and fly into his. Or maybe he would hypnotize me like that doctor did in that movie called
“You know that your mother and I have been friends since high school, correct?” he repeated.
I didn’t want to admit it, but I sort of suspected that Mother and Rasmussen were friends because in that hidey-hole graduation picture they were standing next to each other and Rasmussen was smiling at Mother when he was supposed to be smiling into the camera of Jim Madigan from Jim Madigan Photography Studios.
“So, like I was saying, Hall is in a heap of trouble,” Rasmussen said.
“I know about that already.” I started twirling my hair around my finger, which I had started doing recently because it seemed to calm my imagination down. “Mr. Fitzpatrick told us that Hall hit Mr. Jerbak with a beer bottle and he’s in jail and charges are gonna get pressed on him.”
When we turned down Fifty-eighth Street, the Piaskowskis’ street, Rasmussen pulled up in front of their house and looked out the window. “Junie’s been dead now for almost a year. Hard to believe.” He shook himself a little like you do when you know you can’t stand feeling the way you’re feeling and you better snap out of it. “The house is for sale. Gotta get over here and work on that yard.”
I looked out at the Piaskowskis’ and noticed something I hadn’t the day Troo and me had walked past on our way to church right after we found out about Mother’s staph infection. There was a funny little blue birdhouse half hanging off the rain gutter and it had a kid’s writing on the side that I couldn’t read. It was twisting in the breeze.
Rasmussen was looking at it too because in a shaky voice he said, “Junie and I made that little birdhouse together. Blue was her favorite color. She loved birds. Especially blue-birds. She called them happiness with wings.”
I didn’t say anything but I was thinking that Rasmussen’s big, strong outside didn’t quite match up to his gooey inside, and it was a shock to me that he reminded me of a chocolate-covered cherry. Ethel was right. My thinking wasn’t straight, but straight enough to know he was telling the truth about blue being Junie’s favorite color, because I remembered how she just loved her blue Lik-m-aid so much that her lips always looked the same color as a cornflower.
“You know Junie was my niece, right? My sister Betsy’s daughter?”
“Ethel told me that,” I said quickly.
“Betsy had to move away because it was just too sad for her and her husband to live here after Junie…” He stepped on the gas and pulled away.
A half block later, Rasmussen turned into what was really the playground of the school but was also used as a parking lot when there was a funeral or a wedding or any other big occasion. I couldn’t wait to get out of that car. Rasmussen was making me feel sad for him, the last way on Earth I expected to feel, and it was making me so nervous that I started sweating buckets. When he put the gearshift into P, I pulled down on the door handle.
“Wait just a minute, Sally. I’ve got something else important to tell you.”
His hands were knotted up around the steering wheel and he looked as antsy as I felt. Maybe because we were so close to church he’d started feeling real guilty and was about to confess to the murders. That’s just how he was acting. Like after the cops gave somebody the third degree in a movie and then the guy gets all twitchy and just puts his head down on the table and starts yelling, “Okay, I did it. I did it!”
Rasmussen said, “Mr. Jerbak died.”
“What?”
“Mr. Jerbak died.”
I wanted to say I never did like Mr. Jerbak anyway. He was always beating on his boy Fritz, who would come to school with black eyes that he said he’d gotten when he tripped over the dog but everybody knew Fritz Jerbak didn’t have a dog.
“Do you know what that means?” Rasmussen asked.
I spotted Troo standing at the corner of the church next to the statue of St. Francis is a sissy. Which in St. Francis’s case meant he was light in his sandals. Willie O’Hara came up with that one.
“It means there’s gonna be another funeral?” I said.
“That’s right, but that’s not what I meant. Mr. Jerbak’s death means that Hall won’t be around anymore. He’s going to jail for more than a few days.”
I was bowled over like a strike. “Hall is going to jail forever, you mean?” If Hall didn’t pay the rent from the money he made sellin’ shoes up at Shuster’s, we’d have no place to live. We were
“Maybe not forever, but Hall is going away for a really, really long time.” Rasmussen swiped some sweat on his forehead with a folded white handkerchief he’d taken out of his front suit pocket. “Do you know what
I thought I did.
“It means that you and Nell and Troo will have to move out of your house. The Goldmans will let you stay another week, but then… well, they have to rent it out to people who can pay. Do you understand?” He had put his arm over the back of the front seat and was leaning toward me so close that I could smell orange slices.
I was looking out the window at Troo and trying not to think of the lonely faces up at St. Jude’s. Me and Troo were about to become two more lost causes. “So we have to go live in the orphanage?”
“Well, that’s what I’m getting at here.” Rasmussen’s words started to gush out of him like he’d sprung a leak. “Your mother thinks it would be a good idea for you and Troo to come and live with me until she gets better enough to come home.”
There was a knock on the half-rolled-down car window. It was Mr. Fitzpatrick, also dressed in a black suit with a white carnation on the lapel. He leaned his head down and said, “We’re all set, Dave.”
Rasmussen said, “Be there in a sec, Lou.”
I just couldn’t believe this. Mother thought it was a good idea for Troo and me to go live with Rasmussen? Mother, how could you? I would have to make sure and ask Nell about this. Yes, that’s what I’d do. Rasmussen was probably making this whole thing up. Of course he was.
Rasmussen opened his car door and said, “I’ve got plenty of room at my house. There are four bedrooms. And Ethel could come over to help you anytime you needed something that I couldn’t do for you, like fix your hair.” He picked up my braid in his hand that Ethel had done that morning, and for a second I thought he was going to start crying. And even though he could still be that murderer and molester, I didn’t push him away. He’d probably tell Mother if I did. Now that I knew that Rasmussen and Mother were friends, I’d have to walk on eggshell feet around him.
He swung his legs out of the car and got out, but then leaned his head back in like Mr. Fitzpatrick had and said, “Talk it over with Troo. See what the O’Malley sisters think.” And then he walked off to the front of the church to join the other men who were in black suits with just shaved faces that looked sad beyond belief.
I just sat there. Couldn’t even blink my eyes, that’s how shocked I was, until Troo came up and stuck her head in the window.
“Did he tell you?” She was hopping from foot to foot the way she did when she got so excited she couldn’t stand it, or if she had to pee. “Well, did he?”
“Did he tell me what?” I didn’t want to say what he told me just in case it was something different from what somebody told her. Mostly, I didn’t want her to know we were going to have to go live in the orphanage because no way on Earth was I gonna live at Rasmussen’s.
Troo pulled me out of the car and we started walking toward the church doors. “Hall is going to jail for a really long time because Mr. Jerbak is dead from when Hall hit him on the head with a beer bottle. And Mother is not gonna die.”
“Yeah, he told me that.”
“Isn’t that fantastic!” Troo yelled real loud and then remembered she was at a funeral and said quieter, “So fucking fantastic!”
