Mother answered, “Latour is French.” She took a little whiff of her wrist that I knew would smell like Evening in Paris, her favorite. “The French speak the language of love.”
Troo wasn’t even paying attention. She was lookin’ over at our next-door neighbor’s house and wondering if the stories we’d been hearing about the place were true. Because we were sisters born only ten months apart, which made us practically twins, her and me could have the mental telepathy that lets you read somebody else’s mind even if they don’t want you to, so I pretty much always knew what Troo was thinking. “Kenfield?” she hollered out.
“Kenfield is English,” Mother said. “They like to keep a stiff upper lip. That means they don’t like to show what they’re feeling.” She bent down to take another sheet out of the basket, and when she did her hair came undone from the white ribbon. I was always surprised by how long it was. And when the sun shined on it, even though it was red, you could see the gold hiding in it. I thought she was more beautiful than the movie star Maureen O’Hara. And so must the men on the block because they set their beer bottles down when she walked by and sometimes, if those beer bottles were all drunk up, they gave her a low wolf whistle she pretended not to hear.
Troo nudged me with her elbow and started giggling. “O’Malley.”
Mother shook her finger and said, “Troo O’Malley, being silly never got anybody anywhere in life.” But the corners of her mouth went up just a smidge to let us know that we were better than everybody else and not just potato heads or micks, as the kids on the block who were Italian and Polish and German liked to call us. We called them wops (loud, but great cooks) and Polacks (not so smart) and bohunks (thick-ankled), so I figured it all came out in the wash.
Somebody down the block yelled, “Ollie, Ollie, oxen free,” and Little Richard singing “Tutti Frutti” drifted by out of a car radio. That’s how it was on Vliet Street. Something lively was always going on. Except for dead Junie Piaskowski, who everyone on the block said was murdered and molested. Sara Heinemann hadn’t been murdered and molested yet when Mother fastened the last clothespin on the line and said, “O’Malley sisters, come over here. I have something to tell you.”
Of course, I let Troo sit next to Mother on the stone bench near the pink peony flowers that were falling all over themselves because I made my daddy a couple of promises before he died. And if there is one thing you’re gonna get to know about me, it’s that I was a girl who wouldn’t break a promise even if her life depended on it.
Right when the sun was going behind the trees, Daddy made everybody else go out of the hospital room and asked me to come lie down next to him in his bed that he could make go up and down whenever he wanted.
“Sally?” He had all these tubes coming out of him. And next to him was a machine that
ping ping pinged
just like the submarine in that movie Troo and me had seen at the Uptown Theater called
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
.
“Yes, Daddy?” He didn’t look so much like himself anymore. His face was swelled up and he had cuts around his mouth and bits of blood that didn’t seem to wash off. Also he had a big purple circle bruise from the steering wheel going into his chest. Something had collapsed in there, the old nurse said.
“You need to take care of Troo,” Daddy said ever so quietly. His usually fluffy red-as-a-pile-of-fall-leaves hair came into points on his forehead. “You need to promise me that.”
I patted his hand that felt smooth because the old nurse had just put some cream on it. “I promise. I’ll take care of Troo. Cross my heart. But I gotta tell you something really important, I’m—”
“You have to tell Troo for me that it’s okay,” Daddy interrupted. “Tell her the crash wasn’t her fault.”
Troo was in the hospital too, down the hall from Daddy, because she was also in the car when it ran into that big elm tree on Holly Road. Since she was sitting in the backseat, she didn’t get as hurt as Daddy or Uncle Paulie. She just got a broken arm that ached sometimes now before it was gonna rain.
Daddy took in a breath like it was the hardest thing he’d ever done, and when he let it out he said, “And tell your mother that I forgive her for what she did. Promise?” Then he started coughing some more and a little pink spit came up onto his lips. “I’ll be watching, Sally. Remember . . . things can happen when you least expect them so you always gotta be prepared. And pay attention to the details. The devil is in the details.” Then Daddy went to sleep for a minute but woke up again and said, “And Nell is not the worst big sister in the world. There are one or two that’re worse.”
The old nurse came back into the room then and said Daddy was either delirious or hilarious. I couldn’t quite catch it because she had a funny way of talking.
