Good Graces

outta her.

Troo sneaks a peek at Dave and Mother to make sure they aren’t listening, which they aren’t. They’re locking lips. “Father Mickey is doin’ something with the altar boys that he shouldn’t be doin’.”

Shoot. Shoot. Shoot.

Down at the creek today when they were gabbing away, I was afraid Artie was telling Troo the same thing he told me that night in the Kenfields’ backyard about Father Mickey commiting a bad sin with the altar boys.

I tell her, “I know you’re happy that ya got back together with Artie, but… but you can’t listen to what he’s saying about Father.” I’d like to wring Latour’s scrawny neck right about now and that’s not like me at all. “He’s not thinkin’ straight lately because he’s upset about Charlie Fitch vanishin’ and he was jealous about you spendin’ so much time with Father Mickey. Artie’s imagination, I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you this, has taken a long walk off a short pier.”

Another firework goes off, but I don’t look up. I’ve still got my head turned to Troo. That’s when I see him out of the corner of my eye. About ten feet behind and to the left of us, Father Mickey is leaning against a tree pretending to listen to one of his parishioners, but he’s not. He’s watching us, staring straight at Troo and me.

My sister says, “I know ya left Artie a jar of cod liver oil on his porch, but he doesn’t need it. He’s not imaginin’ anything. He’s not a fanatic like you. What he told ya about Father Mickey bein’ up to no good is the truth. I got proof.” Troo must feel the priest’s eyes screwing into the back of her neck the same way I can because she scootches up closer to me, slides her hand down to the front of her shorts and takes something out that she keeps balled up in her grubby hand. “If I show ya this,” she whispers, “ya gotta promise ya won’t tell a soul and especially not Dave.”

Since I take them so to heart, I don’t ever promise anybody anything if I don’t know what I’m getting myself into. Except for my sister.

“Promise.”

She wiggles even closer, her warm skeeter-bit arm presses against mine. When she opens her hand, Mrs. Galecki’s missing emerald necklace is lying in her palm, just glimmering.

Chapter Twenty-two

For the past two weeks, things couldn’t be more topsy-turvy around here.

Me and my sister are doing the dishes together, trying to guess what mystery food Mother made us tonight. When she placed it down on the table, she said, “Ta-daaa” and called it “Brains a la King,” but she had to be kidding around. That’s how good of a mood she’s been in. She sings along in her warbly voice when a tune she likes comes on the radio and she hasn’t done that for the longest time. Her newest favorite, she goes giddy when she hears it, is Puppy Love. She stops whatever she’s doing and makes Lizzie get up on her hind feet so they can dance around the kitchen. She’s not doing her puzzles in the backyard on the TV tray anymore. Mother has been spending most of her day cutting pictures out of magazines and driving around in her new red Studebaker. She looks mouthwatering in that car. After tying a chiffon scarf around her hair and knotting it in back, off she goes to expand her horizons. She’s in her bedroom right this minute getting ready to go pick up Aunt Betty. They’re driving downtown to Chapman’s, which is the fancy store Mother’s been wanting to shop at for the longest time.

“That Helen,” Troo says, handing me a sorta rinsed-off plate outta the dishpan. “Brains a la King. What a kidder,” she says, not doing her hunhing but her regular old Chopstick laugh that sounds just like when she plays it on the piano. Ha… ha… ha… ha… ha… ha.

Just like Mother, Troo’s mood has been fabulous, too, these last couple of weeks. She had the gall to say to me yesterday when we were taking out the garbage, “Boy, I feel happy! You should try it sometime, Sal.”

My sister wants us all to believe that she’s turned over a new leaf since the Fourth of July. She’s not making me call her Leeze anymore. And when Dave and Mother discuss the wedding, which is going to take place on September 24th, Troo doesn’t look like she’s about to burst a blood vessel. She’s doing her chores before she’s asked and once this week-this was really awful-she rubbed my back when I got done rubbing hers. Even worse than this Shirley Temple mood she’s been in, my sister has this annoying smile plastered on her face all the time. Even when she’s sleeping, she’s dreaming about something that makes her look like a cat that ate a canary and two of its cousins.

