Whistling in the Dark

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

When Eddie and Nell hopped down Delancey’s Corner Store steps, Troo turned a pretend key on her lips and threw it out the window. It was her way of telling me to keep my mouth locked up tight about her knowing who the murderer and molester was. A warning not to say anything to Nell or Eddie. She wanted to keep it hush-hush between the O’Malley sisters.

Eddie handed me and Troo a Coke through the car window and then the other two that were left in the carton. “Give those to Granny and Uncle Paulie.” I guessed that getting married agreed with Eddie, because he was sure acting more grown-up. Almost like Mr. Anderson in Father Knows Best.

He drove down ten houses and parked the Chevy under the big oak tree in front of Granny’s house that she called a bungalow, which is just another word for the smallest kind of place that a person could live in. Granny could’ve used a much larger house because she was a big woman both up and out, especially in her arms, which had a lot of flappy skin hangin’ off of them. But her face hardly had any lines and her hair was thick and white like homemade bread and she kept it in a pageboy. She also had perfect teeth that she kept in a glass full of water when she wasn’t using them. If you ever met her you might think to yourself that she reminded you a lot of that guy on the dollar bill.

“Don’t take too long, we have to be at the hospital by eleven,” Nell called after I’d gotten out of the car. “Dr. Sullivan is going to meet us there and tell us all about Mother. And don’t tell Granny about Eddie and me, I want to surprise her.”

Seemed like nobody wanted me to tell anybody about nothin’.

I knocked on Granny’s front door that coulda used some paint and waited for Uncle Paulie to answer it, which he always did, because Granny moved so slow with her crippled knees that you could be sitting on that porch until the cows came home if you waited for her. When he pushed open the screen door, I said, “Hi, Uncle Paulie.”

He had on what he always had on, tan pants and a white T-shirt that showed off his pretzel-rod arms with the most pale freckles of anybody I’d ever seen. His hair was thick red and started back on his head a bit and looked like it should belong to an entirely different person.

“Peek-a-boo, Troo.”

“No, I’m Sally, remember, Uncle Paulie? Troo has red hair just like yours.” I sort of pushed past him and went looking for Granny. She was in the kitchen filling up her copper teapot with water.

“Hi, Granny. Got a present for you.” I pulled open her refrigerator and put the Cokes inside for later. Granny loved Coca-Cola. Drank almost a whole six-pack every day. It gave her vim and vigor, she said.

Granny’s thyroid-condition eyes got bigger when she said, “Well, hello there, Sally. What a nice surprise. Care for a cuppa?” She didn’t hug me or anything. Granny didn’t go in for hugs.

“No, thank you. I can’t stay long. Troo and Eddie and Nell are waiting for me in the car. We’re going to see-”

“Peek-a-boo, Troo! Peek-a-boo, Daddy!” Uncle Paulie came up behind and put his hands over my eyes.

I peeled off his fingers that smelled of glue and sort of laughed out of politeness, but I was thinking that Uncle Paulie was getting weirder and weirder by the minute and maybe Granny should put him in the orphanage up on Lisbon Avenue.

“That’s enough now, son,” Granny said. “You go back into your room and work on your houses.”

Uncle Paulie said down to the floor, “Okay, Ma.”

Granny waited until Uncle Paulie shuffled off and then said, “So, to what do I owe the pleasure of your company?”

“Mother is getting better. Nell says she is over the hump,” I said, excited to tell her such good news about her sick daughter.

“You’re a day late and a dollar short, Sally m’girl.” Granny reached up to the cupboard and took out one of those dainty teacups she had that were from the old country. “Officer Rasmussen has stopped by almost every day that your mother has been in the hospital to tell me how she was doing.”

I must’ve made quite the face because Granny smiled.

“Why’d he do that?” I asked.

The copper pot whistled and Granny switched the burner off. “I thought you knew that Dave Rasmussen and your mother were friends.”

That was one of the main things I really loved about Granny. She knew a lot of stuff about everybody who lived in the neighborhood and she was never shy about telling you. Like the fact that Brownie McDonald got kicked out of the seminary for drinking up all the Communion wine and that Mrs. Delancey from the corner store used to be Shelly the Snake Girl in a dancing club downtown. (I think that’s why Mrs. Delancey gave Granny half off on her Coca-Cola, to keep that to herself.)

“So Officer Rasmussen, he’s a good egg?” I asked her.

“Always has been. Even if he is Danish.” Granny didn’t have much use for anybody that wasn’t Irish. “And his father was a good egg, too. Ernie, his name was.”

