the kitchen sink and tap-dance all she wants, but I know her. Below all her bubbliness, she’s coming up with another one of her Troo genius revenge plans because she had to give up on the capturing Greasy Al one. Of course, she’s disappointed that she can’t use the reward money to buy the Jerry Mahoney ventriloquist doll, but Troo’s not stupid. She figured out that if Molinari
was
coming back, he woulda showed up by now. I would have to agree with her. I think he escaped for good, too. Maybe to Brooklyn, where Willie O’Hara used to live. He told me that city has loads of Italians and pizza parlors. Molinari could blend right in like a greasy chameleon. Dave has not recently mentioned to me a thing about his “imminent capture,” so that’s another reason I believe that dago is gone forever.

After I set the white plate carefully in the drying rack, my sister tells me, “After we’re done here we gotta go straight over to the Latours. I got a surprise for you.”

“I can’t,” I say, rubbing off the bowl she hands me with the green checked dish towel. “I told Dave I’d water the garden and after I’m done doin’ that I’m gonna work on my charitable summer story and some other stuff.”

Troo and Artie are still back together. Them spending so much time by themselves hasn’t been all bad. Even if Artie’s imagination has gotten the best of him, I know I can count on him to keep her out of trouble. Not having to watch her every second has let me take a breather. I paid Henry a couple of visits, and I found the time to work on a new imitation. I can do a
Wizard of Oz
munchkin now. I haven’t tried it out on Wendy Latour yet, but I think she’ll go bonkers when she hears me singing the
We Represent the Lollypop Guild
song at the talent contest next month. That’s the only idea I had that worked out. I checked out a magic book from the library, but none of my shirts have sleeves long enough to hide a rabbit. I also asked Willie to loan me some of his jokes, but he told me he couldn’t share his “material,” so I guess he changed his mind about being a comedian and is now going to be a tailor when he grows up.

I tell Troo, “I also gotta go over to the Goldmans’ to check on the house.” I look above the sink, where I taped Mrs. Goldman’s postcard that came all the way from the Alps. The snowy mountains look very refreshing when Troo and me are slaving over a hot sink.

On the back of the card is the sweetest note that also lifts my spirits:

It’s too bad that she won’t be back for the end-of-the-summer party, but I’m glad she has not been killed by an avalanche. When she gets home, Mrs. Goldman is gonna give me that five dollars for keeping my eye on her house. The first thing I’m going to do is rush up to the toy store and put that ventriloquist doll on layaway for Troo. I’m also going to take the bus to the new zoo to see Sampson on some pretty Sunday with Ethel. Mary Lane took that picture of him the way she promised she would with her Brownie camera, but it’s not taped up next to the postcard from Mrs. Goldman. I got it under my pillow, the same way Troo keeps Daddy’s sky-blue shirt under hers. Like everybody else around here, even Sampson seems thrilled with himself in that snapshot. He’s got a smile on his face and one of his long arms looped around a tire that hangs from the ceiling looking like he just came back from a night on the town.

Up to her elbows in bubbles, my sister bosses, “You’re not gonna water the garden or work on your charitable story or go over to the Goldmans’ or . . . or anything else boneheaded.” She unplunges her hands from the dishwater and gets me by the wrist. “I been plannin’ this for weeks. You, Mary Lane and Artie and me are havin’ an important powwow over at the Latours tonight.”

I say, “Okay, okay,” because Troo looks like she means Indian burn business and it’s such a relief to see her being her old ornery self. “But I gotta water the garden real quick. The corn . . . I promised Dad . . . Dave, that I would.”

“Girls?” Mother says, making a sweeping entrance into the kitchen that reminds me so much of Loretta Young on her television show. She’s wearing seamed nylons on her legs, which are making a strong recovery, and a shirtwaist dress the same color as a plum with a flipped-up collar and a wide white belt and high heels that match. She smells different, but still divine. She’s started wearing a perfume called Chanel No. 5 that also comes from France, but I think is a cut above Evening in Paris. That’s how she acts anyway when she dabs it on. She jiggles the car keys our way. “I’ll be back late. Dave should be home from his sister’s around ten.”

Soon as we hear her heels clicking on the dining room floor, Troo bends back and calls, “No hurry, Helen, dear. Take your time. Say hi to Aunt Betty for me and have oodles of fun!”

My sister telling her to have oodles of anything should’ve made an alarm bell go off in our mother’s head no matter how excited she is about shopping for her wedding, but she doesn’t miss a step.

When the front screen door slams shut and we hear the Studebacker’s engine start up, Troo wipes her hands down the front of her shorts and says, “You finish up. I’ll meet ya over at the Latours’.”

“Are we gonna play a new game?” I ask, trying to figure out what “surprise” she has in store for us tonight.

“No, we’re gonna . . .” She stops on the porch step, looks back at me very crafty and says, “Yeah. I got a new game to show ya,” and off she goes into the night, laughing. Not her airy Chopsticks tinkle or even a deep French
hunh
. . .
hunh . . . hunh
. That laugh is badder sounding than the time she stabbed Jeffie Lewis in the arm with a pencil after he called her “Clarabelle Hair” one too many times. It is even more wicked than the one Troo gave after she tricked Mimi Latour into petting ankle-biting Butchy when she found out that Willie liked Mimi more than he liked her. The laugh might be even more devilish than the one my sister did when she came up with a way to capture Bobby over at the playground shed and that was the worst one ever.

That laugh—the one that is still echoing around our empty house and filling my heart with the worst kind of scared—
that
is my sister’s revenge laugh.

Whatever genius plan she’s been brewing for the past couple of weeks, I knew it would bubble up to the surface eventually and I was right. Tonight at the Latours’ is when
aaalll
will be revealed. Somebody who has done my sister wrong but good is about to get theirs and even though I can’t be sure, I think I know who Troo’s got in mind. God help us all.

I
’m not going over to the Latours’ the way Troo told me to. I don’t want to hear her plan. I’m afraid to hear her plan. That’s why I’m running over to the Piaskowskis’ as fast as I can. Dave’s still over there getting his sister’s house up to snuff for her return.