Chocolate-Covered Baloney

by KD McCrite

  Daddy came back into the living room, walked right over to the TV, turned it off, and stood in front of it, glaring at Myra Sue.

  I stared at him, and my eyes were probably as big as Myra’s baby blues as she gawked up at him.

  “Myra Sue, is there some boy calling you who thinks it’s fine to hang up if I answer the phone?”

  She gulped.

  “No, sir, Daddy.”

  Daddy narrowed his eyes. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, sir, Daddy. I’ve only been talking to Jessica and Jennifer, and sometimes to Rachel and Fiona. And TracyLynn. And Christy Sanchez. But that’s all.”

  “No boys?”

  “No.”

  “Yeah, Daddy,” I put in, because I couldn’t seem to help myself when there were things in this world that were so obvious. “What boy in his right mind would ever want to call Myra Sue?”

  The girl gave me the dirtiest look you ever saw, and all I was trying to do was help her. Some people have no gratitude.

  Daddy turned to me. “Would some of your friends think it was a funny prank to call folks and hang up on them?”

  My friends? Melissa was my very best friend, and she’d never do such a thing.

  “Daddy, the only people I know who’d do something that dumb are Micky and Ricky Tinker. They might prank-call some folks, but I don’t think they’d do it to us.”

  Daddy raised his eyebrows and still managed to frown. I didn’t know how he did that, but it was a good trick, and I was gonna learn it if I had to stand in front of a mirror for a thousand hours like Myra does.

  “Oh? Why not us?” he asked.

  “Because they know if they pulled that stunt on us Reillys, I’ll clobber ’em good. I don’t put up with any nonsense from those two boys, and they know it.”

  His face cleared. “I see.”

  He sighed and said nothing else while he stared at the floor. Then he looked up at Myra, who was still gawking at him like a dumbstruck old hen in the chicken yard.

  “Here’s something you need to know, Myra,” he said quietly, but in a voice like steel. “When boys do start calling here, or want to come by and see you, I want to know about it. You hear me?”

  She gulped again. “Yes, sir, Daddy.”

  “You make sure they know you won’t be dating until you’re eighteen.”

  “Eighteen?” she hollered. “Daddy! Eighteen? Nobody waits until they’re that old!”

  “Mike,” Mama said with a giggle, “eighteen is a little extreme. I think sixteen is a good age.”

  He looked at Mama, sitting in Grandma’s soft, old rocking chair, Eli sleeping in her arms, and he smiled.

  “We were sixteen, weren’t we, honey?” he murmured. She gave him a flirty smile and nodded.

  Oh brother. Were they gonna start getting mushy?

  “Sixteen, then, Myra Sue,” he said, turning back to my sister. “Two years from now.”

  She nodded.

  “And both of you tell your friends if they call here, they better not hang up if I answer the phone. Got that?”

  “Yes, sir, Daddy. Okay, Daddy,” we said, sweet as baby lambs. What was the point in bringing up the fact that no boy would ever want to date a drip like my sister, and there was not a boy on the face of the planet that I would ever want to date? Especially if it was gonna involve mush and moony eyes.

  Grandma came in the back door Saturday morning, hollering, “Good gravy, it is some kind of cold out there!”

  She was wearing full makeup, with her skin already bright from the cold. Her nose was red as a maraschino cherry. She held a small paper sack in one hand and unbuttoned her brown tweed coat with the other.

  “You got a date, Grandma?” I asked, because I couldn’t see any other reason for running around with her face like that and wearing her new blue, velvety slacks and sparkly, white sweater. Plus, she had on those shoes she wears only for dates. She doesn’t even wear them for church!

  “Trask is taking me to Blue Reed for lunch at the Mill House.”

  “Oh, I hear that’s a nice place,” Mama said, putting down a fresh cup of coffee for Grandma.

  “Is he gonna drive that Mustang over there?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Why?”

  “’Cause if he does, may I ride along with y’all to Blue Reed?”

