Good Graces

regular visit to the fat lady named Vera from Moline, Illinois. Troo told Vera that she was looking like she had lost some weight, so that was also charitable. We also talked to the fortune-teller, Rhonda of the Seven Veils, who told us just like she does every year, “Soon aaalll will be revealed.”

Just thinking that Rhonda might be right makes me shiver on this hottest of hot nights. Troo and me may think we are home free, but just like Granny always says, “The best laid plans of mice and men,” which I take to mean that somebody could have the most genius plan in the world and you could still find yourself caught in a trap. I’m worried about Wendy Latour blowing it. She could say something after church one of these days like, “Father Mickey… fall down go boom,” but since nobody really pays attention to her except Artie and me and her mother, who is real busy with the rest of her brood, that should be all right. And me, I’m worried about me. I know from experience that it’s hard to keep a secret this big even if it’s for the best of all reasons. I would like to tell Dave the whole kit and kaboodle about what happened to Father Mickey. Maybe someday I will. After Wendy Latour passes away. Right after her funeral, once I can walk and talk again, I could come clean as long as Dave promises on his life not to tell Troo that I told him. We’ll see.

Dave opens the screen door and calls, “Sally?”

Like I’m caught doing something that I shouldn’t, I jump and say, “What?”

I’m surprised he’s back from Mrs. Goldman’s so soon. I’m a little bit disappointed, too, when I see that he is empty-handed. I was hoping he’d stop at Fitzpatrick’s and bring me back a quart of Peaches ’n Cream. He is usually very thoughtful about things like that.

“Could you come in here, please?” he says. “We have visitors.”

“In a minute, okay?”

Aunt Betsy and Uncle Richie must have stopped by, which is good news. I haven’t had a chance to get up to visit with them as much as I’d like to, but Nell has been spending almost every day there except for when she’s cutting hair. Nell and Aunt Betsy have really hit it off. Wait, that’s not exactly right. Dave told me that Peggy Sure and Aunt Betsy have really hit it off, which makes a lot more sense. It must feel so good for the mother of dead Junie to hold a little girl in her arms again.

I close my notebook and call next door, “See ya tomorrow at the block party?” I’d love for Ray Buck to come, but it’s especially important that Ethel doesn’t skip it. I want her to see the fruits of our labor.

“Wouldn’t miss it for all the barbeque in Mississippi,” she drawls back. “Sleep tight, Miss Sally. Don’t let them bedbugs bite and if they do…”

“I’ll beat them with my shoe, Ethel. Night, you two lovebirds,” I say, wishing when I tug on the back screen door that it was me and Ray Buck lazing around that porch together, only he’d be a lot younger or I’d be a lot older. I’d be a lot browner or he’d be a lot lighter. I know it’s just a crush, Henry doesn’t have a thing to worry about, but I got to say, that man is the answer to the Who Wrote the Book of Love? question. Ray Buck makes my toes curl.

When he hears the door slam shut, Dave calls out to me, “We’re in the living room,” and that’s followed up by a baby crying, so it must be Nell and Peggy Sure paying a visit and not my aunt and uncle like I thought. That’s okay with me. Troo and me bumped into Nell last week at the Five and Dime. I think she might be getting a little better from whatever she had. She didn’t look like she was going to win any beauty pageants soon, but her teeth were brushed and she wasn’t talking to the hot pads in aisle six or singing to herself, which is a step in the right direction. (I have been making dirty phone calls to her on a regular basis so maybe that could be what’s picking up her spirits. I heard her tell Mother that she has a “secret admirer.”)

I say, “Hi, Nell,” as I push open the swinging kitchen door.

I can see through the dining room straight into the living room. There’s a baby in there all right, only it’s not Peggy Sure. This baby is chubbier with lots of dark hair and it’s not sitting in Nell’s lap, but is getting bounced on the knee of somebody I thought was gone forever. Somebody who I was sure escaped a dragnet and moved to Brooklyn to work in a pizza palace. Somebody who is Greasy Al Molinari!

