Good Graces (28 page)

I just can’t face all that tonight.

I want to go sit on our backyard bench. I need to calm down. Breathing in the garden smells sometimes helps. I’m taking the alleyway home so Mother won’t spot me.

Troo, who is trailing after me like it’s an accident that we’re both going in the same direction, finally breaks the ice when I round our garage and open the gate to our yard. “I think Mrs. G bought the farm this time,” she calls to me outta the dark.

I want to charge back down the alley, push her down and shout,
If she does die, she’ll never know the truth! She was right all along that somebody stole her jewelry, but it wasn’t Ethel, the way she thought it was. It was you! You grabbed the necklace out of Mrs. Galecki’s bedroom. I hope you’re proud of yourself . . . you . . . you . . . lyin’ stealin’ brat! I never want to talk to you again for the rest of my life. I hate you!

But I don’t do that. I just don’t have it in me. I think instead about how if Mrs. Galecki does pass on, I’ll go with Ethel to the funeral, stand right by her side while she bawls into her handkerchief and moans in her black dress and hat with a veil. Even though she knows the end has been coming for a while now and that her patient has had a good long life, dear Ethel, she’s not really prepared. Nobody ever is. You can never get your heart ready.

The only good thing that would come out of Mrs. Galecki’s dying is that Ethel will inherit the money from her Last Will and Testament so she can start up her school and I’m overjoyed for her, I really am, but I have been dreading this day for a long, long time. Even if she wanted to stay, Ethel’s gonna have to move away from the neighborhood. There are people on these blocks who have never shouted hello when she glides by on her way to the drugstore. I’ve heard them call her
jigaboo
and
little black Sammy
behind her back up at the Kroger. She only got to live here in the first place because she was working for Mrs. Galecki. Colored people are supposed to live with other colored people. Ethel’ll have to move down to the Core.

I cannot imagine my life without her warm honey voice, her wise advice. Troo and me sleeping in her screened-in porch on nights when it’s just too stuffy in our room. Listening to Ethel’s jazzy music and eating her Mississippi blond brownies, smelling her violet toilet water behind her ears when she bends down to kiss my foreheard with her cool full lips. Even her bunions. Every square inch of the finest woman I know . . . her goneness is going to make me ache forever in a place I can’t rub.

I
never did get around to telling Dave that he should take out the corn he planted in Daddy’s memory. He did okay for his first try. The stalks are tall and tassled. Fireflies are flickering around the leaves and the smell of the damp dirt is almost as strong as the smell of the cookies drifting over from the factory tonight.

When Troo comes trailing after me into our yard, she doesn’t sail past me like I’m part of the scenery the way she’s been doing. She sits down next to me on the glider, picks up my hand off my lap and squeezes it so hard, which is something she used to do back in the olden days when she got scared of one thing or another, mostly the boogeyman, who doesn’t seem to bother her in the least anymore.

With our sunburned shoulders so close together, we watch the breeze flutter the corn and remember the good old days. How I’d sit in Daddy’s lap on the back porch after supper, smelling hard work on his sky-blue shirt. He’d wrap one of his hands around a cold bottle of beer and his other arm around me and we’d listen to a baseball game coming out of the Motorola radio that would light up his face the same way dawn did when he’d head out to the fields on his red tractor like a conquering hero. I know that Troo is picturing how her and Daddy made mustaches out of the tassles and that he always grew maroon Indian corn just for her because it matched the color of her hair. When August came, acres and acres of his hard work would wave outside our kitchen window like we lived on the shores of a green sea. We all looked so forward to the first of the corn. The taste of a just-picked cob, the salty butter dripping off our chins. Daddy’s triumphant look when we told him it was the best we ever had.

Even with my sister by my side, I haven’t felt this alone since the night I waited for his car to come down our road back from the game at County Stadium. Troo is remembering the crash, too, but she’d never admit it, even if I say to her,
It’s not true what everybody says about time healing all wounds. My heart . . . it feels like it’s permanently cracked, doesn’t yours?

“Sal, my gal,” Troo says, twining her fingers around mine. “I got a little surprise for ya. I was gonna save it, but I think . . . yeah, wait here.”