  “No!” Mama said firmly before Grandma even had time to open her mouth. “April Grace, you are not going to intrude into your grandmother’s . . . outing.”

  I guess Mama thought the word date was inappropriate.

  When the phone rang, Myra Sue screamed, “I’ll get it.”

  “Oh no,” I said quietly, politely, not moving a muscle except my lip muscles, “allow me.” I was just being facetious, but Mama and Grandma gave me the stink-eye, so I guessed they didn’t think it was funny.

  Myra came dragging into the kitchen about a minute later looking Utterly Dejected.

  “It was one of those pranks.”

  “Again?” Mama said.

  I looked outside, and it was not snowing or storming or anything to mess with the phone lines. I kinda shuddered, thinking about somebody calling us and hanging up like that.

  “Lily,” Grandma said, “mebbe you might oughta call the law about it.”

  “Think so?” she murmured. “I’m not sure anyone could do anything to stop prank calls. And really, it hasn’t happened that often. And some of what we thought were hang-up calls the night of the storm were not calls at all, according to the phone company; they were caused by power surges coming through the phone lines.”

  “Well, I don’t like hang-up calls,” Grandma said stoutly. “It takes someone with crude manners or no upbringing to do that.”

  “Yeah, and another thing, we don’t want robbers coming to our house!” I said.

  “Why, honey,” Mama said, “even if someone like that came to our house, they wouldn’t come in. Someone is always home. And if they saw Daisy, why, she’s so big, they’d be too afraid to come any closer.”

  I took all this in, trying real hard to believe it. And I did feel a little better.

  From the other room, Eli made his presence known. For someone with such a tiny mouth and itty bitty lungs, that kid surely could raise an awful racket.

  “You’re right, Mama Grace,” Mama said as she left the kitchen to get the baby, “but I really don’t think there is a blessed thing anyone can do to stop prank calls.”

  Just about then someone knocked on the front door.

  “That will be Trask,” Grandma said.

  “I wonder if he drove that Mustang,” I hollered, forgetting myself for a minute.

  “Hush that,” Grandma scolded. “You want him to hear you saying nonsense like that?”

  “I reckon not,” I said, then went skittering into the living room to look out the front window. Boy, oh boy. There sat his Volvo, as boring as the tan crayon in the Crayola box. I turned away, just as Grandma invited him inside.

  Mama came from the bedroom with Eli in her arms, and she smiled real warm and welcoming at that man.

  Now, the Reverend Trask Jordan has been the minister of Cedar Ridge Methodist Church for as long as I can remember. He was all dapper and cute as a bug in his dark dress coat and shiny shoes. He wasn’t much taller than Grandma, with curly gray hair and round glasses. His figure was what is described as “portly” in some of the British stories I’ve read. That is, he was kinda chubby but not fat.

  “Good afternoon, folks,” he said, all friendly and preacherly. Our own Pastor Ross at Cedar Ridge Community Church smiled the same way and said almost the same thing when he’d come to visit. I guess you learned to greet people just that way in preacher school.

  “Won’t you have a seat, Reverend Jordan?” Mama asked. “Would you like some coffee?”

  He shook his head. “Thank you kindly, Lily, but no. Grace and I have a lunch reservation for one o’clock.” His gaze went to Eli, and his smile got bigger as he approached. “May I?” he asked, holding out
his arms.

  “Surely.” Mama handed the baby over, and Reverend Jordan acted like he’d been handling babies every day for the last fifty years.

  “Now, this is a fine specimen of a young man! Look at that. I don’t believe I’ve seen a better-looking boy than this one, Lily.”

  Mama smiled proudly, and I warmed right up to that fellow.

  “He has red hair,” I announced.

  Reverend Jordan brushed his fingers across Eli’s head.

  “I noticed that,” he said, then ran those same fingers across his own personal head. “I used to have rather red hair myself.”

  I could feel my eyes bug.

  “You did?”

