Good Graces

Chapter One

Somebody at his funeral called Donny O’Malley lush. I couldn’t agree more. Daddy was just-picked corn on the cob and a game-saving double play all rolled into one, that’s how lush he was.

Someone else at the cemetery said that time heals all wounds. I don’t know about that.

Daddy crashed on his way home from a baseball game at Milwaukee County Stadium three years ago. The steering wheel went into his chest. I wasn’t in the car that afternoon. I hadn’t weeded my garden so he told me I had to stay back on the farm and I told him I hated him and wished for a different daddy. I didn’t mean it. I’d just been so looking forward to singing The Land of the Free and the Home of the Braves. Eating salty peanuts and the seventhinning stretch.

When he was in the hospital, Daddy shooed everyone else out of the room and had me lie down with him. “No matter what, you must take care of Troo,” he told me. “Keep her safe. You need to promise me that.” He had tubes coming out of him and there was a ping pinging noise that reminded me of the 20, 000 Leagues Under the Sea movie. “Tell your sister the crash wasn’t her fault. And… tell your mother that I forgive her. I’ll be watching, Sally. Remember… things can happen when you least expect them… you… you always gotta be prepared. Pay attention to the details. The devil is in the details.”

I never forget what he told me or what I promised him, but Daddy is especially on my mind this morning. When it’s baseball season, I always remember him better. The other reason I’m thinking about him is because Troo and me just got home from getting our brand-new start-of-the-summer sneakers at Shuster’s Shoes on North Avenue. That’s the store where Hall Gustafson used to work. He’s the man Mother got married to real quick after Daddy died. My sister thinks she accepted his proposal because Hall had a tattoo on his arm that said Mother, but I think she did it because Daddy forgot to leave us a nest egg. I watched Mother collapse in our cornfield and beat the dirt with her fists, shouting, “Donny! How could you?” but I forgave him right off. When you’re a farmer, it’s hard to put something away for a rainy day.

The whole time we were trying on Keds this morning, I kept imagining that slobbering Swede stumbling out from behind the curtain where the shoes are hidden, but that was dumb. Our stepfather doesn’t have a job at Shuster’s or anyplace else anymore because he got into a fight at Jerbak’s Beer ’n Bowl with the owner, who was famous around here for bowling a 300 game but also for being quick with his fists. Hall’s in the Big House now. For murdering Mr. Jerbak with a bottle of Old Milwaukee. Sometimes in bed at night when I can’t sleep, which is mostly all the time, I think about how good that all worked out and just for a little while it makes me feel like God might know what He’s doing. At least part of the time. He did a bad job letting Daddy die, but I admire how the Almighty got rid of Mr. Jerbak and Hall in one fell swoop. That really was killing two dirty birds with one stone.

Troo wasn’t thinking about Hall when we were up at the store. Not how he dragged her out of bed and knocked her head against the wall or any of the other rotten stuff he did like sneaking behind Mother’s back with a floozy. My sister was having the best time this morning. She’s nuts about Shuster’s because it’s so modern. They’ve got a Foot-O-Scope machine that’s like an X-ray. Troo adores pressing her eyes to the black viewer to see inside her feet, but when I look down at my bones, they remind me of Daddy lying beneath the cemetery dirt.

“Ya know what I been thinkin’, Sal?” my sister asks.

We’re sitting on the back steps of the house. I’m raring to go, but she’s working hard to loop her new shoelaces into bunny ears. Troo was in the crash with Daddy. She played peek-a-boo with him on the way home from the baseball game. Holding her hands over his eyes for longer than she shoulda is what caused the car to go skidding out of control and smash into the old oak tree on Holly Road. She got her arm fractured. It aches before it’s going to rain and also made her not very good at tying.

“What?” I ask her.

“It would be a fantastic idea for us to get away from the neighborhood for a while. We should go away to camp this summer,” she says, batting her morning-sky blue eyes at me.

My eyes are green and I don’t have hair the color of maple leaves in the fall the way Troo does. I have thick blond hair that my mother brushes too hard and puts into a fat braid that goes down my back and deep dimples that I’ve been told more than a few times are very darling. I’ve always had long legs, but this past year they grew three and a half inches. My sister thinks I look like a yellow flamingo.

“We need to expand our horizons,” Troo says.

Even though we don’t look very much alike, we are what people call Irish twins. Troo will turn eleven two months before I turn twelve. I always know what she is really thinking and feeling. We have mental telepathy. So that’s how come I know my sister isn’t telling me the truth about why she wants to go to camp. It’s not the neighborhood she wants to get away from. She likes living in the brick house with the fat-leafed ivy growing up the sides and bright red geraniums in the window boxes and lilacs falling over the picket fence like a purple waterfall. It’s the owner of the house Troo’s got problems with. She wants to get away from Dave Rasmussen, who we moved in with at the end of last summer. He is my real father because when Daddy was in the war Mother accidentally had some of the sex with Dave.

For the longest time, I didn’t know that Dave was my flesh and blood. When I found out, I didn’t think I would get over it, but I mostly have, in my mind anyway. In my heart, Daddy is still my daddy and Dave is Dave. Maybe someday that will change for me, but it never will for my sister. Daddy will always be her one and only. He looked at her like she was a slice of banana cream pie. I was his second-favorite, plain old dependable cherry, and that was fine with me. When you got a sister like Troo, you gotta expect these things.

