by Lesley Kagen
Because it was all very under-the-covers, hardly anyone in the neighborhood knows the way I do why Mrs. Galecki got so sick in the first place. I was sure that Father Mickey had given her too much or too little of her medicines to try and murder her for her inheritance money, but it turns out that I was wrong. Mrs. Galecki had something running through her that wasn’t supposed to be there and that’s what made her go into the coma. A much happier Mr. Gary told me after a couple of whiskey sours and some hands of Old Maid, “The docs don’t know what it was in Mom’s blood, only that it was something they’d never seen before. Something foreign. It’s a real mystery.”
Not to me, it isn’t. I mighta been mistaken about how Father Mickey attempted to murder her, but I’m not mistaken that he did try to. Father was the only person from around here who had been to someplace foreign. Aunt Betty told me the afternoon Troo and me went to the Five and Dime that he was sent to a bunch of different places after he left the seminary and one of them was the Congo, which is in the dark continent of Africa. I’ve seen those little Pygmy people in Tarzan movies. They’re always sneaking around the jungle trying to poison somebody. That’s what Father Mickey musta done. Not with a blow dart, that’s stupid. I bet he mixed some poison he borrowed from the Pygmies into Mrs. Galecki’s fresh-squeezed lemonade on one of those days Ethel went out to do her errands.
Of course, my good friend was let off the hook for any wrongdoing because Ethel has never been anywhere foreign. So, hurray! She has not had to pack up her things and move down to the Core. She is right where she belongs, next door with Ray Buck sitting in the screened-in porch this very minute, which is another reason why I came out in my yard besides wanting to work on my “How I Spent My Charitable Summer” story. I wanted to listen to their low talking and clinking ice cubes and jazzy music, which is such an improvement over Mr. Gary’s Oklahoma! music, I just can’t tell you. Right before he left for the airport to go back to California, I gave him the two leather coin purses to take back to Father Jim so they would steady match, but in all the excitement, I forgot to ask him if he remembered to talk to his mother about changing back her Last Will and Testament so Ethel will inherit the money she needs to open her school for children when Mrs. Galecki really does die, which I’m not too concerned about anymore. For goodness sakes, if Pygmy poison can’t kill her, what can?
“Ya alright over there, Miss Sally?” Ethel calls over the fence.
“Now that you’re back, I am,” I holler. “I don’t think I could take much more of hearin’ about the wind sweepin’ down the plains.”
Ethel rewards me with her million-dollar laugh that I have been missing. It is so rich and there is no end to it. “Thought ya’d like to know that the doctor told me this afternoon Miss Bertha might be comin’ home next week if she gets more of her strength back. Ya still got the Nancy Drew story to read to her?”
“Yes, ma’am.” I checked it back out of the library last week, hoping she’d ask.
Ethel says, “That’s good. Real good,” and I don’t know if she’s talking to me or Ray Buck because she’s gone quiet again, so I get back to being busy, too:How I Spent My Charitable Summer
By Sally Elizabeth O’Malley (Part 2)
We were all so surprised to hear about the disappearance of Father Mickey. Especially my sister, Troo, (known to you as Margaret) was so broken up because Father was so kind to allow her to come back to school. She also got me a souvenir bench from the old zoo that means a lot to me, so she really went all-out this summer.
I would also like to mention that Mary Lane was also charitable, just in case she screws up and forgets to write her story again this year. She won the Billy the Bookworm prize this summer at the library and took Troo and me to the Uptown to see that movie by Alfred Hitch-cock that everybody has been talking about. Just a warning to you and the other sisters. You may not want to see Psycho or you will never want to sit in a rocking chair or take a shower or teach a kid named Norman for as long as you live. (I don’t know if nuns go to motels, but if you do, that will be out of the question, too.)
My mother and Dave will no longer be living in sin after September 24th because they’re getting married. Dave took all of us to the State Fair in West Allis and we ate cream puffs. I brought two back for Ethel Jenkins, who had a pretty rough summer. She really needed some creamy filling. Troo and me rode the Tilt-a-Whirl and the roller coaster. Dave won Mother a teddy bear and also won me a couple of goldfish for my fish tank by throwing ping-pong balls that looked exactly like Granny’s eyeballs into little jars. Troo also got to go to the Freak Show to pay her 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 b
etter 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 tell her. She’s going to roll her eyes and say something mean about my lunatic imagination.
