Good Graces - Lesley Kagen [28]
“Tryin’ to.” Troo cannot stay still for long. She is throwing at car tires when they pass by, timing it so the ball bounces back to her.
“That is good,” Mrs. Goldman says. “And how is your mutter feeling these days?”
I picture her this morning in the shade of the garden with her TV tray in front of her and our collie licking her toes. “I wouldn’t say that she’s a hundred percent in the pink yet, but she’s better. She does jigsaw puzzles to pass the time until her legs get built back up.”
Mrs. Goldman says, “It makes me glad to hear that Helen is on the mend. I like those puzzles, too.”
“Really?” I get a bright idea. I’m gonna bring some of Mother’s old ones over to Mrs. Goldman to make up for being such a bad friend to her. There’s a bunch of those kitties playing with yarn puzzles gathering dust on the shelf in our front closet. “Do you like cats? ’Cause if you do, I might have a big surprise in store for you.”
Mrs. Goldman says in a more serious voice, “I like the katze but am not much for surprises . . . but for this . . . the one you have given me today, I am so very glad. So happy that you have come to see me. I have missed your curious mind.” She picks up my hands in hers. She has numbers tattooed on her arm. “Your coming to see me today . . . it is kismet.”
I never heard that word before. “Kismet?”
“Schicksal,” she says. “Fate. You understand the meaning of this?”
“Ohhh, yeah, sure,” I say, glad. I don’t like it when I don’t get what somebody is talking about. They could be saying something important that I should be paying attention to and it’s flying right over my head. “They teach us all about fate in Catechism class. It means that God’s got everything already planned out for us. That our life is in His hands.”
I think if that really is true, then God must have the worst case of butterfingers. There is no other explanation why He would let Bobby Brophy lick the inside of my ear. And make Daddy crash on the way home from a baseball game. And take Mrs. Goldman’s little daughter away from her. I know He’s supposed to work in mysterious ways, but I don’t think that’s mysterious. He’s being a bully and I know all about them.
The grunting man who was lugging the trunk down to the taxicab comes halfway back up the steps, mops his forehead with the bottom of his T-shirt and says to Mrs. Goldman, “That all of it?” and you can tell he sure as heck hopes it is. He’s the color of boiled rhubarb.
Mrs. Goldman says, “Thank you. That is it. Vee vill be right there.”
I got so caught up in becoming friends with her again that I put what she’s doing out of my mind. “You’re leavin’,” I say, feeling the bottom drop out of my heart.
“Ja. Mr. Goldman and I are taking of a trip,” she says. “To Rheinland.”
“Rhinelander?” I say, completely astounded. That’s the home of Camp Towering Pines. “Troo and me just got back from there!”
For a person who doesn’t like surprises, my old friend is in for one of the worst of her life. I’m about to warn her when she says, “I think perhaps you misunderstand me, Liebchen. Otto and I are returning to the Motherland. To Germany.”
“Oooh.” Otto has been the man of her dreams for over forty years. I’ve heard him speaking from behind the curtains lots of times, but I have never actually laid eyes on him. Troo thinks he doesn’t come out of the house much because he’s a hunchback, but I think it’s because he’s shy about his English not being so good.
“My brother . . . he is ill and vee are going back to run Hans’s clock shop for him until he is feeling better.”
She’s got a bellowing grandfather clock and some silly cuckoos and there’s another that chimes like the bells at church. I could really count on those clocks to get me through the night when we lived upstairs. Now I know where they came from.
“I’m so sorry your brother’s sick,” I say. It is my responsibility as a Catholic to try to make her feel better even if I can’t count it as a charitable work. Doing a good deed for a Jew is frowned upon. I don’t think