Good Graces (29 page)

Oh, Troo
.

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.

Troo says, “You know that antique railroad watch Mr. Honeywell’s got? The one he’s always braggin’ about? Father told Charlie that the second after he got adopted he’d have to steal it and if he didn’t, Father would make sure the Honeywells picked another kid from the litter.”

Poor Charlie. He really was caught between a rock and a hard place. “Do you think after he ran away that he . . . um . . . got his head chopped off or eaten by a bear or—?”

“Jesus, Sal. Quit bein’ so fuckin’ weird,” Troo says. “Fitch is fine. He’s livin’ in the country in this place called Fredonia. Artie got a letter from him a couple of weeks ago.”

“Why’d he go there?” I ask. I never even heard of the place.

“Remember booger-eatin’ Teddy Jaeger?”

I nod. He’s kinda hard to forget.

“After he got adopted, him and Charlie became pen pals,” Troo says. “That’s where Charlie went to get away from Father Mickey. When he showed up at Teddy’s new home, the mother and father told him he could stay for the rest of the summer and help them sell vegetables outta their roadside stand.”

I don’t doubt that for a second. If those people were charitable enough to adopt finger-up-his-nose Teddy Jaeger, Charlie Fitch musta seemed like the guy from
The Millionaire
showing up at their front door.

After I think some more about everything she’s been telling me, I come up with one more question. “But why didn’t the altar boys just tell their mothers or fathers or . . . or the police that Father Mickey was makin’ them steal against their will?” We’re not exactly big on that kind of thing around here, we’re supposed to fight our own battles, but this is sort of a special situation where you might want to call in the cavalry.

“The altar boys are dumb, but they’re not that stupid,” Troo says, flicking her cigarette into the grass. “They knew nobody would take their word over a priest’s.”

She’s right, of course. Even if they gave confessions signed in blood. The boys also had to know that their parents would punish them within an inch of their lives just for saying something so bad about Father. No one would believe the four of us either if we wanted to tell on him. Mary Lane is a famous no-tripper storyteller and I have a problem with flights of imagination and Troo, everybody thinks she is the next Bonnie from Bonnie and Clyde, and Artie Latour, they’d say anything he heard from Charlie Fitch about Father Mickey was wrong due to him being a half-deaf mess.

Even Dave, who is the fairest person I know, wouldn’t take us seriously. He couldn’t believe us over Father Mickey even if he wanted to. It’s against his religion. If I got up off this bench and marched into the kitchen to tell him everything Troo just told me, he’d look helplessly across the table at Mother and she would say, “Get out the cod liver oil and a serving spoon,” or she might slap me across the face. That’s what she did when I told her that I hated God after Daddy died. And when Troo came home from school rubbing the back of her noggin, complaining that Sister Imelda whacked her so hard with the back of a geography book that she was still seeing the Canary Islands, Mother told her, “Take out the garbage.”

They can’t help it. The Lord thy God comes before all others and the same goes for anybody who works for Him.

Completely tuckered out from all this telling, Troo drops her head into my lap and stares up at the sky. I am feeling ashamed of myself as I pet the top of Daddy’s and my bench. When Troo disappeared outta our bed those nights, I thought at first that she was out looking for Greasy Al. Then I was positive that she was stealing. I was so sure she was up to no good. It never crossed my mind she could be up to good.

Troo asks, “You believe me?”

“Yeah.”

My sister lets out a sigh that lets me know that’s a real load off her mind.

“Mary Lane told me that Mr. Fazio is a gangster and she thinks Father owes him money for gamblin’,” I ask. “Do you think that’s true?”

My sister says, “I know it is. I didn’t understand what I was seein’ when I went through Father Mickey’s desk drawer, but in those notebooks I found . . . there was a long list of all these numbers with dollar signs and dates. They had to be bets. Uncle Paulie used to have a notebook just like that. Remember?”

I didn’t until just now. It was blue. He always had it with him before the crash. When he was a bookie and not a pin setter. So many times, I watched him slide it in and out of his back pocket where he keeps his Popsicle sticks now.

Troo says, “I . . . we can’t let Father get away with this. Not just for lyin’ to me, but the altar boys and . . . everybody in the parish. He betrayed all of us, Sal. The same way Judas did Jesus.”

I know where she’s headed and it’s not down the straight-and-narrow path. Father Mickey is who I suspected Troo was going after with a vengeance because he got Mother the annulment, but now she’s got even more reasons to balance the scales.

I bring my face down to hers and use my strictest voice. “I know what he did was bad, but you can’t go after him. He’s a priest. What if he—”

Troo cuts me off with, “I already decided.” She’s got that steely glint in her eyes. “I got me a plan.”