Her acting so cheerful is terrible, but what’s driving me most up the wall is that no matter how much I badger her, she won’t cough up how she got her hands on Mrs. Galecki’s green necklace. I’ve tried about a hundred times to get it out of her, but each and every time she reminds me of the promise I made her at the lagoon on fireworks night not to tell a soul, especially not Dave. And then she says mysteriously, “Soon aaalll will be revealed,” sounding very much like the fortune-teller up at the State Fair.

I think my sister snuck next door and took Mrs. Galecki’s necklace, but I don’t know why she would do something like that. Since she is so light-fingered in general, it even crossed my mind that Troo could be the cat burglar. So I looked and looked, but did not find a candelabra or any other stolen loot stashed around our bedroom. That’s why I’m still 99.9 percent positive it’s Mary Lane who’s been taking stuff out of people’s houses. It’s gotta be.

Even though Troo’s not acting like it on the outside, of course she can’t fool me. She’s still spitting mad at Father Mickey for getting Mother the annulment. She hasn’t asked me to smooch her with the red wax lips and doesn’t swoon anymore when she hears Father’s name. And she has stopped going up to the rectory for her extra religious instruction. Mother and Dave haven’t noticed that she’s been skipping. Their spirits are too high to pay much attention to Troo and me these days. Both of them are on cloud nine.

And so are a lotta other people in the neighborhood. The burglaries have stopped. The cops are still looking, but the high-top footprints they found outside the Holzhauers’ house ended up belonging to Hank Holzhauer, the kid who lives there, so that was a dead end. Since no more valuables are being stolen on a weekly basis, the search for the cat seems to have taken a backseat. (That talk I gave to Mary Lane in the library lavatory musta done some good.)

So leaving to go look for the burglar is not why Dave told Mother he was going to skip supper tonight and grab something up at the Milky Way, the lucky dog. He went over to the house of his sister, Betsy, and her husband, whose name is Richie Piaskowski, to take the sheets off their furniture and spruce the place up a bit. They’re coming for a visit and Dave hopes he can convince them to stay longer than a week at their house on 56th Street across from the church where their daughter, Junie, had her funeral. I can see her grave when I go to sit next to Daddy’s at Holy Cross Cemetery every Saturday. How they could bear leaving their girl beneath that mound of dirt, I don’t know. Dave takes his niece a bouquet on all the holidays except at Christmas, when he brings her a wreath trimmed with angel hair and blue bulbs to decorate her gravestone, but that’s not the same. I could never move away from Daddy, not even for a little while, but I am not going to throw stones at their house. They’re my aunt Betsy and uncle Richie now and they could be Troo’s, too, if she’d let them, which she won’t because they’re related to Dave. (Since their last name ends in ski, after meeting them she’ll right off the bat tell a huge Polack joke. I’m gonna have to take them around a corner and explain that they shouldn’t take it personally.)

Well, my sister can stand next to me here at the kitchen sink and tap-dance all she wants, but I know her. Below all her bubbliness, she’s coming up with another one of her Troo genius revenge plans because she had to give up on the capturing Greasy Al one. Of course, she’s disappointed that she can’t use the reward money to buy the Jerry Mahoney ventriloquist doll, but Troo’s not stupid. She figured out that if Molinari was coming back, he woulda showed up by now. I would have to agree with her. I think he escaped for good, too. Maybe to Brooklyn, where Willie O’Hara used to live. He told me that city has loads of Italians and pizza parlors. Molinari could blend right in like a greasy chameleon. Dave has not recently mentioned to me a thing about his “imminent capture,” so that’s another reason I believe that dago is gone forever.

After I set the white plate carefully in the drying rack, my sister tells me, “After we’re done here we gotta go