Good Graces

Chapter Nineteen

How I Spent My Charitable Summer

By Sally Elizabeth O’Malley

I went to Granny’s every Friday and washed out Uncle Paulie’s socks, which might not sound like such a sacrifice, but believe me it is. His socks smell like old bowling shoes from not just one person’s feet, but from a lot of persons’ feet, which made me think of Mary Magdalene drying Jesus’s toes off with her hair. That was so nice of her because from walking barefoot in Galilee and around lost sheep, the Son of God’s feet had to be really raunchy. Or maybe they weren’t because He also spent a lot of time walking on water. And I was really charitable to Wendy Latour. I have done so much wicked-witch laughing for her that I lost my voice for a week. I was also kind to her brother, Artie. When his best friend disappeared, I gave him one of my leather coin purses that I made eleven of at camp because that is the number of Apostles minus Judas, who I want nothing to do with. I’d also like to mention here for your holy consideration that my sister, Margaret, also gave Artie a piece of gum and hasn’t missed one of her religious visits with Father Mickey. I helped Mother clean behind the stove, painted her toenails and got her nummies. She has not gotten boils yet for living in sin with Dave Rasmussen the way you told me she would.

That’s where I left off after Troo and me got back from listening to Music Under the Stars over at the park with Mother tonight. I’ll get extra credit points for using Mary Magdalene’s hair and Jesus’s feet and the Apostles. The reason I crossed out that part about keeping an eye on the Goldmans’ house is because even though I am doing that, they are Jewish. Sister Raphael would take off my extra points to even the murdering Jesus score.

When I used the key Mrs. Goldman gave me to go into their house yesterday to turn off the light I saw glowing on the stove and bring her the kitty puzzles, I wound all her clocks, too. A clock that isn’t ticking is as sad as dead flowers. Normally I don’t like being anywhere without Troo, but it felt kinda nice to be alone for a change. I opened a window because it was such a hotbox in there and sat down on Mrs. Goldman’s davenport and started thinking about how sad it was that she couldn’t plant a garden this summer and how charitable it would be for me to go up to the Five and Dime tomorrow and get some seeds and stick them in for her. When she came back home from her trip, that’d be one surprise she would really like. She’d see her blooming backyard and wrap me in her arms and say, “Oh, Liebchen. What a special girl you are. Danke schoen!” And the next thing I knew her cuckoo clock woke me up. I don’t know why, but I felt like I got my hand caught in the brown-sugar cookie jar. I dashed out the door and didn’t stop running until I got home.

When I can’t sleep at night, when my mind goes from one thing to another and back again, sometimes I can stop it for a little while by using some of Ethel’s good advice. I read. Or write. That’s what I wanted to do tonight, add something else onto the charitable summer story under the covers after I got Troo to sleep, but that’s not gonna happen. My sister’s up to something.

“Harder,” she says from her side of the bed. “Over to the left more, between my shoulder blades.” The pages of my notebook that I set on top of our dresser are getting flapped by the fan while I rub her back. They grab her attention. “You’re workin’ on your story already?”

“I thought I better before-”

“You’re such a brownnose.” I can’t see her face, but I know that she’s sneering. (She usually waits until the night before school starts and copies off my story.)

I say, “Maybe you could try to start a little earl-”

“Holy cow, I’m beat,” she says, pulling her back away from my fingers and punching her pillow. “You better turn in, too. Tomorrow is a big day.”

One of the biggest. When we wake up, it will be the Fourth of July.

After we do our butterfly kissing and mentioning of Lew Burdette having a hell of an arm, my sister right away starts breathing slow. She’s trying to fool me, but I can hear her fast-licking her lips the way she does when she gets nervous or excited. That can only mean one thing. Even though she’s stretched out like a cartoon cat, she’s planning on sneaking out of our bed. For a kid that prides herself on her trickiness, she’s gonna have to try harder. She didn’t even put on her nightie after our bath. She slipped on the same pair of shorts she had on all day and her sneakers are waiting for her next to the bedroom door.

