Good Graces - Lesley Kagen [47]
Mother, who looks lovely in a creamy blouse, lights up a cigarette and says, “We’ll be there rootin’ for you, right, girls?”
The urge to tell Dave about Greasy Al paying us a visit last night is so powerful, but I can’t face the rest of my life with my sister not speaking to me, I just can’t. So I tell him, “Wouldn’t miss it for the world. Go get ’em, tiger.”
Troo doesn’t wish him good luck. She gives Dave a dirty look, stabs her fork down at her plate and doesn’t even thank him for making her French toast.
Chapter Thirteen
I will always love baseball the same way Daddy did. Unfortunately, coming to these games puts me in a pickle. I spend most of every inning thinking about how much he would love being here on a hot summer night and how bad I miss feeling his hairy arm pressed against mine, the look of his chipped-tooth smile after a really great play and how he’d jump to his feet and shout, “That’s showin’ ’em who’s boss!”
How do you make yourself forget?
It’s the Policemen (The Clobbering Coppers) versus the Feelin’ Good Cookie men (Chips Off the Old Block) under the playground’s big lights tonight. I’m sitting high up so I can get a bird’s-eye view, but not of the action out on the diamond. I’m memorizing the faces of the people coming and going. I’m looking for Greasy Al. It would be so simple for him to blend into this crowd and bide his time, especially if he was wearing a disguise like a black beard or something. After the ninth inning, he could stream out the gates with everybody else and hurry to hide between houses to follow a little girl named Troo O’Malley home. When I least expected it, that’s when he’d reach out from behind a tree and grab her. I gotta keep my eyes peeled and this is no easy job.
The bleachers around the diamond are always packed when these two teams go at each other. The last time they played it got kinda heated up and nobody talked to anybody for about a week. Mr. Jessup, who is the regular ump, is pretty strict. He got on everybody’s nerves so bad reciting the rules of the game that one of the factory men yelled out from the crowd, “Shut up already with the sermon on the mound,” and then somebody else offered Dave ten dollars to shoot Mr. Jessup and it went downhill from there.
That’s why Father Mickey is behind home plate tonight. Nobody would dare question his infallible calls. Troo is chatting up a storm with him. Usually she doesn’t like people to fidget with her, so I’m shocked when Father licks his finger and rubs it across a smudge on her cheek and she doesn’t seem to mind at all. Her religious instruction must be going really, really well, so that’s at least one thing I can like about him.
Wendy Latour comes skipping through the playground gates with the rhinestone tiara on her head and when she spots me, she spreads her legs and shouts out the same way she always does, “Thally O’Malley, hi, hi, hi!” After she throws me lots of See the USA in your Chevrolet Dinah Shore kisses, she tries to crawl up the bleachers to give me one of her enormous hugs, but she steps on somebody’s hand so Artie has to pull her back. He is really taking Charlie Fitch’s running away to heart. He looks like the “Wreck of the Hesperus,” which I have never actually seen but sounds pretty bad. All wrecks are.
Mary Lane’s mother musta given her a Toni Home Permanent Wave and left it in too long. She looks like she got struck by lightning. She is strolling alongside Fire Chief Bailey’s son, Skip, probably asking him about different and better ways to start fires. She set one last night at the empty television repair store on Lisbon Street. It’s not seeing a place burn down that she likes so much. It’s the trucks that come to put out the fire that she adores. She would like to drive a hook and ladder someday, but that will never happen because they’re called firemen and not firewomen, but that’s one of the other reasons I like her so much. She holds