Troo’s fault that Daddy was in the hospital? How could all this be Troo’s fault? Troo couldn’t drive a car, she was only seven years old! Oh, Daddy. And I had no idea what he wanted to forgive Mother for and why he couldn’t tell her himself, but maybe it was because she was crazy with grief like the doctor said.
Even though Daddy had fallen asleep, I whispered, “Roger, wilco and out.” That’s how we always said good-bye to each other. Just like Penny said good-bye to her uncle Sky King when he was up in the clear blue of the western sky in his plane the
Songbird
. Daddy and me just adored that TV show, watched it together every single Saturday morning because Daddy was a pilot, too.
And then the old nurse said, “Visiting hours are over.” “But I gotta . . . ,” I tried to say, but she shook her head in a way that I knew there’d be no gettin’ around. What I wanted to tell him would have to wait until tomorrow. I put my hand on his whiskery chin and turned his face toward mine so I could give him a butterfly kiss on his cheek, because that was his absolute favorite, and then an Eskimo kiss on his nose because that was my absolute favorite.
Daddy’s funeral was three days after I made him those promises. I never did get to tell him I was sorry.
CHAPTER TWO
Mother took me to go see Dr. Sullivan last summer when I started having real bad dreams about
The Creature from the Black Lagoon
. In this movie that took place in the Amazon area there was this creature who lived deep down in the water but would come up to get people whenever it wanted to. After Daddy died, I started thinking all the time about how the Creature could come for me or Troo or Nell or Mother, and what would we do if it did? We weren’t strong. We just were not. And after we moved from our farm way out in the country into the city, to make matters even worse, the Washington Park
lagoon
was just three blocks away from our house. That’s where they found Junie Piaskowski’s dead body our first summer on Vliet Street. They never found the person who left her there all alone next to those red rowboats you could rent. And I couldn’t believe that not one person thought it coulda been the Creature that had murdered Junie because that Creature had a lot of stick-to-itiveness. Look how much he had wanted that actress Julie Adams!
But sitting there in the doctor’s office that smelled like shots, I reconsidered about that for a while, and finally said to Dr. Sullivan, “Okay, maybe it wasn’t the Creature who murdered Junie.”
The doctor smiled and nodded his head.
“Because of those pink undies being tied around Junie’s neck,” I explained. “The Creature doesn’t have very nice fingers and you’d need very nice fingers to tie undies around a girl’s neck, wouldn’t you?”
Dr. Sullivan made me swallow some cod-liver oil and then put his face right up close to mine, so close that the pores in his nose looked like the insides of an empty egg carton. “Sally O’Malley, you have what is known as an overactive imagination.” His breath was warm and putrid, just like I imagined the Amazon would be. “That’s not good. In fact”—he looked over at Mother and shook his head—“it just goes to prove once again that an idle mind is the devil’s workshop. Have you been attending mass regularly?”
Him saying that didn’t give me a lot of faith in Dr. Sullivan. Because he was so wrong. My mind was never idle. Never ever.
The noon whistle blew over at the cookie factory and I heard Mother say from far off, “Sally? Sally! Did you hear me?” in that tone she got to let you know she had better things to do.
“Sorry.” Thinking about the Creature and Daddy like that, that was what Dr. Sullivan called a flight of the imagination, which was something I musta inherited from my Sky King.
Mother sighed one of her big sighs and said, “I have to go to the hospital tomorrow to have an operation. My gallbladder has to come out.” She placed her hand below her right ribs. “And while I’m gone”—she pointed her finger at Troo—“I want you to work on your charitable works, and you”—she pointed at me—“get control of that imagination of yours or I’ll take you back to the doctor.”
Then she looked down at her hands and twirled the wedding ring that Hall had given her, which seemed like it hurt because she had a pained look on her face. With the bad luck Mother was having with her husbands, Troo and me figured that one of the reasons she had married Hall so fast after Daddy died was because he didn’t look like he’d decease anytime soon, with his muscles and wavy Swedish hair and that tattoo on the top part of his arm that said MOTHER. Nell said that tattoo must have impressed the hell right out of Helen. And maybe it had right after Daddy died. But now Mother was stuck with Hall because if you were a Catholic you couldn’t get a divorce unless you wanted to go straight to hell and burn for all eternity. If you were a Catholic, Granny said, the only thing you could do if you didn’t want to be married anymore was to pray really hard for a certain shoe-selling louse to get run over by a bus on his way to work.