She goes to the garage and kicks two times on the door that Dave keeps trying to remember to fix. I can hear her rummaging around in there and then a long scraping sound on the cement floor and a few swear words.

After she switches off the light and the yard turns black again, she calls, “Close your eyes.” I can hear her grunt as she drags something across the grass. The nearer she gets to me, that rusty smell she’s had on her a couple of the times she’s snuck back into bed in the middle of the night gets stronger and stronger. “Okay.” Troo claps her hands just once. “Open saysme.”

Right in front of me, the moon catching it just right, is something else that I thought was long gone. I reach out and run my fingers across the worn-down green seat to make sure it’s not my imagination, but Daddy’s and my bench from the zoo feels real.

“But . . . I went back to look for it and it was gone,” I say. Those kids in Fatima who were paid the miracle visitation by the Blessed Virgin couldn’t have felt any more awestruck than I do. “I . . . I thought it got destroyed by the men with the bulldozers.”

“I know you did.” Troo is puffed up. “Mary Lane and me . . . we went and got it. Her dad told us they were just gonna throw it out, so we carried it all the way down Lloyd Street in the middle of the night so nobody would see us and blab the surprise.
Onree
let us keep it behind the drugstore for a while and then last week all three of us brought it the rest of the way,” she says. “Dave told me it was okay to keep it in the garage.” When I don’t get up right away because all the amazement I am feeling seems to have settled in my heinie, she shoves me on the shoulder and says, “Whatcha waitin’ for?”

After I get up from the glider and ease down in the middle of the bench, leaving the spot empty where Daddy always sat, Troo quickly curls up on the other side of me and says, “Feelin’ better?” She reaches up to pat me on the top of my head. “I sure am.” Of course she is. There’s just about nothing in the whole world that Troo adores more next to scaring the life outta somebody and bushwacks than having a plan and making it stick. “It’s good you’re sittin’ down. I gotta tell you something really bad,” she says.

She’s finally gonna come clean about her cat-stealing. They’re always telling us at church that confession is good for the soul so I should let her get it off her chest, but I’ve got Troo in one of her once-in-a-blue-moon generous moods. “Before you do that, could you do one more really nice thing for me?”

That catches her off guard. I don’t usually ask her for favors because the chance of getting one is too slim.

Troo says, “But . . . I need to . . . fine. I’ll go out to the new zoo to see that dumb gorilla with you, but if you start cryin’ and wavin’ at him, I’m warnin’ you, I’ll . . . I’ll . . .”

I hook a chunk of her hair that’s fallen in her eyes behind her ear and say, “That’s really sweet, but that’s not what I was gonna ask you.” I have thought this through already over ten times. I let it out in a rush so Troo can’t interrupt. “I want you to climb through our bedroom window, get Mrs. Galecki’s emerald necklace out of your sock and stick it back under her bed. Nobody’d have to know that you stole it.”

“What?!” Troo flies up off the bench, flapping her arms, legs going every which way. “What . . . what are you talkin’ about? Who told you I stole it?”

“I . . . I . . .” Nobody did. I was just so sure, but now . . . the look on her face, she can’t fake that one. That’s her genuine, you-better-not-be-callin’-me-a-liar-or-I’ll-sock-you-in-the-breadbox look. “Didn’t you?”

“No, I didn’t!”

“Then who did?”

“That’s what I’ve been tryin’ to tell you, if you’d shut up and listen!” She is so agitated, she can barely get out, “Father Mickey. He stole the necklace.”

“Trooper,” I say, shaking my head low and slow. She’s mad at him, and trying to shift the blame onto somebody else the way she always does when she gets caught doing something bad. Father Mickey couldn’ta snuck into Mrs. Galecki’s bedroom to take the necklace because Ethel’s got eyes in back of her head. But then I remember that’s not exactly true. She isn’t watching every minute of every day. When Mrs. Galecki goes down for her long afternoon nap, Ethel leaves to do grocery shopping at the Kroger or over to the drugstore to get the medicines. During one of Father Mickey’s visits would be another good time to get those errands done.

Still flapping, Troo says, “I thought you already knew about . . . Mary Lane bragged that she filled you in when she ran into you up near church, didn’t she?”

I nod. Reluctantly. She’s gonna blow a gasket when she hears me admit that.

