Lesley Kagen - Good Graces

“Do you want me to pull out the dandelions?” I ask her. “What about the caterpillars? Should I pick them off the vines?”

“ Ach . I’m afraid there is no garden this summer.” She shows me her knobby knuckles. They’ve gotten worse than they were.

“Sally!” Troo shouts the way she does when she wants me to be at her beck and call.

Mrs. Goldman says, “Before you go… the key to the house.” She rummages around her skirt pocket until she finds what she’s looking for. “It opens both doors up and down. In case of the emergency.” She sets the key in the palm of my hand. “Vhen vee get back from our trip, I vill pay you five dollars for your hard vork.”

“No joke?” I know I should tell her, Oh no, thank you, I’m happy to do this favor for you without getting paid to make up for letting you down, but I have been saving up for bus fare to go see Sampson at the new zoo. I went over to the old one yesterday to see what was left.

Troo was getting punished for lipping back, so she had to stay in her room and write a hundred times on a piece of paper, I am not the Queen of Sheba, and Mary Lane was nowhere to be found, so that’s the reason I went all by myself.

Three yellow bulldozers were lined up, getting ready to wreck everything, but Daddy’s and my bench was still there. It’s old and pretty heavy. I wanted to drag it back to our house a little at a time every day, but I didn’t feel strong enough to get it more than a few feet. The whole time, I kept looking over at Sampson’s enclosure expecting to see him waving or hear him singing, but all that was left were the orange rocks and his favorite blue ball floating in the murky pool.

The money I would get from Mrs. Goldman to watch over her house could buy me a bus pass. I tell her, so she knows how much Sampson and me would appreciate it, “Five whole bucks? Thank you! That’s a mint!”

She pulls me close and gives me one of her good schnitzel- smelling hugs. “What a special girl you are,” she says, somewhat proud, but also somewhat something else. Sad?

Troo yells something, but I can’t make it out. I back out of Mrs. Goldman’s arms even though I don’t want to and shout down to the curb, “What?”

My sister makes this obnoxious sound like I’m a contestant on Beat the Clock and my time is up.

“Marta,” Mr. Goldman calls to his wife from behind the drawn curtains. “Vee must go. The meter it is running.”

“Well, I guess we both gotta hit the trail,” I say. “You have a safe trip. I’ll say a rosary for your brother to get better fast and come look at the house every day. Remember to check the stove and unplug your iron before you go.” Mother always makes sure she does that before she leaves the house. “And…” I don’t think Mrs. Goldman has any fancy jewelry that could get stolen, she never wears any, but she could have some guns from the war or a shoebox full of cash hidden away, which are some of the things that have already gotten taken out of people’s houses, according to Dave. Of course, everybody is talking about the burglaries and how worried they are that they could be the next to get hit, but since Mrs. Goldman doesn’t go to Mass or the baseball games or bowling, she might not have heard the scuttlebutt. “There’s been a cat burglar prowlin’ around the neighborhood. Lock up extra tight.”

“This is good advice.” When she says that, she is not looking at me. She is watching Troo bounce her ball up the block very ferociously. “All of us must vork hard to keep vhat is valuable to us safe. Promise me you vill keep a good vatch, Liebchen. ”

“You can count on me.” I don’t say this time , but that’s what I’m thinking. “See ya when ya get back. A lot more often. Aufedersein,” I say, hurrying off the porch to catch up with my still-buzzing sister.

The sign hanging above the store says in peeling white letters:

KENFIELD’S FIVE AND DIME… WE HAVE WHAT YOU NEED!

That’s not tooting their own horn. They really do.

The floors are a yellow color and the aisles are close together but packed high with bottles of bubble bath and sewing needles and erasers and, well, just about everything under the sun. There’s pets, too. Chatty budgies and whisker-twitching mice and lovebirds that have to be kept in different cages because they don’t actually get along that well and all sorts of different kinds of fish. This is where Dave bought me the aquarium that’s on top of the dresser in our bedroom. The pet aisle reminds me of living out on the farm, but the rest of the Five and Dime smells like popcorn. There is a machine up front that pumps it out all day long. You can get a small bag for two cents and a bigger bag with butter for a nickel and the salt is free.

The best part of the store, though, has gotta be the candy case. It’s the first thing you see when you come in and it’s even better now that it’s been new and improved! My favorite used to be pink and green Buttons, but I got sick from swallowing too much paper, so I switched over to Oh Henry! bars in honor of you know who. Troo’s favorite used to be licorice, but now she goes silly for those lips made out of wax because she has gotten very interested in kissing recently. The Frenchy way, less lips, more tongue, which I tried to explain to her is just asking for trench mouth, but would she listen?

Our old Vliet Street neighbor, Mrs. Kenfield, lifts up her head to greet whoever just walked into her store, but when she sees that it’s Troo and me, she mutters, “The O’Malley sisters,” like somebody just asked her to name the last two kids in the world she’d like to have come through her doors this morning. She goes back to spritzing Windex on the counter and rubbing it off with a blue rag until the smudges disappear, maybe wishing she could do the same to me, and for sure Troo. “How’s your mother?”

Of course, Mrs. Kenfield sees her at choir practice and up at the Kroger when she goes on Wednesdays, which is the day they hand out extra S &H Green Stamps, but just like Mrs. Goldman and Mr. Fitzpatrick, whenever anybody in the neighborhood runs into Troo and me they automatically ask how our mother’s doing because they really can’t believe she’s not dead and sometimes I can’t either. That’s why I kneel next to her bed in the middle of the night and watch her chest go up and down. I set my head against hers on the pillow and breathe in her leftover powder and perfume, just for a little while, just to make sure.

“Mother’s feelin’ better and better,” I tell Mrs. Kenfield as Troo disappears down aisle two. What is she doing? Kleenex for flowers is in aisle four. “Gettin’ stronger and stronger by the minute.”

Mrs. Kenfield says, “Glad to hear Helen’s on the mend,” but she doesn’t sound it and I don’t blame her. I don’t care what the Bible says about loving your neighbors more than you love yourself. I think it’s hard to even like people when your own family is going belly-up the way ours was last summer. You can’t help but wish you had what they had.

The reason she’s so grumpy is because her husband, Mr. Chuck Kenfield, is going down the drain. His daughter, Dottie, the one he used to wail over and maybe still does, had some of the sex when she was still in high school. She got pregnant so he had to send her away to a special home in Chicago to live with some other girls who did the same thing. What Dottie was supposed to do was have her baby and leave it there for somebody who was married to come by and pick it up so she could go back to her regular life, but that’s not what happened. Grown-ups gossip about this after Mass all the time. Dottie’s disappearance is still piping hot news because she snuck out of the Chicago hospital when the nurses weren’t looking, so now it’s both her and the baby that’re missing. I heard she had a little girl.