Good Graces

could be the next to get hit, but since Mrs. Goldman doesn’t go to Mass or the baseball games or bowling, she might not have heard the scuttlebutt. “There’s been a cat burglar prowlin’ around the neighborhood. Lock up extra tight.”

“This is good advice.” When she says that, she is not looking at me. She is watching Troo bounce her ball up the block very ferociously. “All of us must vork hard to keep vhat is valuable to us safe. Promise me you vill keep a good vatch, Liebchen.”

“You can count on me.” I don’t say this time, but that’s what I’m thinking. “See ya when ya get back. A lot more often. Aufedersein,” I say, hurrying off the porch to catch up with my still-buzzing sister.

Chapter Nine

The sign hanging above the store says in peeling white letters:

KENFIELD’S FIVE AND DIME… WE HAVE WHAT YOU NEED!

That’s not tooting their own horn. They really do.

The floors are a yellow color and the aisles are close together but packed high with bottles of bubble bath and sewing needles and erasers and, well, just about everything under the sun. There’s pets, too. Chatty budgies and whisker-twitching mice and lovebirds that have to be kept in different cages because they don’t actually get along that well and all sorts of different kinds of fish. This is where Dave bought me the aquarium that’s on top of the dresser in our bedroom. The pet aisle reminds me of living out on the farm, but the rest of the Five and Dime smells like popcorn. There is a machine up front that pumps it out all day long. You can get a small bag for two cents and a bigger bag with butter for a nickel and the salt is free.

The best part of the store, though, has gotta be the candy case. It’s the first thing you see when you come in and it’s even better now that it’s been new and improved! My favorite used to be pink and green Buttons, but I got sick from swallowing too much paper, so I switched over to Oh Henry! bars in honor of you know who. Troo’s favorite used to be licorice, but now she goes silly for those lips made out of wax because she has gotten very interested in kissing recently. The Frenchy way, less lips, more tongue, which I tried to explain to her is just asking for trench mouth, but would she listen?

Our old Vliet Street neighbor, Mrs. Kenfield, lifts up her head to greet whoever just walked into her store, but when she sees that it’s Troo and me, she mutters, “The O’Malley sisters,” like somebody just asked her to name the last two kids in the world she’d like to have come through her doors this morning. She goes back to spritzing Windex on the counter and rubbing it off with a blue rag until the smudges disappear, maybe wishing she could do the same to me, and for sure Troo. “How’s your mother?”

Of course, Mrs. Kenfield sees her at choir practice and up at the Kroger when she goes on Wednesdays, which is the day they hand out extra S &H Green Stamps, but just like Mrs. Goldman and Mr. Fitzpatrick, whenever anybody in the neighborhood runs into Troo and me they automatically ask how our mother’s doing because they really can’t believe she’s not dead and sometimes I can’t either. That’s why I kneel next to her bed in the middle of the night and watch her chest go up and down. I set my head against hers on the pillow and breathe in her leftover powder and perfume, just for a little while, just to make sure.

“Mother’s feelin’ better and better,” I tell Mrs. Kenfield as Troo disappears down aisle two. What is she doing? Kleenex for flowers is in aisle four. “Gettin’ stronger and stronger by the minute.”

Mrs. Kenfield says, “Glad to hear Helen’s on the mend,” but she doesn’t sound it and I don’t blame her. I don’t care what the Bible says about loving your neighbors more than you love yourself. I think it’s hard to even like people when your own family is going belly-up the way ours was last summer. You can’t help but wish you had what they had.

The reason she’s so grumpy is because her husband, Mr. Chuck Kenfield, is going down the drain. His daughter, Dottie, the one he used to wail over and maybe still does, had some of the sex when she was still in high school. She got pregnant so he had to send her away to a special home in Chicago to live with some other girls who did the same thing. What Dottie was supposed to do was have her baby and leave it there for somebody who was married to come by and pick it up so she could go back to her regular life, but that’s not what happened. Grown-ups gossip about this after Mass all the time. Dottie’s disappearance is still piping hot news because she snuck out of the Chicago hospital when the nurses weren’t looking, so now it’s both her and the baby that’re missing. I heard she had a little girl.

