Good Graces - Lesley Kagen [92]
All there’s left for me to do is watch them guide my good friend across the grass to the front of our house, propping her up between them.
“Ethel?” I call to her.
“Don’t you worry, Miss Sally,” she calls back over her shoulder. “Everything’s gonna be fine,” and as much as I want to believe that, my pounding heart is letting me know the smartest woman I know couldn’t be more wrong.
I try to never disobey Mother, but I can’t do what she wants me to. Go back to bed and let my thoughts chase their tails. Listen to my sister sing that party pooper song until she falls asleep and I’m left alone in the dark to toss and turn in the damp twisted sheets, watching the aquarium fish swim by the sunken pirate ship and think about Troo’s half-buried feelings and what trouble she’s in and how the fox-stole-wearing angelfish don’t seem to care about anybody but themselves and poor Nell, just a skeleton of her former self. And how Dave is probably gonna get shot in the back by a bank robber after he marries our unlucky-in-love mother. And Daddy. All he asked me to do was pay attention to the details and keep Troo safe. He expected me to come through for him in the clinch and I’m batting 0 for 2.
I just can’t face all that tonight.
I want to go sit on our backyard bench. I need to calm down. Breathing in the garden smells sometimes helps. I’m taking the alleyway home so Mother won’t spot me.
Troo, who is trailing after me like it’s an accident that we’re both going in the same direction, finally breaks the ice when I round our garage and open the gate to our yard. “I think Mrs. G bought the farm this time,” she calls to me outta the dark.
I want to charge back down the alley, push her down and shout, If she does die, she’ll never know the truth! She was right all along that somebody stole her jewelry, but it wasn’t Ethel, the way she thought it was. It was you! You grabbed the necklace out of Mrs. Galecki’s bedroom. I hope you’re proud of yourself . . . you . . . you . . . lyin’ stealin’ brat! I never want to talk to you again for the rest of my life. I hate you!
But I don’t do that. I just don’t have it in me. I think instead about how if Mrs. Galecki does pass on, I’ll go with Ethel to the funeral, stand right by her side while she bawls into her handkerchief and moans in her black dress and hat with a veil. Even though she knows the end has been coming for a while now and that her patient has had a good long life, dear Ethel, she’s not really prepared. Nobody ever is. You can never get your heart ready.
The only good thing that would come out of Mrs. Galecki’s dying is that Ethel will inherit the money from her Last Will and Testament so she can start up her school and I’m overjoyed for her, I really am, but I have been dreading this day for a long, long time. Even if she wanted to stay, Ethel’s gonna have to move away from the neighborhood. There are people on these blocks who have never shouted hello when she glides by on her way to the drugstore. I’ve heard them call her jigaboo and little black Sammy behind her back up at the Kroger. She only got to live here in the first place because she was working for Mrs. Galecki. Colored people are supposed to live with other colored people. Ethel’ll have to move down to the Core.
I cannot imagine my life without her warm honey voice, her wise advice. Troo and me sleeping in her screened-in porch on nights when it’s just too stuffy in our room. Listening to Ethel’s jazzy music and eating her Mississippi blond brownies, smelling her violet toilet water behind her ears when she bends down to kiss my foreheard with her cool full lips. Even her bunions. Every square inch of the finest woman I know . . . her goneness is going to make me ache forever in a place I can’t rub.
Chapter Twenty-five
I never did get around to telling Dave that he should take out the corn he planted in Daddy’s memory. He did okay for his first try. The stalks are tall and tassled. Fireflies are flickering around the leaves