“Well, now, we must keep you entertained, mustn’t we. I know you like to be busy, so I set up the card table and got out a jigsaw puzzle. Those are always fun, aren’t they.”
Maybe I was not the absolute shrewdest judge of character, but I had a pretty good hunch that habit of agreeing with herself covered up her desperation at not knowing what to do with a kid. This household didn’t have so much as a dog or cat, not even a goldfish. By all evidence so far, Aunt Kate was only used to taking care of herself and the constant war with Herman, as it gave every appearance of being.
Right now she was at her most smiling and dimpled as she led me over to the card table, stuck as far out of the way as possible in the corner of the living room, and the puzzle box front and center on it. MOUNT RUSHMORE—KNOW YOUR PRESIDENTS, and in smaller type, 1,000 Pieces. Worse yet, it was one I had already done in my jigsaw period, when Gram was trying to keep me occupied. “Yeah, swell,” I managed to remark.
Ready to leave me to the mountain of puzzle pieces and my cold toast, Aunt Kate headed for the basement to see if the laundry was finished yet. “Oh, just so you know,” she sang out as she started down the cellar stairs, “I put your snap-button shirt in with our washing, but the other was torn so badly I threw it away. It wasn’t worth mending.”
“Doesn’t surprise me,” I called back. Catching up to the fact I hadn’t bothered to remove my stash from the ruined shirt the night before, what with everything else going on, I inquired for the sake of keeping current, “Where did you put my money?”
The footsteps on the stairs halting, her voice came muffled. “What money is that?”
“It was safety-pinned to the back of the good pocket, Gram did that so a pickpocket couldn’t steal it and—”
For someone of her heft, she came up out of those cellar stairs in a terrific burst of speed, turned the hall corner at full tilt, and barreled through the kitchen and out to the garbage can at the top of the driveway, flannel robe billowing behind her, me at her heels. Her backside was too broad for me to see past as she flung open the lid of the can and looked in, and I was afraid to anyway.
“Too late,” she moaned, “it’s been picked up.”
“C-can’t we get it back?” Frantically I ran down the driveway, followed by Aunt Kate at a heavy gallop. Pulling up short at the curb, I shot a look one way along the street and she the other, then our heads swung in the opposite directions, staring past each other. No garbage truck. We listened hard. Nothing to be heard except her puffing and blowing.
“Maybe we could go to the dump,” I stammered, “and head it off.”
“Impossible,” she said in a way that could have meant either the dump or me. With that, we trudged back up the driveway, the slap-slap of her fuzzy slippers matching the thuds of my heart.
Outside the kitchen door, she rounded on me furiously. “Why didn’t you tell me it was pinned there?”
“I—I didn’t know you were going to do the wash so soon,” I blurted, which was not the real answer to the real question.
That was coming now, as she drilled her gaze into me and started in. “More than that, why didn’t you—”
But before she could rightfully jump all over me for forgetting to rescue the money myself before dropping the shirt in the laundry chute, she stopped and pinched between her eyes in that way that signaled she needed an aspirin. After a moment, eyes still tight shut, she asked as if she could not face any more of this, “How much was it?”
“Th-thirty dollars, all I had,” I said, as if it were an absolute fortune, which to me it was. As I’ve said, no small sum in those days, to someone like her either, according to the excruciating groan she let out.
“See,” I tried to explain, “I was supposed to buy my school clothes with it, and whatever comic books I wanted, and go to a show once in a while if you said it was okay, and—” I looked at her angry, flushed face, twice the size of my merely red one, and abjectly tailed off—“wasn’t supposed to be a nuisance to you about money.”
“That didn’t quite work out, did it,” she fried my hide some more as she stomped back into the kitchen, still mad as could be. I shrank behind her, keeping a cautious distance. “Now this,” she declaimed, “on top of everything else,” which seemed to mean me generally. “And I have all these things to do,” she further declared, just as if she had not been sitting around drinking coffee and reading the newspaper half the morning.
I babbled another apology to try to make amends, although I wasn’t getting anything of the sort from her for failing to go through my pocket before junking my shirt and costing me every cent I possessed, was I?