Good Graces

Chapter Twenty-four

My sister gave me the cold shoulder all day. That’s how she always acts when I don’t do what she tells me to do, which was show up at the powwow she had planned over at the Latours’ last night where she was gonna reveal her revenge plan. I could just kick myself. That’s what I shoulda done. Hearing what Troo’s got up her sleeve would’ve been awful, but thanks to Mary Lane, now I know something even worse. Something that could get Troo sent to reform school if she gets caught. Getting revenge is not against the law. Not like stealing from your neighbors is.

I was going to talk to her about what she’s been up to with Father Mickey and the altar boys after we turned in tonight, but then I decided keeping my sister’s criminal life to myself is the smart way to go. What would be the point? After I accuse Troo and she finally admits to being one of the cats, she’ll cuddle up and talk to me in her purring dolly voice, give me excuses for being wayward the way she always does, or worse, she won’t do that at all. She’ll hawk a loogie at me and say, “Yeah? So what?” and prance into the darkness to kick up her heels.

After we got done saying our prayers, Troo was still doing an excellent imitation of an iceberg. She didn’t twirl my hair and she didn’t want me to rub her back or give me butterfly kisses. She drew a line down the middle of our bed that I couldn’t cross without getting kicked, then rolled away from me as far away as she could and sang over and over in the coldest voice, “Every party has a pooper, that’s why I invited you. Party pooper. Party pooper,” until I couldn’t take it for one more second and had to run out to the green bean teepee.

That’s where I am now. Listening to the crickets and trying to decide if I should hop the white fence and ask great-advice-giving Ethel what she thinks I should do about thieving Troo, when I hear the first wails of the ambulance. I automatically cross myself and say a Hail Mary the way the nuns taught us to for the poor person’s suffering soul and go back to figuring out how to get Troo out of dutch, but I can barely hear myself think. The siren is getting closer and closer and doesn’t wind down to a whimper until it’s right next door.

Knowing that can only mean one thing, I scramble out of the teepee as fast as I can and shout, “Ethel! I’m comin’.”

Because of my fly-like-the-wind speed, I beat out Dave, Mother, Troo and all the other neighbors who heard the siren and have come to see what the ruckus is about. The flashing light on the ambulance parked in front of Mrs. Galecki’s house is making our faces go red, then black, red, black, while we watch the men who’ve come to do their job. They hurry up the steps with a stretcher to hunch over Mrs. Galecki, whose head is slumped down to her baggy chest. The porch light is shining down on her face, which matches her gray hair. Ethel is swaying next to her patient and friend, wringing her hands and asking for Jesus’s help.

I want to go to her, but the porch is small and there’s no room for me. All I can do is call to Ethel from the bottom of the steps in my most soothing voice that I learned from her, “Everything’s gonna be fine, sugar,” but she either doesn’t hear me or doesn’t believe me because she’s pleading to the heavens even louder.

The ambulance guys are the same two that always come when Mrs. Galecki’s heart acts up. Like Laurel and Hardy, one of them is fat and one is skinny. When they get done poking around, they heave Mrs. Galecki onto the stretcher with “A one and a two and a three a,” and struggle down the steps with her in their hands. She looks even worse close-up. Her toothless mouth is hanging open and she’s only got on one of the pretty pink slippers that Ethel knit her.

Ethel is scurrying after them with the other slipper in her hand, whimpering out, “Don’t you fret, Bertha, don’t you fret. Ya gonna be back home eatin’ berry cake in no time.”

Ethel doesn’t notice me when she rushes past me in the dark. I don’t think she knows if she is coming or going. When I chase after her and tap her on the shoulder, she turns with a start, brings both of her hands to her chest and says, “Oh, Miss Sally. Bertha… she’s real bad!”

“Is it her…?” I place my hand across my heart the way you do for the Pledge of Allegiance.

“I… don’t know… we was just sittin’ there on the porch talkin’ about Mr. Gary’s visit and then all of a sudden…” Ethel goes back to taking giant steps toward where the ambulance is parked and I’m working hard to keep up. “Bertha give out a shout and went limp and… she didn’t come back ’round the way she does mosta the time with a little jostle and the smellin’ salts so I called the operator.”

Down at the curb, the men slide Mrs. Galecki through the open doors of the ambulance like she’s a refrigerator shelf. She clanks, and that sound… it gives me the shivers in the hot night.

Ethel wants to get in, too, so she can comfort Mrs. Galecki on the way to the hospital, but the skinny man with Augie embroidered on his white shirt puts a hand on her arm to stop her. “Family only. You know the rules.”

Of course she does. This has happened so many times before. She’s just not thinking straight.

“Rest easy, Bertha,” Ethel calls through the door. “Your boy… he’ll be here right quick and-”

Augie slams one door shut and then the other. “Give the hospital a buzz later on,” he tells Ethel on the way to his shotgun seat beside his partner, who cranks the siren back up and off they go ripping down 52nd Street to St. Joe’s.

Somebody laughs and the crowd of neighbors breaks up to go back to whatever they were doing before all the excitement except for Troo, who is hanging back, and Mother and Dave, who’ve come to Ethel’s other side.

Dave puts his arm around Ethel’s shoulders and she leans against him and for just a second I think she is gonna faint right there in the street and Mother must think that, too, because she says to her, “You look like you could use a stiff drink.” To me, she puts her foot down. “You and your sister get back to bed on the double.”

All there’s left for me to do is watch them guide my good friend across the grass to the front of our house, propping her up between them.

“Ethel?” I call to her.

“Don’t you worry, Miss Sally,” she calls back over her shoulder. “Everything’s gonna be fine,” and as much as I want to believe that, my pounding heart is letting me know the smartest woman I know couldn’t be more wrong.

I try to never disobey Mother, but I can’t do what she wants me to. Go back to bed and let my thoughts chase their tails. Listen to my sister sing that party pooper song until she falls asleep and I’m left alone in the dark to toss and turn in the damp twisted sheets, watching the aquarium fish swim by the sunken pirate ship and think about Troo’s half-buried feelings and what trouble she’s in and how the fox-stole-wearing angelfish don’t seem to care about anybody but themselves and poor Nell, just a skeleton of her former self. And how Dave is probably gonna get shot in the back by a bank robber after he marries our unlucky-in-love mother. And Daddy. All he asked me to do was pay attention to the details and keep Troo safe. He expected me to come through for him in the clinch and I’m batting 0 for 2.

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.