Good Graces - Lesley Kagen [96]
“Mrs. Galecki? Why wouldn’t he?” Sure she can be kind of annoying, sometimes she coughs for fifteen minutes at a stretch, but she’s still one of his flock.
“Not her,” Troo says. “Helen.”
She looks up and into the kitchen window. I hope Dave and Mother put cold water in a bucket for Ethel’s bunion feet and are saying uplifting things to her. If I was in there, I would sing about the ant moving the rubber tree because it’s got such high hopes. Ethel really likes that song. She sings it to Mrs. Galecki when she’s spraying her thinning hair tall with Aqua Net every morning.
“Before Mother started going out with Dave in high school, her and Father Mickey were hot and heavy,” Troo says. “Aunt Betty told me during rummy.”
“Yeah, she told me something like that, too.”
Up at the Five and Dime the same day she surprised me with the news that Father was from the neighborhood, Aunt Betty winked at me and said, “M.P.G. could give a girl the ride of her life. Ask your mother.”
I’ve got so many questions that I don’t know which one to pick. It’s like trying to decide which candy to buy outta the case at the Five and Dime. Troo looks so petered out, but I gotta know all of it if I’m gonna help her outta the jam she’s gotten herself into.
“Do you know how Father’s makin’ the altar boys be cats?” I ask. Even though we have fate in the Catholic Church, we also got free will. I’m not sure where one starts and the other takes over, but it seems to me that the boys could have told the priest that they didn’t want to steal.
Troo points up to the western sky. The stars tonight look close enough to put in my pocket and save for a rainy day. “The Big Dipper and the Little Dipper.”
Daddy used to say that they reminded him of us.
I squeeze her hand harder than she’s squeezing mine. “Tell me. How’s Father makin’ the boys steal?”
Troo says, “Artie told me down at Honey Creek on the Fourth that before he ran away, Charlie Fitch told him that Father threatened the altar boys. Told them that he’d kick ’em out of school if they didn’t steal for him.”
He can do that. Our pastor is the boss of everything, not only the church and the nuns, but the school, and everybody in the neighborhood.
I say, “But Charlie, he didn’t have a house of his own and there’s nothin’ good to take out of the orphanage.” When our Brownie troop went up to St. Jude’s to sing Christmas carols to those poor kids, the place reminded me of the dump near the farm.
Troo says, “You know that antique railroad watch Mr. Honeywell’s got? The one he’s always braggin’ about? Father told Charlie that the second after he got adopted he’d have to steal it and if he didn’t, Father would make sure the Honeywells picked another kid from the litter.”
Poor Charlie. He really was caught between a rock and a hard place. “Do you think after he ran away that he . . . um . . . got his head chopped off or eaten by a bear or—?”
“Jesus, Sal. Quit bein’ so fuckin’ weird,” Troo says. “Fitch is fine. He’s livin’ in the country in this place called Fredonia. Artie got a letter from him a couple of weeks ago.”
“Why’d he go there?” I ask. I never even heard of the place.
“Remember booger-eatin’ Teddy Jaeger?”
I nod. He’s kinda hard to forget.
“After he got adopted, him and Charlie became pen pals,” Troo says. “That’s where Charlie went to get away from Father Mickey. When he showed up at Teddy’s new home, the mother and father told him he could stay for the rest of the summer and help them sell vegetables outta their roadside stand.”
I don’t doubt that for a second. If those people were charitable enough to adopt finger-up-his-nose Teddy Jaeger, Charlie Fitch musta seemed like the guy from The Millionaire