The reason Dottie had to go away like that to Chicago is because around here it’s a mortal sin to do what she did. I think the Kenfields just should’ve packed up and moved to another neighborhood. Or maybe Dottie could’ve done what Nell did when she got knocked up last summer by Eddie Callahan. Get married when nobody is paying attention. When the baby came out of the oven in April instead of June, Dottie could tell nosy buttinskis that her kid is just a real go-getter. “Early bird gets the worm!” is what Nell chirped to visitors until Troo told her to shut the hell up.

Missing Dottie, that’s why Mr. Kenfield has become so sloshy that Mrs. Kenfield has to run the Five and Dime all by herself now. You can tell that being on her feet all day is hard on her. She has gotten very close veins in her legs. She doesn’t complain out loud, of course not. The Kenfields are English. They are a people who like to keep a stiff upper lip, which means they don’t like to show you any of what they are feeling. I see them in the movies. They usually wear clothes that are clean and full of starch, but I’m positive this is the same shirtwaist Mrs. Kenfield had on the last time we were up here and the part in her hair looks like a dandruff plantation and she’s got pimples on her chin that she put some Clearasil on and forgot to wash off this morning.

I’m about to ask the same exact question I always do when I come up here. Even though her husband and me don’t spend a lotta time together the way we used to, outta sight does not mean outta mind for me. I still think of him often as my good friend. “How has Mr. Kenfield been?”

Wiping the glass counter even harder, Mrs. Kenfield says, “I’ll tell him that you asked after him, Sally.” That’s what she always says.

“Oh, don’t bother,” I say, coming up with something else I can put in my charitable summer story. “I’ve been plannin’ to stop by one of these nights so we can talk on the porch swing like we did last-”

“Don’t you dare!” Mrs. Kenfield practically bites my head off. “You remind him of… I mean…” She swallows and says quieter, “That wouldn’t be a good idea. Chuck… Mr. Kenfield has been feeling under the weather. I wouldn’t want you to catch what he’s got.”

I would have to agree with her.

“Hellooo!”

A new customer breezes into the Five and Dime on shiny red high-heeled shoes, seamed nylons, a skirt higher than her knees and a blouse that looks like it got shrunk in the wash. It’s Mrs. Callahan, Mother’s best friend since they were little and living across the street from the Feelin’ Good Cookie Factory. She won’t ask me how Mother is feeling because she already knows. They chat every night on the telephone for hours. She didn’t use to be, but Mrs. Callahan is related to us now. She is the mother of Eddie Callahan, who got Nell in the family way. (When I heard the two of them groaning in her bedroom on Vliet Street last summer, my half sister told me that they were doing their Royal Canadian Air Force exercises, but my niece is living proof those two were touching a lot more than their toes.)

Mrs. Callahan parks herself in front of the small fan that’s whirring on the Five and Dime’s front counter.

“Where’s your sister?” she asks. She likes Troo better than she likes me. They play rummy for pennies.

“She’s ah-”

“Hi, Aunt Betty,” Troo calls from somewhere in the back of the store, not even trying to be secretive.

“What’s the score, Eleanor?” Aunt Betty shouts back friendly, but to me she says real urgent, “Forget whatever it was the two of you were doin’ next Friday night. Eddie’s gonna take Nell to the drive-in and I told them I would watch the baby, but…” She really has to work on improving her aim. Her cherry smile would be nice if she didn’t draw so much outta the lines. “Detective Riordan just asked me out to dinner at Frenchy’s!”

“That’s great!” I say, because Aunt Betty really does need another husband. Her original one got flattened by a cookie press four years ago. I heard her complaining to Mother not long ago, “I despise the smell of those goddamn cookies. It’s bad enough we’ve had to breathe it in since the day we were born… I can’t stand it for one more