Those are the exact same words she used when she told Mary Lane and me last summer that she wanted to go after Bobby Brophy and we all know how good that turned out. Troo probably already figured out a way to cut the ropes on the heavy crucifix that hangs above the altar so it will come crashing down on Father while he’s saying Mass or maybe she’ll knock him over the head with an incense burner or hide a cherry bomb in the sacristy or . . .

“You with me?” she asks.

Even though I know whatever revenge scheme she’s come up with to get back at Father Mickey doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in Miami Beach, I stroke her hair and tell her the way I always do, the way a good sister should, “Always and forever.”

H
aving our excellent friend, Mr. Gary Galecki, come all the way from California for his summer visit is a huge deal for the O’Malley sisters. That’s why Troo shoved whatever plan she’s cooking up to get back at Father Mickey onto a back burner for the time being. So we can spend some time with Mr. Gary. (Believe me, she has not forgotten her revenge. She’s just put a temporary lid on it.)

Unlike he usually does, Mrs. Galecki’s son has not come back to the neighborhood to have his usual visit with his mother during the first week of August. The two of them won’t be reading the paper and eating jam and toast and talking around the kitchen table like they always do. Instead of putting her up on a pedestal, the poor man has been spending most of his time up at the hospital. His mother is not dead, but she isn’t exactly alive either. Dave told me our old neighbor is in something called a
coma
, which means she’s neither here nor there, which sounds an awful lot like purgatory.

Right after Mr. Gary arrived, Troo and me wanted to rush over and welcome him home, but Mother told us we could not intrude on his grief. That we had to wait until he came to us. So when he knocked on our back door tonight and asked if the two of us were available to play cards, we jumped at the chance and followed him over here.

Outta habit, I came straight into the kitchen, but Ethel isn’t in here puttering around like she normally would be. Since today is her day off, she went to spend it at her Baptist church down in the Core to pray for her coma friend with Ray Buck. I wanted to go along this morning the way she lets me sometimes, but she pinned on her hat, picked up her handbag and said, “Not today, Miss Sally. Got me some things to take care a. Maybe next time.” She didn’t say so because she wants to spare my sensitive feelings, but the both of us know there might not be a next time. I bet she’s already looking for a new place to live and somebody else to nurse just in case things turn for the worse for Mrs. Galecki, which they will, they always seem to.

Ethel left blond brownies on the kitchen counter, and in the sink there is a coffee cup rimmed in bright pink lipstick, a new shade she was excited about trying. Seeing that cup, that souvenir of her, makes me want to go into her bedroom and put my head down on her feather pillow that always smells of fresh-cut strawberries and think of the good old days. Ethel hasn’t been herself lately. She’s been spending her time dusting and crying over Mrs. Galecki’s sickness and nothing I say to her makes any difference. Even radish sandwiches or reading her Nancy Drew doesn’t put a smile on her face.

“You better get out here. I’m dealing, Sally,” Mr. Gary calls to me from the porch.

Troo and me have gotten too big for Old Maid, but Mr. Gary loves this game and we’re his guests. Ethel would be ashamed of me if I didn’t play along. My sister and me are the only friends this poor man’s got left in the neighborhood.

The reason his name is mud around here is because when he went back to California after his visit last summer, he took our old pastor, Father Jim, with him so they could grow
flowers
together, not
fruits
, like everybody keeps saying. I really miss Father Jim. He always gave the easiest penances after confession and his fingernails weren’t shiny like Father Mickey’s are. Father Jim’s were always dirty. I used to help him pot plants in his gardening shed the Men’s Club built for him behind the rectory. I have never seen somebody with such a green thumb. He had a lotta rosebushes growing in the backyard, but the irises were his trademark. They were just magnificently purple and that’s a very popular Catholic color, especially during Lent. Even Mary Lane telling me she peeped on him up at the rectory last summer and saw him dancing around in a white dress to
Some Enchanted Evening
didn’t change my opinion of him one iota, or Dave’s neither. We had a long talk about Father Jim and Mr. Gary and the both of us agreed that it’s kinda unusual, but if you love somebody it shouldn’t matter if you both wear the pants in the family. The Bible even says so. We are all created in God’s image. His own Son doesn’t have a girlfriend in the Bible and he was really good pals with the Apostles who were all guys, so that kinda makes you think.

After Mr. Gary shuffles and deals and we get our cards straight, he draws the Milking Maid out of my hand with one of his beautiful ones that God musta given to him to make up for his ears, which are only somewhat smaller than Dumbo’s.

He says, “I understand you were the belle of the ball at the Fourth of July party this year, Troo.”

My sister, who is next to him on the little wicker couch in her baby doll pajamas, says, “See?” and points down to her neck. She’s wearing her blue ribbons that she never takes off even when she’s in the tub. “And that’s not all.” She brought over her trophy that she won at camp for being so talented. Troo lifts it out of the shopping bag and sets it down. She spent an hour yesterday trying to clean off the green color it’s turning, which didn’t work, so now it looks like a lucky tomahawk instead of a golden one.