Watching her pour that water over her tea bag, I suddenly realized how much I’d been missing her. It felt so nice to sit at her little kitchen table with the uneven legs and listen to her go on and on about the people we knew. Just like the good old days. I so wished for a minute that Granny was the hugging kind.

“You know the Rasmussen family used to own the cookie factory,” Granny said. “Sold it to some big company from out East in fifty-five.”

I could hear Eddie beeping his ah oooga horn.

Granny stuck her spoon down into her sugar bear three heaping times and stirred it into her cup. “You knew that Dave and Helen were engaged a long time ago, right?”

I did not! Being friends was one thing. Rasmussen and

Mother engaged? Like Nell and Eddie? Granny must have that wrong. “Engaged to be married?”

“Oh, yes. They had the wedding date all picked out. But Dave’s mother, Gertie, who always thought too highly of herself, by the way, told Dave that he could do better than Helen. That Helen wasn’t high-class enough for him.” Granny made a tsking noise. “Never did like Gertie Rasmussen. Always lording her money over everybody. And very vain about her legs, which were quite nice, but not that nice.”

Granny poured a little milk into the cup until it was creamy tan and then came and sat down next to me. “But then Dave broke it off because as much as he loved Helen, he didn’t think it would be right to go against his mother’s wishes since Gertie was sick with tuberculosis by then. So your mother married Nell’s father, instead.”

Once again, for the millionth time, I was so amazed by the way grown-ups knew things that kids didn’t and how good they were at keeping those things on the q.t.

Uncle Paulie was whistling “Pop Goes the Weasel” in his bedroom. And Eddie honked his horn again.

“I thought after Nell’s father died that Helen and Dave would get married then,” Granny said, blowing on her tea.

“But your mother married your daddy instead because she was still mad at Dave for not going against Gertie.”

You had to watch Granny sometimes. She could give you blarney and I thought I’d caught her. “If that’s all true, then why didn’t Mother marry Rasmussen after Daddy died?”

“Well, like I always say, my girl Helen can be as ornery as a pack mule with a bad back. She got that from her father, by the way. Stubborn runs worse in the Riley family than a pair of cheap nylons.” She took a nice full sip from her cup. “In other words, Sally, your mother was too proud. She was having a lot of money problems because your daddy didn’t leave her anything but a pile of bills and you girls. Helen didn’t want Dave to know how bad off she was. A slice of humble pie right about then would’ve solved all her problems.”

Granny let loose a long Irish sigh. “Helen always was willing to cut off her nose to spite her face.”

Why, for God’s sake, would Mother cut off her nose? “Then Hall showed up,” Granny grumbled.Mop

“Then Hall showed up,” Granny grumbled.

Oh boy. This was goin’ to take a while. Granny couldn’t stand Hall. “Think of how desperate your mother must’ve been to marry a shoe salesman she only knew for two months. You’d think she would’ve been a little marriage shy by that time, eh?” She gave me a sip of her tea. “You know what I always say about that marriage, Sal?”

Yes, I did. Over and over again. “Once bitten, twice shy?”

The car horn beeped again and you could tell by how long he held it down that Eddie was getting really sick and tired of waiting.

“Exactly.” Granny heard the horn, too. “Sounds like Eddie is having a hard time keepin’ his shirt on.” And then under her breath, it sounded like she said, “And his pants.” She held up her hands. “Before you go, just rinse out those socks in the bathroom sink. My arthritis is really acting up today.” Her hands did look like claws or something so I knew she wasn’t faking, which she did sometimes. When she didn’t want to do something, she’d tell me she was having “palpitations,” and since there was no way I could tell if she was having palpitations, I did it because I didn’t want to think about what kind of trouble I’d be in if Granny got palpitated to death. “Paulie needs them socks for work tonight, so hurry it up,” she said, pushing me on the back toward the little hall. Granny was so dang bossy. This was who Mother inherited it from. Troo, too. And also that do-you-smell-dog-poop look that she was givin’ me.

“Okay, okay.” I had that dumb feeling in my stomach about not getting over to see Granny more often and also thinking mean thoughts about Uncle Paulie’s weirdness, so I walked into the bathroom and stuck my hands into the cold gray water. I took out the first black sock and wrung it and hung it on this wooden drying stick Granny had in the tub. Then I reached down into the water again and pulled out another, and when I did I happened to get a look at myself in the mirror above the sink. My nose was sunburned and my hair had gotten almost as white as Granny’s. I looked a little older, I thought. Eddie beeped again, this one so long that it got into my head and that was all I could hear, so I hurried and squeezed the water out of the next sock and turned to hang it up on the… Oh my God. Sweet Jesus, Mary and Joseph! It was a pink-and-green argyle.