“Ginger ale sounds good,” Greasy Al says. “Thank you.”
Dave, who is watching me rubbing and blinking my eyes, tells me, “They’ve been getting some help from Alfred’s youngest brother for the past few weeks. He’s been bringing formula and diapers and whatever else they need over to the Goldmans’ once the neighborhood settles down for the night.”
Moochie Molinari is on the smallish side and sneakier than an Indian about to raid a wagon train, so I don’t doubt for a second that he could creep around these blocks without getting spotted.
“But . . . but why aren’t you arrestin’ him?” I ask Dave. “He escaped from reform school! He’s wanted! He popped a guard!”
“I didn’t wanna hit Mr. Franklin,” Greasy Al says, forgetting his new manners and using his old bully voice. “I only did it ’cause I had to.”
Dottie places her hand on his knee and gives him a pat. That must be some sort of secret signal she gives her husband when she wants him to pipe down. Mother gives signals like that to Dave, too. She scratches her nose when she wants him to change subjects.
“The baby and I were alone in Chicago and she got sick with scarlet fever,” Dottie slowly explains to me. “I needed Alfred’s help.”
“But once the baby got better, why didn’t the both of you stay hidden down there?” I ask. That’s what I woulda done if I was them. “Why’d you come back?”
Dottie’s eyes go moist when she says, “I . . . my mom and daddy . . . the baby . . .”
Greasy Al puts his arm around her like she’s a flower he doesn’t want to crush.
“These are what are known as extenuating circumstances, Sally,” Dave says. “Alfred will be returning to the reform school to deal with his problem and while he’s there, Dottie is hoping to stay with her mother and father.”
I catch that. “What do you mean hoping? Don’t the Kenfields already know about . . .” I point at the three of them.
Dottie sets the baby in Greasy Al’s arms and comes up to the chair to kneel down in front of me. Up close, she looks older than in her picture except for her smile, that hasn’t changed. She’s still got very good teeth.
She says, “We didn’t know how to . . . we were just talking about the best way to break the news to them and I thought you might be able to help us out. I know what a soft spot my dad has for you,” she says.
That’s true. At least it used to be. I always ask his wife to say hello to him for me when I visit the Five and Dime, but I’ve never heard anything back. And Mr. Kenfield hasn’t invited me once to swing on his porch with him the way we did last summer.
I tell Dottie, “You know . . . your dad . . . he is . . . he’s . . .” I’m trying to prepare her the way you would anybody who’s in for a shock. “He’s different than he was when you were still here. Sometimes he has too much to drink and he chases kids if they step one foot in his yard and he fell down in the
dime store and knocked over all the Christmas decorations and . . . well, I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you this, but he’s pretty much gone down the drain.”
Mother and Dave don’t disagree with me or remind me to mind my manners. Everybody knows what bad shape Mr. Kenfield is in. It would be wrong to pretend we don’t.
Dottie takes my hands in hers and says, “If you could just pave the way . . . I’m sure that Daddy . . .” She looks like she is about to start choke-crying. “It would mean the world to us.”
I think about what she is asking me to do. I’m pretty sure that Mr. Kenfield isn’t furious at his daughter anymore. If he was, he wouldn’t have moved that picture out of her bedroom and hung it in his living room. It might be too much to expect him to feel the same way about his new son-in-law, Greasy Al.
Molinari says, “If ya could do this for us . . . the sooner the better. If things go smooth, I can leave without havin’ to worry ’bout my girls.”
My girls? Did he just say that so loving? I doubted Dave, but I guess he was right when he told me at the beginning of the summer that all Greasy Al needed to straighten out was some TLC.
Dottie gives my hands a squeeze and says, “Please, Sally.”
I can see what she’s feeling. It’s that awful missing that never seems to get better. I know what it’s like waiting around for time to heal all wounds.
I look down at Daddy’s watch on my wrist and make up my mind. “Let’s go,” I say. “He should be out on the porch by now.”
Dave thought the fresh air would do us some good, so Dottie, Greasy Al and me and the baby took the alleyway. I didn’t want Mr. Kenfield to see us coming down the block. Just appearing without any warning might make him have a heart attack or something. Miracles can do that. At least twenty people musta died the day Jesus turned loaves into fishes.