I am going to bide my time by watching what’s going on in the aquarium Dave bought me until she tries to make her move. I adore the angelfish with the feathering fins that glides through the water not paying attention to the littler fish. If they had noses they would be stuck up in the air and if they had shoulders, they would wear a ritzy fox fur draped over them. They remind me of Mother. There is a pirate ship sunk on the bottom of the tank and next to the anchor is a treasure chest mostly buried in the pink gravel. That reminds me of Troo. The skeleton with the Jolly Roger hat reminds me of Nell. Same smile. I called her on the telephone after supper. I didn’t talk. I just breathed heavy so she would think that at least somebody thought she was still lush enough to make a dirty phone call to. Nell cried into the phone, “Eddie? Is that you? Please come home.”

That didn’t work out exactly the way I planned it, so that’s why I’m extra determined that I will not fail Troo. I’ve got important work to do. I’m being a lifeguard.

My sister slowly opens one of her eyes to see if I fell asleep.

“You can stop pretendin’ now,” I tell her.

She giggles and props her head up on her hand. Her hair is waving down the sides of her face like the red velvet curtain over at the Uptown Theatre. She picks up a piece of my hair and twirls it around her finger. That’s another thing she does to help her fall asleep.

I don’t ask where she was planning on running off to because she would never answer that. I ask her something else that’s really been bugging me. “Tell me how come you didn’t decorate anything this year for the Fourth contest.”

If she wants to win the blue ribbon so bad, what is she thinking? Those Kleenex flowers aren’t gonna get folded and stuck on the Schwinn all by themselves. We spent the whole afternoon at the playground-decorating party that Debbie told us about. Troo had every chance in the world to bring her bike over, but she sat next to me with our backs pressing against the school bricks and didn’t lift a finger. Mary Lane didn’t either. She never even showed up. Dollars to donuts, she skipped the party because she didn’t want to give counselor Debbie Weatherly the satisfaction of knowing that she doesn’t have eight bikes after all, not even one.

Using her mental telepathy on me, Troo asks, “You told Mary Lane about the cops knowin’ the cat burglar is a kid, right?” You’d have to have known her her whole life to tell, but she’s worried. I know my sister can really go after Mary Lane, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t one of her best friends. That’s just how those two are together. Pick. Pick. Pick. “I’m sure it’s her, aren’t you?”

I was positive, but ever since I told Mary Lane in the library lavatory that she better quit leading a life of crime and she acted like I was two Hail Marys short of a rosary, I just don’t know what to think anymore.

I say, “She told me she wasn’t the cat, but I still mostly think she is. I’m gonna remind her again at the park tomorrow to knock it off. She missed the playground party but she wouldn’t miss the picnic, right?”

Troo doesn’t say, Are ya kiddin’ me? Mary Lane wouldn’t miss all that free food if the world was coming to an end. She flips over without a word. I rub her neck between my fingers until I’m sure she really is asleep. How I can tell is by hearing her choo-choo snoring and her sucking the two middle fingers of her right hand that she quit last summer but for some reason has started up again.

I check Daddy’s Timex at ten after ten, so that means I’ve got at least seven more hours to keep watch over Troo. I’m gonna pass the time by making shadow puppets. I can do a bird and another kind of bird and a bunny, and when I get done with that, I’ll put my feet up on the wall and I’ll imagine myself walking to see Sampson at his new home. Maybe I’ll go out to the bean teepee once I’m sure that Mother and Dave have gone to bed, which won’t be long now. I heard the front door open and shut, which means that Dave is back from work, and from out in the living room I can hear muffled talking. I hope Mother doesn’t start complaining again because hearing her going after Dave is bad enough during the day, but at night, the hot words that come pouring out of her mouth make my sweaty skin go clammy. I know that her wanting Dave to buy her so many things is not the only reason she gets after him. Mother has never completely forgotten about him jilting her way back when his mother told him to. You know what they say about forgiveness? Mother and Troo are not at all divine at it. They can’t help it. It’s their 100 percent Irish blood. Same goes for Granny. She held a grudge against a boy in the old country for ten years because he made fun of the sack dress she wore to school. (She won’t tell me what she did to even the score, only that the kid was known from that day on as Toothless Tom.)