  “Sure ’nough. Got teased about it all the time, too.”

  “You did?”

  Boy, oh boy, did this feller go right to the top of the list, and he didn’t even have to bring chocolate like Rob Estes, or flowers like Ernie Beason did a time or two.

  “Freckles, too?” I asked.

  “Some.” He handed the baby back to Mama. “That is a fine boy,” he said again, “and I’d love to keep him with me all afternoon, but if Grace and I are going to get there by one o’clock, we better go.”

  I want you to know, the second those two senior citizens drove away, Mama put Eli in his bassinet in the living room and was dialing the telephone. She was grinning and her eyes sparkled.

  “Isabel, it’s Lily,” she said. “She’s gone. As soon as you can get over here, we’ll get started on our plans.”

  Plans? What plans? I even said, “What plans?”

  But Eli set up howling, and Mama took off to take care of him.

  “What plans?” I hollered.

  “Answer the door when Isabel arrives,” Mama said, “and please don’t yell like that in the house.”

  Well, good gravy, excuse me all over the place for having an inquiring mind.

  One way or another, I was going to have to start solving some of these mysteries before I turned plumb goofy with curiousness.

  Curiouser and Curiouser

  I went to my sister’s closed bedroom door and knocked so politely, you could have written to that etiquette expert lady, Emily Post, and sent her an illustration of it. When she did not respond, I knocked again, louder, but politer than all getout. The sound of Hall and Oates came wafting out from under the door.

  She opened the door a crack and blinked at me from one blue eyeball.

  “What do you want?”

  “What are the plans Mama and Isabel have?”

  The blue eye blinked five or six times, then Myra Sue stepped back and opened the door.

  “What are you talking about?”

  I walked into her room, and let me tell you, I nearly got lost among the piles of dirty clothes and Tiger Beat magazines, Soap Opera Digests, Current Soaps, and other junk all over the floor. How could she even sleep in that mess without worrying that something would crawl out of it and chase her around the room?

  She had a bunch of notebook paper with lots of writing on it scattered across the bed.

  “You’re actually writing a paper for history?” I asked, surprised. “What’re you writing about?”

  She followed my gaze, then flew to the bed and gathered up those pages.

  “It’s none of your business!”

  That’s when I knew she was writing something that had nothing to do with George Washington or the Monroe Doctrine or World War I. And one thing about it: she wasn’t gonna let me see what it was, even though I strained my eyes as hard as I could.

  “Why are you here?” she said, stuffing all those pages in her backpack, then hanging on to it like it was full of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Let me tell you something: that girl would never pass for a Wise Man, even if she grew a beard and rode a camel.

  “Mama just now called Isabel, and she told her to come over here while Grandma is gone so they can make plans.”

  “I haven’t heard anything about secret plans. What do you think they’re planning?”

  I shrugged. “I thought you might know.”

  We stood there and stared at each other.

  “Maybe they’re going to send us off to boarding school,” Myra whispered.

  “Boarding school?” I yelped.

  “Shhh! Yes.”

  “Where’d you get a crazy idea like that?” I whispershouted. She looked all uppity and put her hands on her hips. “Well, I don’t know, April Grace. You tell me. You’re the one with crazy ideas all the time. Where do you get them?”

  “From my imagination! But Myra Sue, you have no imagination. So why would you even think something as silly as us being sent to a boarding school?”

  She huffed. “Because it happened on Silver Linings two years ago. Colton and Amber were going to—”

  “Myra Sue, why can’t you understand those dumb soap operas Are Not Real? They are stories.”

  She bugged out her eyes at me. “You don’t have to keep telling me that.”

  I had to force my teeth to unclench because that goofy girl had frustrated me so much that I like to have fused my jawbones together.

  “You might as well believe that we’re all moving to South America,” I told her.

  “Really? Why would we do that?” Her eyes got bigger and bigger. “Daddy would have to sell the farm. And where would Grandma live?”

