“That Helen,” Troo says, handing me a sorta rinsed-off plate outta the dishpan. “Brains a la King. What a kidder,” she says, not doing her hunhing but her regular old Chopstick laugh that sounds just like when she plays it on the piano. Ha… ha… ha… ha… ha… ha.
Just like Mother, Troo’s mood has been fabulous, too, these last couple of weeks. She had the gall to say to me yesterday when we were taking out the garbage, “Boy, I feel happy! You should try it sometime, Sal.”
My sister wants us all to believe that she’s turned over a new leaf since the Fourth of July. She’s not making me call her Leeze anymore. And when Dave and Mother discuss the wedding, which is going to take place on September 24th, Troo doesn’t look like she’s about to burst a blood vessel. She’s doing her chores before she’s asked and once this week-this was really awful-she rubbed my back when I got done rubbing hers. Even worse than this Shirley Temple mood she’s been in, my sister has this annoying smile plastered on her face all the time. Even when she’s sleeping, she’s dreaming about something that makes her look like a cat that ate a canary and two of its cousins.
Her acting so cheerful is terrible, but what’s driving me most up the wall is that no matter how much I badger her, she won’t cough up how she got her hands on Mrs. Galecki’s green necklace. I’ve tried about a hundred times to get it out of her, but each and every time she reminds me of the promise I made her at the lagoon on fireworks night not to tell a soul, especially not Dave. And then she says mysteriously, “Soon aaalll will be revealed,” sounding very much like the fortune-teller up at the State Fair.
I think my sister snuck next door and took Mrs. Galecki’s necklace, but I don’t know why she would do something like that. Since she is so light-fingered in general, it even crossed my mind that Troo could be the cat burglar. So I looked and looked, but did not find a candelabra or any other stolen loot stashed around our bedroom. That’s why I’m still 99.9 percent positive it’s Mary Lane who’s been taking stuff out of people’s houses. It’s gotta be.
Even though Troo’s not acting like it on the outside, of course she can’t fool me. She’s still spitting mad at Father Mickey for getting Mother the annulment. She hasn’t asked me to smooch her with the red wax lips and doesn’t swoon anymore when she hears Father’s name. And she has stopped going up to the rectory for her extra religious instruction. Mother and Dave haven’t noticed that she’s been skipping. Their spirits are too high to pay much attention to Troo and me these days. Both of them are on cloud nine.
And so are a lotta other people in the neighborhood. The burglaries have stopped. The cops are still looking, but the high-top footprints they found outside the Holzhauers’ house ended up belonging to Hank Holzhauer, the kid who lives there, so that was a dead end. Since no more valuables are being stolen on a weekly basis, the search for the cat seems to have taken a backseat. (That talk I gave to Mary Lane in the library lavatory musta done some good.)
So leaving to go look for the burglar is not why Dave told Mother he was going to skip supper tonight and grab something up at the Milky Way, the lucky dog. He went over to the house of his sister, Betsy, and her husband, whose name is Richie Piaskowski, to take the sheets off their furniture and spruce the place up a bit. They’re coming for a visit and Dave hopes he can convince them to stay longer than a week at their house on 56th Street across from the church where their daughter, Junie, had her funeral. I can see her grave when I go to sit next to Daddy’s at Holy Cross Cemetery every Saturday. How they could bear leaving their girl beneath that mound of dirt, I don’t know. Dave takes his niece a bouquet on all the holidays except at Christmas, when he brings her a wreath trimmed with angel hair and blue bulbs to decorate her gravestone, but that’s not the same. I could never move away from Daddy, not even for a little while, but I am not going to throw stones at their house. They’re my aunt Betsy and uncle Richie now and they could be Troo’s, too, if she’d let them, which she won’t because they’re related to Dave. (Since their last name ends in ski, after meeting them she’ll right off the bat tell a huge Polack joke. I’m gonna have to take them around a corner and explain that they shouldn’t take it personally.)
Well, my sister can stand next to me here at the kitchen sink and tap-dance all she wants, but I know her. Below all her bubbliness, she’s coming up with another one of her Troo genius revenge plans because she had to give up on the capturing Greasy Al one. Of course, she’s disappointed that she can’t use the reward money to buy the Jerry Mahoney ventriloquist doll, but Troo’s not stupid. She figured out that if Molinari was coming back, he woulda showed up by now. I would have to agree with her. I think he escaped for good, too. Maybe to Brooklyn, where Willie O’Hara used to live. He told me that city has loads of Italians and pizza parlors. Molinari could blend right in like a greasy chameleon. Dave has not recently mentioned to me a thing about his “imminent capture,” so that’s another reason I believe that dago is gone forever.
After I set the white plate carefully in the drying rack, my sister tells me, “After we’re done here we gotta go straight over to the Latours. I got a surprise for you.”
“I can’t,” I say, rubbing off the bowl she hands me with the green checked dish towel. “I told Dave I’d water the garden and after I’m done doin’ that I’m gonna work on my charitable summer story and some other stuff.”
Troo and Artie are still back together. Them spending so much time by themselves hasn’t been all bad. Even if Artie’s imagination has gotten the best of him, I know I can count on him to keep her out of trouble. Not having to watch her every second has let me take a breather. I paid Henry a couple of visits, and I found the time to work on a new imitation. I can do a Wizard of Oz munchkin now. I haven’t tried it out on Wendy Latour yet, but I think she’ll go bonkers when she hears me singing the We Represent the Lollypop Guild song at the talent contest next month. That’s the only idea I had that worked out. I checked out a magic book from the library, but none of my shirts have sleeves long enough to hide a rabbit. I also asked Willie to loan me some of his jokes, but he told me he couldn’t share his “material,” so I guess he changed his mind about being a comedian and is now going to be a tailor when he grows up.
I tell Troo, “I also gotta go over to the Goldmans’ to check on the house.” I look above the sink, where I taped Mrs. Goldman’s postcard that came all the way from the Alps. The snowy mountains look very refreshing when Troo and me are slaving over a hot sink.