Whistling in the Dark

looked to me that Eddie and Reese were friends because they were talking and then looking back at the car and laughing. That worried me for Nell. Like Granny said, you lie down with dogs, you get fleas.

Nell was staring at Eddie like he was hotsy totsy even though he was scrawny and his skin had some problems and me, I didn’t think he was such a looker. But he did have nice dark brown hair that he wore in a pompadour, and Nell liking hair so much, maybe that was what they had in common. That’s why people fell in love, Mother said, because they had things in common.

“Do you love him?” I asked.

Nell was looking in the mirror, smoothing on hot pink lipstick. “You writin’ a book?”

And then this girl roller-skated up and Nell smiled real fast and said, “Hi, Melinda.”

Melinda attached the tray full of bags of food to the window on Nell’s side of the car. “Hi, Nell.” Her little antenna was bobbing on her head. I wasn’t sure what Melinda was supposed to be, but then I remembered the drive-in had to do with outer-space stuff, like in Flash Gordon, so maybe Melinda was supposed to be a space ant or something.

Nell reached over and beeped the ah oooga car horn to get Eddie’s attention, to let him know the food had come. He laughed at something Reese Latour said and then walked slowly back to the car.

Eddie smiled real nice at Melinda as she whizzed past him, but when he got back in the car he said meanly to Nell, “I’ll get back into the car when I’m damn good and ready.” He looked out the windshield. Reese Latour was looking straight at him. “You don’t ever do nuthin’ like that to me again. Beep at me like that, unnerstand?” Then Eddie pulled Nell’s hair hard enough to make her neck bend back.

“Sorry,” she whimpered.

Eddie pulled just a little harder and said, “You better be, sister,” and then he let go and pushed her head away.

On the ride back home, nobody talked. Just the radio DJ, who said it might rain on the Fourth of July. The bag of food made my lap warm, but as hungry as I was, I couldn’t eat, thinking about what Eddie had done to Nell. Made her give in like that.

When we pulled up to our house, Nell got out of the car. Mother’s yellow scarf that Nell had started wearing around her neck fluttered in the breeze. I had barely slammed the door shut when Eddie laid rubber. Nell and me just stood there together and watched him speed down Vliet Street, Dion singing about teenager love floating back to us.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I knew Troo would be sitting on the backyard bench folding those tissues back and forth and back and forth into one chubby line and then she’d slip a bobby pin over it in the middle and slowly separate the layers of Kleenex until they looked exactly like a carnation, which was an excellent funeral flower my mother always said.

When I walked past our landlords’ kitchen window, I remembered what Mr. Goldman was complaining about yesterday to Mrs. Goldman when I’d been diggin’ for worms. His raised voice came through the window screen, saying Hall was betrunkenes and he hadn’t paid the rent and if he didn’t soon we would be… kaput. Mrs. Goldman said quietly back to her husband, “But, Otto, what will happen to the children?”

“Trooooo…,” I yelled out, so when I came around the house I wouldn’t scare her. If there was anything Troo hated, it was to be snuck up on. She’d gotten really jumpy about that since the crash.

“Troooo…”

No answer. I got scared then. Maybe Rasmussen had changed his mind about coming after me. Maybe he’d decided to go after Troo. I ran down the path next to the pink peonies that had lost their smell and had started to fall apart. I stopped at the edge of the house and peeked my head around. Troo was surrounded by at least twenty white Kleenex flowers, like a girl on a parade float. She just hadn’t heard me because she could get deaf when she was working on something. The tip of her tongue stuck out of her pouty mouth.

I watched my little sister for a minute and then because our yard butted up next to the Kenfields’, one story up, I looked up at Dottie’s bedroom and just for a second I could swear she was standing in the window. That even made me worry about my imagination.

“Whatcha doin’ over there?” Troo laughed. “Seein’ if Dottie wants to come out and play?”

“Very funny.” I waved the bag of food at my sister. “Got you something.” I slipped off my shoes and walked across the grass toward her.

“Is that you, Liebchin?” Mrs. Goldman popped her head out the gardening lean-to next to the garage. That’s what she called me. Liebchin meant sweetheart in the German language.

Mrs. Goldman was a largish woman and when she was working in the garden, she sometimes wore a pair of Mr. Goldman’s brown shiny trousers that were the same color as her curly hair. In Germany, she had been a teacher, but now she was just a landlady. She had on a yellow ironed shirt, rolled up at the sleeves, and the first thing I noticed like always were those numbers on her arm.

I’d asked Mrs. Goldman about that tattoo the first time I helped her water the garden last summer. I asked her if she’d been a sailor like Hall. She set her hose down and asked why I thought that. When I pointed at her arm, she gave me a rusty smile, like she hadn’t used it for a while, and told me that back in Germany she and Mr. Goldman had been captured by some bad people who put them in a place called a concentration camp. Then they branded them like cattle. And those bad people were called Nazis. This was something like the Frankenstein monster for Mrs. Goldman because she shivered when she said Nazis. Like these were people that you would not want to tangle with at any time who I bet had German shepherds, which everyone knew were dogs you could never trust. (Except, of course, for Rin Tin Tin, who was the exception to the rule.)

“Do you need any help, Mrs. Goldman?” I asked, because I knew that Troo was thinking uncharitable thoughts and maybe by me being charitable it would somehow cancel them out. Troo didn’t like our landlords because our lease said we couldn’t have pets so her dog, Butchy, had had to stay out in the country with peeing Jerry Amberson. Troo held that against the Goldmans.

“Come to the garden. I want to show you,” Mrs. Goldman said, stepping all the way out of the shed.

Troo crossed her eyes at me and went back to her Kleenex flowers when I walked past her.

“See?” Mrs. Goldman pointed, kneeling down in the dirt. “It is the fruit of our labor. The first of the tomatoes.”

I said what I always said when something sprouted up like that. “That is such a miracle.”

To plant those little tan seeds and then after a while something good to eat or smell would grow. It amazed me, every time. And it made me remember how out on the farm Daddy would plant in the muddy spring and by summer there would be tall corn waving around in the field that at night I could hear rustling through our bedroom window, saying shush… shush… shush.

“Yes, you are right,” Mrs. Goldman said, kneeling down and gently rolling the little green balls between her fingers like they were emeralds. “It is a kind of miracle.”

“Marta, come here,” Mr. Goldman called to her out the back door and then went right back in. Mr. Goldman wasn’t much for talking. His English was not so good.

I helped her up and my fingers wrapped around her tattooed arm and I hoped that didn’t hurt. She said, “A garden is also a way to be prepared. You never know what can happen. But no matter what, it is nice to know you will have the fresh vegetables.” Mrs. Goldman and Daddy, they woulda gotten along just great. She brushed the dirt off her pants and then took my chin in her hand and said in her school-teacher voice, “You must be careful, Liebchin. Life, it is not simple like a garden, where flowers are always flowers and weeds are always weeds.” And then she walked slowly toward the house, saying to Troo as she passed her, “Beautiful.”

Troo pretended she hadn’t heard her.

I’d forgotten all about the burgers and fries and shakes. I walked back to the bench and dropped the glassy-