“I don’t want to expand anywhere,” I tell her. “My horizons are fine.”

“Yeah, that’s what you think, but Mrs. Kambowski told me that a person should get out and see the world whenever they can,” Troo tells me in her know-it-all voice that is not my favorite. “She said that travel is très chic.”

“She’s wrong.” Mrs. Kambowski is the boss of the Finney Library who won’t stop teaching my sister these French words no matter how many times I politely ask her to stop. “Ya know as good as me that goin’ someplace you’ve never been before can turn out really bad,” I remind Troo. “Remember what happened to Julie Adams in the Creature from the Black Lagoon when she went to the Amazon? And what about Sky King? He always gets into trouble when he goes flyin’ off into the horizon.” Daddy and I never missed that show because he was a pilot, too. “And… and what about all the bad stuff that happened to us when we moved from the country to the city?”

“I knew you’d say that,” she says with a smile that can bring the dead back to life. She inherited it from Daddy. He gave her her nickname, too. After she got a rusty nail pulled out of her heel and didn’t even flinch, he started calling her “a real trouper” and then because that took too long to say we began to call her Trooper and then shortened it even more. Her real name is Margaret. I also call her my Troo genius because she is really smart. She can come up with plans like nobody’s business. Like this camp one she’s trying to sell to me harder than the Fuller Brush man tries to talk Mother into a new broom even though the old one’s still got plenty of bristles. “That’s why I was thinkin’ we wouldn’t go someplace brand-new. We could go to the same camp Mary Lane went to last year. That one up in Rhinelander. She bragged about it so much… it’s like we’ve already been there, right?”

“Wrong.” Down the block, Bobby Darin is singing on the radio, “Won’t you come home Bill Bailey,” and that has to be a sign from God to stay put right where I am. I might not have a lot of belief in Him anymore, but I got enough to pay attention to the details.

Still struggling with the laces, Troo says, “I’m… I’m not thinkin’ about me.”

Yes, she is.

“I looked up what’s wrong with you in Mother’s medical book. An ocean voyage or a change of scenery is the best cure for people who have lunatic imaginations,” she says in her dolly voice, which is so hard not to give in to even if you know she’s just putting it on to get what she wants; it’s adorable. “Since ya don’t like being near water so much anymore, I figure a boat trip is out.” When I don’t agree, she doesn’t give up. She never does. “I bet you’d sleep a lot better breathin’ in all that country air.”

I doubt it.

Troo hits the hay every night like a bale falling outta our old barn loft. Wrapped in Daddy’s sky-blue work shirt that still has the smell of his Aqua Velva hidden under the collar, she holds her baby doll Annie up to her cheek and I feel her sweaty leg pressed up to mine and sometimes I count the freckles on her nose to see if she sprouted any new ones or walk my bare feet against the bedroom wall because it’s always cooler on that wall and my thoughts go round and round and I flip over on my tummy and stare at the picture of Daddy that hangs over our bed. He’s in a boat holding up a fish. His hair is blown into two horns. Troo says that he looks “devil-may-care” in that picture and maybe he does, but he probably isn’t anymore. I didn’t do that good a job last summer keeping my sister safe the way he asked me to. It seems like no matter how hard I try to be prepared I’m not ready for the bad when it shows up. Take Bobby Brophy. He was the playground counselor who almost murdered and molested me last summer and I didn’t suspect a thing. He hurt my sister, too. Knocked her out cold.

“Hey!” Troo nudges me. “I just remembered. The camp’s in a pine forest. That means it’d smell like Christmas every morning and that’s your favorite holiday.” She brings one sneaker and then the other into my lap and says, “Tie me up.”

Oh, how I wish I could. With a strong rope. I would anchor her to me.

“And ya know what the best part of us goin’ to camp would be, the real pièce de résistance?” she says. “You won’t have to visit Doc Keller while we’re gone!”

Mother makes me go up to his office on North Avenue once a week so he can give me a dose of cod liver oil and a stern lecture with his breath that smells like old vase water. He warns me each and every time that I better get my imagination under control or else. “An idle mind is the devil’s workshop,” he says, but Doc couldn’t be more wrong. My mind is never idle. Never ever. And it’s getting worse. I think all that cod liver oil might be greasing my wheels.

“Whatta ya say, Sal, my gal?” My sister picks up my hand and twines her fingers through mine. She knows I’m a sucker for that. “Ya in?”

“But what about Mother?” I ask. Through the screen door, I can hear the sound of her picking up the house. She’s still kinda wobbly. If somebody you know gets sick with a gall bladder that turns into liver problems and then a staph infection like what happened to her last summer, you better start saying your prayers. Doc Keller told all of us that he’d never heard of a person getting over something that fatal. “Who’s gonna get her nummy and what if she needs something like-”

Troo hawks and throws a loogie, which is something she has started doing lately when she wants to make a point. “What’s-his-name can take care of her.”

She means Dave, who bends over backwards for Troo, same as me, so against my better judgment, which I don’t hardly have much left of anymore, I end up telling him that night out on the backyard bench that both of us want to go to Camp Towering Pines in the worst possible way. I didn’t want to, but I had to lie to him. I know my sister. She’d figure out some way to go to that camp without me. There’s no telling what kind of trouble she could get into if I wasn’t there to stop her. And I made that promise to Daddy that I’ll never break. Even if my life depends on it.