I want to go sit on our backyard bench. I need to calm down. Breathing in the garden smells sometimes helps. I’m taking the alleyway home so Mother won’t spot me.
Troo, who is trailing after me like it’s an accident that we’re both going in the same direction, finally breaks the ice when I round our garage and open the gate to our yard. “I think Mrs. G bought the farm this time,” she calls to me outta the dark.
I want to charge back down the alley, push her down and shout,
But I don’t do that. I just don’t have it in me. I think instead about how if Mrs. Galecki does pass on, I’ll go with Ethel to the funeral, stand right by her side while she bawls into her handkerchief and moans in her black dress and hat with a veil. Even though she knows the end has been coming for a while now and that her patient has had a good long life, dear Ethel, she’s not really prepared. Nobody ever is. You can never get your heart ready.
The only good thing that would come out of Mrs. Galecki’s dying is that Ethel will inherit the money from her Last Will and Testament so she can start up her school and I’m overjoyed for her, I really am, but I have been dreading this day for a long, long time. Even if she wanted to stay, Ethel’s gonna have to move away from the neighborhood. There are people on these blocks who have never shouted hello when she glides by on her way to the drugstore. I’ve heard them call her
I cannot imagine my life without her warm honey voice, her wise advice. Troo and me sleeping in her screened-in porch on nights when it’s just too stuffy in our room. Listening to Ethel’s jazzy music and eating her Mississippi blond brownies, smelling her violet toilet water behind her ears when she bends down to kiss my foreheard with her cool full lips. Even her bunions. Every square inch of the finest woman I know… her goneness is going to make me ache forever in a place I can’t rub.
Chapter Twenty-five
I never did get around to telling Dave that he should take out the corn he planted in Daddy’s memory. He did okay for his first try. The stalks are tall and tassled. Fireflies are flickering around the leaves and the smell of the damp dirt is almost as strong as the smell of the cookies drifting over from the factory tonight.
When Troo comes trailing after me into our yard, she doesn’t sail past me like I’m part of the scenery the way she’s been doing. She sits down next to me on the glider, picks up my hand off my lap and squeezes it so hard, which is something she used to do back in the olden days when she got scared of one thing or another, mostly the boogeyman, who doesn’t seem to bother her in the least anymore.
With our sunburned shoulders so close together, we watch the breeze flutter the corn and remember the good old days. How I’d sit in Daddy’s lap on the back porch after supper, smelling hard work on his sky-blue shirt. He’d wrap one of his hands around a cold bottle of beer and his other arm around me and we’d listen to a baseball game coming out of the Motorola radio that would light up his face the same way dawn did when he’d head out to the fields on his red tractor like a conquering hero. I know that Troo is picturing how her and Daddy made mustaches out of the tassles and that he always grew maroon Indian corn just for her because it matched the color of her hair. When August came, acres and acres of his hard work would wave outside our kitchen window like we lived on the shores of a green sea. We all looked so forward to the first of the corn. The taste of a just-picked cob, the salty butter dripping off our chins. Daddy’s triumphant look when we told him it was the best we ever had.
Even with my sister by my side, I haven’t felt this alone since the night I waited for his car to come down our road back from the game at County Stadium. Troo is remembering the crash, too, but she’d never admit it, even if I say to her,
“Sal, my gal,” Troo says, twining her fingers around mine. “I got a little surprise for ya. I was gonna save it, but I think… yeah, wait here.”
She goes to the garage and kicks two times on the door that Dave keeps trying to remember to fix. I can hear her rummaging around in there and then a long scraping sound on the cement floor and a few swear words.
After she switches off the light and the yard turns black again, she calls, “Close your eyes.” I can hear her grunt as she drags something across the grass. The nearer she gets to me, that rusty smell she’s had on her a couple of the times she’s snuck back into bed in the middle of the night gets stronger and stronger. “Okay.” Troo claps her hands just once. “Open saysme.”
Right in front of me, the moon catching it just right, is something else that I thought was long gone. I reach out and run my fingers across the worn-down green seat to make sure it’s not my imagination, but Daddy’s and my bench from the zoo feels real.
“But… I went back to look for it and it was gone,” I say. Those kids in Fatima who were paid the miracle visitation by the Blessed Virgin couldn’t have felt any more awestruck than I do. “I… I thought it got destroyed by the men with the bulldozers.”
“I know you did.” Troo is puffed up. “Mary Lane and me… we went and got it. Her dad told us they were just gonna throw it out, so we carried it all the way down Lloyd Street in the middle of the night so nobody would see us and blab the surprise.
After I get up from the glider and ease down in the middle of the bench, leaving the spot empty where Daddy always sat, Troo quickly curls up on the other side of me and says, “Feelin’ better?” She reaches up to pat me on the top of my head. “I sure am.” Of course she is. There’s just about nothing in the whole world that Troo adores more next to scaring the life outta somebody and bushwacks than having a plan and making it stick. “It’s good you’re sittin’ down. I gotta tell you something really bad,” she says.
She’s finally gonna come clean about her cat-stealing. They’re always telling us at church that confession is good for the soul so I should let her get it off her chest, but I’ve got Troo in one of her once-in-a-blue-moon generous moods. “Before you do that, could you do one more really nice thing for me?”
That catches her off guard. I don’t usually ask her for favors because the chance of getting one is too slim.
Troo says, “But… I need to… fine. I’ll go out to the new zoo to see that dumb gorilla with you, but if you start cryin’ and wavin’ at him, I’m warnin’ you, I’ll… I’ll…”
I hook a chunk of her hair that’s fallen in her eyes behind her ear and say, “That’s really sweet, but that’s not what I was gonna ask you.” I have thought this through already over ten times. I let it out in a rush so Troo can’t interrupt. “I want you to climb through our bedroom window, get Mrs. Galecki’s emerald necklace out of your sock and stick it back under her bed. Nobody’d have to know that you stole it.”
“What?!” Troo flies up off the bench, flapping her arms, legs going every which way. “What… what are you talkin’ about? Who told you I stole it?”
“I… I…” Nobody did. I was just so sure, but now… the look on her face, she can’t fake that one. That’s her genuine, you-better-not-be-callin’-me-a-liar-or-I’ll-sock-you-in-the-breadbox look. “Didn’t you?”
“No, I didn’t!”
“Then who did?”
“That’s what I’ve been tryin’ to tell you, if you’d shut up and listen!” She is so agitated, she can barely get out, “Father Mickey. He stole the necklace.”
“Trooper,” I say, shaking my head low and slow. She’s mad at him, and trying to shift the blame onto somebody else the way she always does when she gets caught doing something bad. Father Mickey couldn’ta snuck into Mrs. Galecki’s bedroom to take the necklace because Ethel’s got eyes in back of her head. But then I remember
