“You know Junie was my niece, right? My sister Betsy’s daughter?”
“Ethel told me that,” I said quickly.
“Betsy had to move away because it was just too sad for her and her husband to live here after Junie…” He stepped on the gas and pulled away.
A half block later, Rasmussen turned into what was really the playground of the school but was also used as a parking lot when there was a funeral or a wedding or any other big occasion. I couldn’t wait to get out of that car. Rasmussen was making me feel sad for him, the last way on Earth I expected to feel, and it was making me so nervous that I started sweating buckets. When he put the gearshift into P, I pulled down on the door handle.
“Wait just a minute, Sally. I’ve got something else important to tell you.”
His hands were knotted up around the steering wheel and he looked as antsy as I felt. Maybe because we were so close to church he’d started feeling real guilty and was about to confess to the murders. That’s just how he was acting. Like after the cops gave somebody the third degree in a movie and then the guy gets all twitchy and just puts his head down on the table and starts yelling, “Okay, I did it. I did it!”
Rasmussen said, “Mr. Jerbak died.”
“What?”
“Mr. Jerbak died.”
I wanted to say I never did like Mr. Jerbak anyway. He was always beating on his boy Fritz, who would come to school with black eyes that he said he’d gotten when he tripped over the dog but everybody knew Fritz Jerbak didn’t have a dog.
“Do you know what that means?” Rasmussen asked.
I spotted Troo standing at the corner of the church next to the statue of St. Francis is a sissy. Which in St. Francis’s case meant he was light in his sandals. Willie O’Hara came up with that one.
“It means there’s gonna be another funeral?” I said.
“That’s right, but that’s not what I meant. Mr. Jerbak’s death means that Hall won’t be around anymore. He’s going to jail for more than a few days.”
I was bowled over like a strike. “Hall is going to jail forever, you mean?” If Hall didn’t pay the rent from the money he made sellin’ shoes up at Shuster’s, we’d have no place to live. We were kaput. Oh sweet Jesus, Mary and Joseph. I grinded my teeth together and got prepared for Rasmussen to tell me that Troo and me were going to go live in the orphanage up on Lisbon Avenue.
“Maybe not forever, but Hall is going away for a really, really long time.” Rasmussen swiped some sweat on his forehead with a folded white handkerchief he’d taken out of his front suit pocket. “Do you know what that means?”
I thought I did.
“It means that you and Nell and Troo will have to move out of your house. The Goldmans will let you stay another week, but then… well, they have to rent it out to people who can pay. Do you understand?” He had put his arm over the back of the front seat and was leaning toward me so close that I could smell orange slices.
I was looking out the window at Troo and trying not to think of the lonely faces up at St. Jude’s. Me and Troo were about to become two more lost causes. “So we have to go live in the orphanage?”
“Well, that’s what I’m getting at here.” Rasmussen’s words started to gush out of him like he’d sprung a leak. “Your mother thinks it would be a good idea for you and Troo to come and live with me until she gets better enough to come home.”
“WHAT?” That had to be nothing but a flight of my imagination, what he just said, because going to live with him was the most Virginia Cunningham crazy idea I’d ever heard!
There was a knock on the half-rolled-down car window. It was Mr. Fitzpatrick, also dressed in a black suit with a white carnation on the lapel. He leaned his head down and said, “We’re all set, Dave.”
Rasmussen said, “Be there in a sec, Lou.”
I just couldn’t believe this. Mother thought it was a good idea for Troo and me to go live with Rasmussen? Mother, how could you? I would have to make sure and ask Nell about this. Yes, that’s what I’d do. Rasmussen was probably making this whole thing up. Of course he was.
Rasmussen opened his car door and said, “I’ve got plenty of room at my house. There are four bedrooms. And Ethel could come over to help you anytime you needed something that I couldn’t do for you, like fix your hair.” He picked up my braid in his hand that Ethel had done that morning, and for a second I thought he was going to start crying. And even though he could still be that murderer and molester, I didn’t push him away. He’d probably tell Mother if I did. Now that I knew that Rasmussen and Mother were friends, I’d have to walk on eggshell feet around him.
He swung his legs out of the car and got out, but then leaned his head back in like Mr. Fitzpatrick had and said, “Talk it over with Troo. See what the O’Malley sisters think.” And then he walked off to the front of the church to join the other men who were in black suits with just shaved faces that looked sad beyond belief.
I just sat there. Couldn’t even blink my eyes, that’s how shocked I was, until Troo came up and stuck her head in the window.
“Did he tell you?” She was hopping from foot to foot the way she did when she got so excited she couldn’t stand it, or if she had to pee. “Well, did he?”
“Did he tell me what?” I didn’t want to say what he told me just in case it was something different from what somebody told her. Mostly, I didn’t want her to know we were going to have to go live in the orphanage because no way on Earth was I gonna live at Rasmussen’s.
Troo pulled me out of the car and we started walking toward the church doors. “Hall is going to jail for a really long time because Mr. Jerbak is dead from when Hall hit him on the head with a beer bottle. And Mother is not gonna die.”
“Yeah, he told me that.”
“Isn’t that fantastic!” Troo yelled real loud and then remembered she was at a funeral and said quieter, “So fucking fantastic!”
Part of it was fantastic. The part about Mother getting better. And even that part about Hall because all we ever got from him were some hits on the head and some slaps with his belt, and now Mother would be free to get married to somebody else because I didn’t think the Pope made you stay married to a murderer. But that part about going to live with Rasmussen? I didn’t think that was so fucking fantastic.
“Yippie ai oh ki aa,” Troo shouted, a yellow rose from Rasmussen’s garden bouncing on her head.
We walked into the church right behind the Latours, so we had to wait a while because it takes fifteen people a long time to stop at the holy water font, especially when Wendy Latour decides to wash her face in it. I asked Troo, “Who told you all this?”
“Nell told me on the way over.” Troo smiled at Artie Latour. He still had the hots for her because his little harelip twitched into a smile until Reese put his fingers around his neck and squeezed until he turned back around again. The Latours had scrapple for breakfast. I could smell it on them.
“Nell talked to Rasmussen. He’s a good egg, just like I been tellin’ you.” Troo’d lowered her voice into a whisper because that was what you had to do in the church, which smelled of incense and had stained-glass windows that calmed me down when the sun came through and made puzzle pieces of red and yellow and green lights on the floor. While we waited in line to go down the main aisle, I looked over at the Virgin Mary statue that always smiled at you no matter what, with her petal pink lips and chipped blue eyes that followed you wherever you went. Candles flickered beneath her feet, lit by people who’d dropped a dime in the tin collection box and asked Jesus’s mother to have a good talk with her son about granting their prayers.