Good Graces - Lesley Kagen [93]
When Troo comes trailing after me into our yard, she doesn’t sail past me like I’m part of the scenery the way she’s been doing. She sits down next to me on the glider, picks up my hand off my lap and squeezes it so hard, which is something she used to do back in the olden days when she got scared of one thing or another, mostly the boogeyman, who doesn’t seem to bother her in the least anymore.
With our sunburned shoulders so close together, we watch the breeze flutter the corn and remember the good old days. How I’d sit in Daddy’s lap on the back porch after supper, smelling hard work on his sky-blue shirt. He’d wrap one of his hands around a cold bottle of beer and his other arm around me and we’d listen to a baseball game coming out of the Motorola radio that would light up his face the same way dawn did when he’d head out to the fields on his red tractor like a conquering hero. I know that Troo is picturing how her and Daddy made mustaches out of the tassles and that he always grew maroon Indian corn just for her because it matched the color of her hair. When August came, acres and acres of his hard work would wave outside our kitchen window like we lived on the shores of a green sea. We all looked so forward to the first of the corn. The taste of a just-picked cob, the salty butter dripping off our chins. Daddy’s triumphant look when we told him it was the best we ever had.
Even with my sister by my side, I haven’t felt this alone since the night I waited for his car to come down our road back from the game at County Stadium. Troo is remembering the crash, too, but she’d never admit it, even if I say to her, It’s not true what everybody says about time healing all wounds. My heart . . . it feels like it’s permanently cracked, doesn’t yours?
“Sal, my gal,” Troo says, twining her fingers around mine. “I got a little surprise for ya. I was gonna save it, but I think . . . yeah, wait here.”
She goes to the garage and kicks two times on the door that Dave keeps trying to remember to fix. I can hear her rummaging around in there and then a long scraping sound on the cement floor and a few swear words.
After she switches off the light and the yard turns black again, she calls, “Close your eyes.” I can hear her grunt as she drags something across the grass. The nearer she gets to me, that rusty smell she’s had on her a couple of the times she’s snuck back into bed in the middle of the night gets stronger and stronger. “Okay.” Troo claps her hands just once. “Open saysme.”
Right in front of me, the moon catching it just right, is something else that I thought was long gone. I reach out and run my fingers across the worn-down green seat to make sure it’s not my imagination, but Daddy’s and my bench from the zoo feels real.
“But . . . I went back to look for it and it was gone,” I say. Those kids in Fatima who were paid the miracle visitation by the Blessed Virgin couldn’t have felt any more awestruck than I do. “I . . . I thought it got destroyed by the men with the bulldozers.”
“I know you did.” Troo is puffed up. “Mary Lane and me . . . we went and got it. Her dad told us they were just gonna throw it out, so we carried it all the way down Lloyd Street in the middle of the night so nobody would see us and blab the surprise. Onree let us keep it behind the drugstore for a while and then last week all three of us brought it the rest of the way,” she says. “Dave told me it was okay to keep it in the garage.” When I don’t get up right away because all the amazement I am feeling seems to have settled in my heinie, she shoves me on the shoulder and says, “Whatcha waitin’ for?”
After I get up from the glider and ease down in the middle of the bench, leaving the spot empty where Daddy always sat, Troo quickly curls up on the other side of me and says, “Feelin’ better?” She reaches up to pat me on the top of my head. “I sure am.” Of course she is. There’s just about nothing in the whole world that Troo adores