that’s not exactly true. She isn’t watching every minute of every day. When Mrs. Galecki goes down for her long afternoon nap, Ethel leaves to do grocery shopping at the Kroger or over to the drugstore to get the medicines. During one of Father Mickey’s visits would be another good time to get those errands done.
Still flapping, Troo says, “I thought you already knew about… Mary Lane bragged that she filled you in when she ran into you up near church, didn’t she?”
I nod. Reluctantly. She’s gonna blow a gasket when she hears me admit that.
“Goddamn it all! That bigmouth Lane, she’s always trying to prove she’s better than…” My sister is pacing fast in front of the bench, punching her fist into her hand. “I was gonna tell you all about the altar boys and Father Mickey and… and the rest of it over at the Latours’ last night, but you never showed up and now-”
“
Troo takes her time, but when she sits back down, she shoots me a hurt look that you never see much on her face anymore and takes one of her L &M’s from her shorts’ back pocket. I almost ask her for one. Cigarettes might smell like a cat box, but they seem to round the rough edges for everyone and I think I’m going to need a little smoothing.
“I bet Mary Lane didn’t tell me everything,” I say. “Start at the very beginning.”
Troo strikes a match, thinks about that for a minute and says, “The first time I went up to the rectory for my extra religious instructions, the doorbell rang and when Father Mickey went to answer it, I did, ya know, what I do.” She means she snooped like she always does in Mother’s dressing table and my notebooks and Nell’s closet and only God knows where else. “I pulled out the drawers of Father’s desk and in the top two there was only notebooks, but in the bottom one, I found Mr. Livingston’s fancy silver belt buckle.”
I gasp. “Did he… did Father catch you looking through his stuff?” The thought of him coming up on her from behind the way Bobby did last summer makes the whole backyard feel like it dived underwater. I can barely breathe.
Troo shakes her head and says, “By the time he came back from paying the paper boy, I was already back in the chair memorizing the parts of the missal he gave me to learn.”
“Didn’t you wonder what he was doin’ with Mr. Livingston’s buckle?” I ask.
She shrugs. “I figured Father found it in church or something and was goin’ to give it back, but then I heard that it’d been stolen and I… I didn’t know what to think.”
My sister has gone pale. I dab the sweat beads off her forehead with my fingertips. I don’t want to upset her more than she already is and she can get snooty if you push her, so I’m going to try and let her unravel what she’s got to tell me in her own time.
“After that first visit, Father and me never studied religion again.” Troo lets out the longest exhale. “We played hangman and tic-tac-toe and he made me cherry Kool-Aid, but mostly… we talked.”
“You talked? About what?” I ask, finding that a little hard to believe. Priests don’t usually have conversations with kids. They just tell them they’re going to hell if they aren’t good and obey their parents and stuff like that.
Troo says, “He seemed so interested in me, Sal. He wanted to know what I thought about this and that. Like the Braves. The neighborhood. We talked about everything. Even Daddy.” She takes an extra long drag off her L &M. “I told him how much I hated Dave and how mad I was at Helen and…” She probably cried, but she’d never tell me if she did. “He gave me a hug and promised that he’d make sure that Mother never got the annulment letter and… I believed him.”
The heart of the matter, that’s what this is.
Troo says, “That’s how come when Father asked me to keep my ears open around Dave and report back to him what was goin’ on in the cat burglar investigation, I told him I would.”
“Didn’t you think that was kinda weird?” I ask. I sure do. Usually when somebody asks her to do anything she tells them where to go.
“Kinda,” Troo says, puffing away. “Until he explained to me that the reason he was so interested in the burglaries was because he studies wrongdoing. He told me it’s important to know thy enemy.”
I would have to agree with him.
My sister says, “I…I swear. I didn’t know then that he had something to do with the stealing. I just wanted to return the favor, ya know, for him being so… oh, I don’t know.” I do. Father made her feel the same way Daddy used to. Number one on the hit parade. Not second fiddle like she sees herself now. “So after that, every time I went up to the rectory, I told him everything I heard Dave tell Helen about the burglaries and what I heard him talk about with Detective Riordan on the telephone. Father seemed so happy to hear that, but… but then he broke his promise and brought the annulment letter to Helen anyway.”
Because of mental telepathy, I know she was also thinking that if she fed Father tidbits about the cat burglar case it would make it harder for Dave to solve the case. He would have to spend more time on the job and less time with Mother and that might get her steamed enough to call the wedding off.
After letting all that sink in, I say, because I’m itchin’ to know, “But what does any of this have to do with Mrs. Galecki’s necklace? How did you get a hold of it?”
“I’m gettin’ to that.” She taps off her ash. “On the Fourth, on my way up to Granny’s to get my Eiffel Tower costume, I stopped by the rectory and went through a window into Father Mickey’s office. I knew he wouldn’t be there, that he’d be over at the park helpin’ get everything ready for the parade. I was so mad, Sal. I… I was gonna take the belt buckle outta the drawer-I don’t know what I was gonna do with it, but when I looked for it in the desk, it was gone.” I am biting my nails over how brave she is. “So I searched around for something else I could take. I couldn’t believe it when I found Mrs. Galecki’s necklace stuffed behind some books. I didn’t know how Father got a hold of that either, but tit for tat. I took it.” Troo inhales her cigarette smoke up through her nose, which is so French. “I think he stills likes her.”
“Mrs. Galecki? Why wouldn’t he?” Sure she can be kind of annoying, sometimes she coughs for fifteen minutes at a stretch, but she’s still one of his flock.
“Not her,” Troo says. “Helen.”
She looks up and into the kitchen window. I hope Dave and Mother put cold water in a bucket for Ethel’s bunion feet and are saying uplifting things to her. If I was in there, I would sing about the ant moving the rubber tree because it’s got such high hopes. Ethel really likes that song. She sings it to Mrs. Galecki when she’s spraying her thinning hair tall with Aqua Net every morning.
“Before Mother started going out with Dave in high school, her and Father Mickey were hot and heavy,” Troo says. “Aunt Betty told me during rummy.”
“Yeah, she told me something like that, too.”
Up at the Five and Dime the same day she surprised me with the news that Father was from the neighborhood, Aunt Betty winked at me and said, “M.P.G. could give a girl the ride of her life. Ask your mother.”
I’ve got so many questions that I don’t know which one to pick. It’s like trying to decide which candy to buy outta the case at the Five and Dime. Troo looks so petered out, but I gotta know all of it if I’m gonna help her outta the jam she’s gotten herself into.
“Do you know how Father’s makin’ the altar boys be cats?” I ask. Even though we have fate in the Catholic Church, we also got free will. I’m not sure where one starts and the other takes over, but it seems to me that the boys could have told the priest that they didn’t want to steal.
Troo points up to the western sky. The stars tonight look close enough to put in my pocket and save for a rainy day. “The Big Dipper and the Little Dipper.”
Daddy used to say that they reminded him of us.
I squeeze her hand harder than she’s squeezing mine. “Tell me. How’s Father makin’ the boys steal?”
Troo says, “Artie told me down at Honey Creek on the Fourth that before he ran away, Charlie Fitch told him that Father threatened the altar boys. Told them that he’d kick ’em out of school if they didn’t steal for him.”
He can do that. Our pastor is the boss of everything, not only the church and the nuns, but the school, and everybody in the neighborhood.
I say, “But Charlie, he didn’t have a house of his own and there’s nothin’ good to take out of the orphanage.” When our Brownie troop went up to St. Jude’s to sing Christmas carols to those poor kids, the place reminded me of the dump near the farm.
