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
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,
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:
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:
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.