  Now, at this point, I nearly had to sit on my hands to keep from choking my own personal throat out of pure aggravation.

  “Well, Myra Sue,” I choked out, “maybe they’re planning to send us to boarding school in South America.”

  Boy, oh boy, I thought her eyeballs would pop right out of her skull.

  “No!” she said. “I won’t go to South America. It’s too far from—”

  I perked up right quick, thinking she was about to spill the beans on some of her mysterious behavior. But I guess she heard her own dumb words because she broke off all of a sudden.

  “Too far from what?” I asked.

  Her brain must have steamed with all the thinking she seemed to be putting it through.

  “Too far from here!” she finally sputtered.

  Oh brother. She is always and forever whining about living on the farm, so I’d think South America would be just peachy to her.

  “I refuse to move!” she hollered.

  “Good grief, Myra, don’t be so all-fired dumb. No one is moving to South America, and we are not going to boarding school. Number one: Only rich people send their kids to boarding school. Number two: Mama and Daddy wouldn’t do that anyway. Number three: None of us can speak Spanish or Portuguese, which is what most people speak in South America.”

  Her bottom lip, which had been pooched out thirteen feet or thereabouts, shrunk back to normal, and the wildness drained from her eyes.

  “Well then, what are Mama and Isabel planning that does not include us?” she asked. Then she got all pouty again. “This just proves Isabel doesn’t like me anymore. If she did, she’d want me right there while they were doing that planning.”

  “Maybe they’re planning to clean out the cellar, Myra Sue. You want to be included in that?”

  That took the pouty expression right off her face and replaced it with a look of horror.

  “Myra Sue, I can almost guarantee you that whatever they’re planning has nothing to do with boarding school, South America, or cleaning the cellar. But it is curious that you don’t know what Isabel is up to.”

  She sniffed.

  “I told you before. I embarrassed her into utter humiliation at the Christmas program, and I refuse to do it to her again.”

  “But, Myra, you were the one who was humiliated, not Isabel.”

  Her expression said she did not believe me, not for a minute.

  “Has Isabel ever once told you that she no longer dotes on you, or dislikes you, or anything that dumb?”

  “No,” she said in a small voice. “But she wouldn’t. Isabel is the very soul of discretion and manners.”

  “O
h brother! Where have you been? I will admit that Isabel has made some progress in manners, but she still does not hold back from blasting off somebody’s eyebrows if she decides to tell them off.”

  Just about then, someone knocked on the front door.

  “There’s Isabel,” I said, “and Mama told me to let her in as soon as she got here.”

  I hurried downstairs, but Myra did not follow. I shot a look at her when I reached the door, but she continued to hang around at the head of the stairs like she was waiting to be invited. I raised my eyebrows, asking silently if she was coming down, but she just shrugged and stayed where she was.

  “Hi, Isabel,” I said as I let the woman inside. “Mama’s taking care of Eli. I’ll tell her you’re here.”

  “I think I’ll wait for her in the dining room. I brought my notebook.” She waved it at me like it was some kind of trophy.

  “What’re y’all planning, anyway?” I asked, cutting a glance upstairs at Myra. She leaned forward on the banister, listening. As if she had any right to eavesdrop, that secretkeeping brat.

  “Darling child, if you don’t know already, then I daresay your mother has chosen not to tell you,” Isabel said, as uppity as you can possibly imagine, as she went into the dining room.

  I opened my mouth to take exception to that observation, but I ended up saying nothing ’cause Mama came into the dining room, toting the baby in one arm, a notebook and pen in her free hand. I narrowed my eyes. The last time those two women had notebooks and pens and sat at the dining room table, the result had been a Christmas program, and I had been roped into participating in it like nobody’s business.

  “You need something, honey?” Mama asked me.

  “Just wondering what you’re planning, is all.”

  She twisted her mouth, thinking. She and Isabel exchanged glances, then both of them looked me up and down like they’d never seen me before.

  “What do you think, Isabel? Should we let her in on our secret?”