Good Graces - Lesley Kagen [121]
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