Mother got up off the bench and said in her sternest voice, “While I’m gone, the O’Malley sisters better mind their p’s and q’s, because when I come home, if I hear you gave anybody any trouble at all, I’ll give you a spanking that you’ll never forget.” And then she walked away like she’d just remembered what that better thing was that she had to do.
I waited until the screen door slammed behind her and then I said to Troo, “She’s probably gonna die just like Daddy, don’t you think?” I didn’t used to worry a lot, but I started up after Daddy died and now it was something that I did almost all the time. Because if you coulda seen my daddy. He was strong and brave with big hands and black hairy arms and wide shoulders. He was never even sick, my Sky King. So that just shows you what can happen when you least expect it.
Troo was holding a chubby blade of grass up to her mouth and trying to make it do that kazoo sound you can get out of it sometimes. “Nah,” she said. “She’s not gonna die. Helen’s too ornery to die.”
Troo never worried and had hardly cried when Daddy died, which I thought was a little weird. Because although Daddy loved me very, very much, so much that I’d never forget him in a million years, he loved Troo just a little bit more. That hurt my feelings for a while, but when you had a sister like Troo, well, you just had to expect these things.
Troo was also right as rain about Mother. She wasn’t ornery when Daddy was alive, but nowadays she was and I knew whose fault that was. So that night I planned to say extra prayers that Hall would forget to look both ways before he ran across North Avenue on his way to Shuster’s Shoes because that would give Mother another chance at marrying someone else who didn’t talk with his mouth full. If she came back from the hospital. Which she probably wouldn’t. Like I said, I didn’t have a lot of faith in Dr. Sullivan. His breath, and I’m sorry to have to say this, his breath alone could just about kill you.
CHAPTER THREE
Hall and Mother getting married was another perfect example of what could happen when you least expected it.
A month after Daddy died, we went to Milwaukee and brought flowers from the farm to put on his grave up at Holy Cross Cemetery, where Daddy was buried next to his daddy. I laid down in the grass next to him and didn’t want to leave, but Mother told me to get up and quit making a cryin’ scene or she’d make me regret I was born. Later, we had ham sandwiches and Ovaltine at Granny’s. Troo washed and I dried, Nell changed the sheets on the beds, and Mother laid a piece of shirt cardboard down on the wobbly kitchen table. She used Granny’s laundry pen to write out—For Sale. 525-6788.
When Troo asked Mother, “Why you making that sign?” Granny answered, “No life insurance.”
Mother made her mouth look like a minus sign and started looking in the mess drawer for Scotch tape. (I already knew we were just about out of money because Mother kept it in her sock drawer, and when I put her laundry away that morning I noticed that sock was pretty flat.)
Troo and me followed Mother outside and watched while she stuck the sign to the back window of our Plymouth. When the edges were all smoothed down to her liking, Mother jiggled her car keys above our heads and said, “O’Malley sisters, I’m taking you over to Shuster’s for new school shoes.” Uncle Paulie walked past us on the way to his job up at Jerbak’s Beer ’n Bowl, and Troo muttered under her breath, “Thank God for small favors,” which meant she was happy Uncle Paulie was leaving. Mother thought Troo was being thankful for the new shoes or she woulda said something to Troo about bad manners, even though she herself could hardly bring herself to say “Pass the mashed potatoes” to her own brother. Was that why Troo didn’t like Uncle Paulie? Because Mother didn’t?
“No matter how poor we are,” Mother said, backing into the parking space in front of Shuster’s Shoes up on North Avenue, “we still need shoes.” She winked at us. “They’re important to our souls.” Troo and me were bustin’ a gut but stopped real fast when a Mr. Hall Gustafson met us at the shoe store door and said in an overly friendly way, “And what can I do for you beautiful young ladies today?” He was smiling at Mother like a rabid dog and just about drooling when he slipped a pair of pumps on her pretty feet. She didn’t seem to mind one bit.