Chapter Thirty-four

Sitting next to Greasy Al on our davenport, I’m shocked to see somebody else I thought I would never see again as long as I lived. Dottie Kenfield! So that baby… that’s got to be the one she was supposed to leave in the unwed mother’s home in Chicago!

Dave says, “Come in, Sally.”

I don’t. That wouldn’t be safe. I’m sure fugitive-from-justice Greasy Al must have a gun on Dave’s back like in that Humphrey Bogart movie when he was holding that nice man against his will, but then I think that can’t be right. Mother and Dave look calm and Dottie seems content and the baby’s quit crying and… and this is something I never saw before. This is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Greasy Al Molinari is grinning from ear to ear!

Dave smiles and pats the seat of the red velvet wingback chair, but I don’t move from the kitchen doorway. If he’s not here to hold Dave hostage, the only other reason I can think of to explain why Molinari’s sitting in our living room is that’s he’s piping mad about the poison-pen letters Troo wrote him in reform school every Friday. He’s come to get his revenge by ratting Troo out.

I’m trying to come up with a good explanation so my sister doesn’t get in trouble when Mother tells me, “Stop acting like such a ninny. Get in here. You’re embarassing me.”

Edging closer, I don’t take my eyes off of Molinari for one step. He looks so different. His hair is cut shorter and isn’t even that greasy and he doesn’t smell like pepperoni, more like… like schnitzel? I haven’t seen Dottie in the longest time in real life, but she looks the same as she does in her picture that is hanging in the Kenfields’ living room. The one she had taken in her mint-green senior-dance dress. She’s not wearing that, she’s got on a pair of white pedal pushers and a blue gingham blouse, but the ruby ring is still hanging around her neck on a gold chain.

What are these two doing here? Together?

Dave, who I am sure is getting mental telepathy with me the same way Troo does, says, “Sally, I’d like you to meet Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Molinari and their daughter, Sophia.”

Greasy Al musta slipped something into Dave’s drink that made him say something so goofy. These two can’t be married. They don’t have a thing in common the way they’re supposed to. Greasy Al dropped out of high school to spend all his time stealing hubcaps and kids’ bikes and siphoning gas outta cars. Dottie Kenfield was the apple of her mom’s and dad’s eyes and on the honor roll at school and would help out at the Five and Dime on the weekends. The two of them being married would be like… like the Creature from the Black Lagoon and Julie Adams getting hitched!

Greasy Al hands the baby over to Dottie and stands up when I finally make it all the way into the room. “Thanks for leavin’ the Goldmans’ back door open, kid,” he says, very politely. “We’ll pay them back for the food.”

I gotta grab on to the arm of the wing chair to steady myself. Did I do that? After I promised Mrs. Goldman that I would keep such a good watch on her house? The afternoon I fell asleep… ran out… Oh, for the love of Mike.

I say to Dave, who musta found them over there when he went to fix the stove light, “I’m really, really sorry. I went to bring Mrs. Goldman a couple of Mother’s old kitty puzzles and I… I… was gonna lie down just for a minute and I guess I didn’t lock her place back up again and-” I never went back inside the house after that one time, only checked it from the sidewalk.

Dave says, “Calm down, Sally,” the same way he does in the middle of the night after one of my nightmares that a lot of the time feature a certain goombah who is sitting across from me.

Mother shoots me a look, but says to her guests like she’s been reading every issue of Good Housekeeping, “May I offer the two of you something to drink?”

Dottie, who’s patting the baby’s back, says, “I’d love a glass of ginger ale if you’ve got it, Mrs. O’Malley. I mean…”

“You can call me Helen, honey. I won’t be Mrs. Rasmussen for a few more weeks. And how about you, Alfred?”

Oh, if Troo was only here to see this and not over at Fast Susie’s! My sister’s never gonna believe me when I