I would adore seeing Dave even if it’s just for a minute. It’s been a tough day guarding Troo and the sight of my father makes me feel better, so I scootch down to the end of the bed. When I open our bedroom door a crack, I have a straight shot into the living room, but it isn’t Dave next to Mother on the davenport. This man’s hair isn’t light, it’s dark. All of him is black, even his shoes. It’s Father Mickey! I can’t hear what they’re saying because my ears feel like Niagara Falls is rushing through them, but I’m thinking that Mrs. Kenfield told Father about Troo stealing out of the Five and Dime and now he’s come to tell Mother. But why does he have a letter in his hand? He wouldn’t write it down if he was here to tattle on Troo, he would just… oh. That letter… it’s gotta be the annulment from the Pope that Mother’s been waiting for!

Father Mickey is tilting forward, offering it to Mother, but when she’s just about got it, he snatches it away.

“Knock it off, Mick,” she says, loudly. “Get it over with.”

She must be so scared that it says:

Dear Helen,

So sorry to hear that your husband Hall Gustafson is a beer-bottle killer, but I don’t think it would be a good idea to give you an annulment at this time. Try again later.

Holiest regards,

Pope John the twenty-third

Father Mickey mumbles something and Mother shakes her head so he unfolds the letter and reads it out loud. When he’s done, a beaming smile comes onto her face and that is such a rare thing to see that I gasp and hope they don’t hear me. Father puts his arms around her and moves closer. Mother stops him with a hand to his chest and starts to cry, and that is such another rare thing. This is not sadness breaking loose from my mother’s heart. This is the kind of crying you do after you think that you’re for-sure dead, but then somebody brings you back to life. The kind of sobbing that Lazurus probably did on Jesus’s shoulder. The same way I cried that night at the zoo when Daddy told me to fly like the wind away from Bobby.

Mother takes in a breath and presses her Matador Red lips to the white sheet of paper from the Pope that has just told her probably in Italian and maybe some Latin:

Dear Helen,

Greetings from the Vatican!

I have granted you an annulment so anytime you want to, you can start picking the flowers out for your wedding.

Dominus vobiscum

Your friend in Christ, the Pope

Mother has asked and she has received. His Holiness has decreed that she is no longer married to that murdering Swede and, matter of fact, never has been. Granny told me that an annulment in the Catholic Church isn’t like a divorce a Lutheran gets. An annulment erases everything like it never even happened. It’s like getting matrimonial amnesia.

After closing the bedroom door and slipping back into bed next to Troo, I’m feeling relieved that she didn’t slip out the bedroom window when I was watching the goings-on in the living room and that the fighting between Dave and Mother is finally gonna stop, but that’s not the only thing I’m feeling. Never a rose without a prick is what Granny would say if she was here right now. I would have to agree with her. Tomorrow morning when my sleeping beauty sister finds out that the Pope has given two thumbs-up to Dave and Mother’s wedding plans, she’s gonna erupt like Mount Vesuvius all over the place.

And it’s not only for Troo that I’m feeling the worst kind of worry there is. I haven’t told Dave out loud because I can hardly believe it myself, but I think I am beginning to love him at least half as much as I loved Daddy. I don’t think I can stand to lose both of them, which I probably will. I have been worried about this almost from the first day I found out he was my real father and that Mother wanted to marry him. On a picture-perfect afternoon in the not-too-distant future, they will stand toe-to-toe at the altar to commit the holy sacrament of marriage. The groom in his best blue suit and wing-tip shoes will slip that gold band on his bride-to-be’s finger and say:

I, David,

Take you, Helen,

To be my wife,

To have and to hold,

From this day forward,

As long as we both shall live.

It’s the last line of that vow that’s been tying my tummy into a knot.

Isn’t Dave concerned the same way I’ve been that if he marries Helen Riley Durand O’Malley Gustafson, he could be taking his life into his own hands? He’s a detective, for goodness sakes. He should’ve noticed by now what terrible fatal luck Mother has in the husband department. First off, Nell’s father died smelling ammonia. Then Daddy was killed in the car crash. And Hall will probably get electrocuted in the chair.

People are always saying that bad things happen in threes, but what if they’re wrong? What if bad things happen in fours?