“Goddamn it all! That bigmouth Lane, she’s always trying to prove she’s better than . . .” My sister is pacing fast in front of the bench, punching her fist into her hand. “I was gonna tell you all about the altar boys and Father Mickey and . . . and the rest of it over at the Latours’ last night, but you never showed up and now—”

“
Shhh
,
shhh,
you gotta lower your voice. They’re gonna hear you.” I point to the house. The kitchen curtains are closed, but the light is on above the sink so we can see the outlines of Dave, Mother and Ethel sitting around the table. “Why don’t you . . .” I pat the bench.

Troo takes her time, but when she sits back down, she shoots me a hurt look that you never see much on her face anymore and takes one of her L&M’s from her shorts’ back pocket. I almost ask her for one. Cigarettes might smell like a cat box, but they seem to round the rough edges for everyone and I think I’m going to need a little smoothing.

“I bet Mary Lane didn’t tell me everything,” I say. “Start at the very beginning.”

Troo strikes a match, thinks about that for a minute and says, “The first time I went up to the rectory for my extra religious instructions, the doorbell rang and when Father Mickey went to answer it, I did, ya know, what I do.” She means she snooped like she always does in Mother’s dressing table and my notebooks and Nell’s closet and only God knows where else. “I pulled out the drawers of Father’s desk and in the top two there was only notebooks, but in the bottom one, I found Mr. Livingston’s fancy silver belt buckle.”

I gasp. “Did he . . . did Father catch you looking through his stuff?” The thought of him coming up on her from behind the way Bobby did last summer makes the whole backyard feel like it dived underwater. I can barely breathe.

Troo shakes her head and says, “By the time he came back from paying the paper boy, I was already back in the chair memorizing the parts of the missal he gave me to learn.”

“Didn’t you wonder what he was doin’ with Mr. Livingston’s buckle?” I ask.

She shrugs. “I figured Father found it in church or something and was goin’ to give it back, but then I heard that it’d been stolen and I . . . I didn’t know what to think.”

My sister has gone pale. I dab the sweat beads off her forehead with my fingertips. I don’t want to upset her more than she already is and she can get snooty if you push her, so I’m going to try and let her unravel what she’s got to tell me in her own time.

“After that first visit, Father and me never studied religion again.” Troo lets out the longest exhale. “We played hangman and tic-tac-toe and he made me cherry Kool-Aid, but mostly. . . we talked.”

“You talked? About what?” I ask, finding that a little hard to believe. Priests don’t usually have conversations with kids. They just tell them they’re going to hell if they aren’t good and obey their parents and stuff like that.

Troo says, “He seemed so interested in me, Sal. He wanted to know what I thought about this and that. Like the Braves. The neighborhood. We talked about everything. Even Daddy.” She takes an extra long drag off her L&M. “I told him how much I hated Dave and how mad I was at Helen and . . .” She probably cried, but she’d never tell me if she did. “He gave me a hug and promised that he’d make sure that Mother never got the annulment letter and . . . I believed him.”

The heart of the matter, that’s what this is.

Troo says, “That’s how come when Father asked me to keep my ears open around Dave and report back to him what was goin’ on in the cat burglar investigation, I told him I would.”

“Didn’t you think that was kinda weird?” I ask. I sure do. Usually when somebody asks her to do anything she tells them where to go.

“Kinda,” Troo says, puffing away. “Until he explained to me that the reason he was so interested in the burglaries was because he studies wrongdoing. He told me it’s important to know thy enemy.”

I would have to agree with him.

My sister says, “I . . .I swear. I didn’t know then that he had something to do with the stealing. I just wanted to return the favor, ya know, for him being so . . . oh, I don’t know.” I do. Father made her feel the same way Daddy used to. Number one on the hit parade. Not second fiddle like she sees herself now. “So after that, every time I went up to the rectory, I told him everything I heard Dave tell Helen about the burglaries and what I heard him talk about with Detective Riordan on the telephone. Father seemed so happy to hear that, but . . . but then he broke his promise and brought the annulment letter to Helen anyway.”

Because of mental telepathy, I know she was also thinking that if she fed Father tidbits about the cat burglar case it would make it harder for Dave to solve the case. He would have to spend more time on the job and less time with Mother and that might get her steamed enough to call the wedding off.