So I say back to her the same thing I say to her every morning. “You are so, so, so, so beautiful. You remind me of Ida Lupino.” Then I wink at her and then she winks back at me in her adorable slightly bulgy-eyed way and that can go on forever, so I put a halt to it by pointing down to her right shorts pocket to make sure she has what she needs to keep her tiny mind occupied when we’re over at the cemetery. Birdie cannot, I repeat, not do any bored wild-streaking on this life-changing day. We’re on a deadline. “You got your hobbies?”
“Yes, Tessie, I got my hobbies.” She slides her playing cards and a cat’s cradle string out of her pocket with a very proud smile and I don’t blame her. Dick and Jane might be too hard for her to read, and keeping track of what goes on in movies or television shows is too confusing, and our Mutual Admiration meetings might be above her head, but you hand this kid a deck of cards—I think she got her love of the “52” from Daddy—or give her a white string off a Meuer’s Bakery box that still smells like sugar? She turns into a regular Albert Einstein.
All set to hit the investigating trail now, I grab the Red Owl bag off the counter, point to the back door, and tell her the last thing I gotta tell her to get her going in the right direction in my voice that’s sure to fire her up. “Race ya to the cemetery fence! One for the money . . . two for the show . . . three to get ready, and . . .”
I wait for her to fill in the blank, but she doesn’t shout, Go, Bird, go! like she’s been doing.
She could be going stubborn on me again or . . . or maybe she just has to tinkle. Yes. She can forget if I don’t remind her. “You gotta go before we go, Bird, go?”
“No, I don’t gotta go before we go, Tessie.”
Hmmm.
“Did you just remember ya hung the wrong-colored towel out of the window?”
“No, I hung the white towel out the window just like you told me to, Tessie,” she says, sure-enough-sounding that I believe her.
Because I’m all gassed up and ready to go and she is doing an excellent impression of a roadblock, I lose my patience that I don’t got a lot of in the first place, because in this way, unfortunately, I resemble my mother by a bad-luck draw of the blood.
So it’s not really my fault that I ask Birdie snippier than I should, “Then what’s the damn problem?”
She looks down at the green kitchen floor that could use a good scrubbing and tells me in her tiniest voice, which is already quite tiny, “You’re gonna get mad-der if I tell you.”
“No, I won’t. I promise, no, I sister-promise.” For some other unknown reason, the kid who forgets 99% of what I tell her always remembers that’s the most serious kind of promise there is. A sister-promise can never be broken, no matter what. Even if some dumb greaser forces me to eat maggots on a saltine cracker before he’ll give Birdie back to me, she knows that I would rather do that than break a sister-promise. “C’mon.” I make my voice less ticked-off sounding and more sugary-sounding. “Tell me, honey.” As much as I want to, I can’t go over to the cemetery without her, because I cannot leave her alone. “Why aren’t you raring to go with me to Holy Cross?”
“’Cause . . . ’cause . . .” Birdie says, barely above a whisper, “I don’t want Mommy to take away my all for ones and ones for all.”
“You mean you don’t want Louise to take away your all for ones and ones for all.”
“Roger that.”
My sister was so wound up at the time that I didn’t think she heard our mother warn us not to visit the cemetery or do any peeking into our neighbors’ windows or she’d take away the Three Musketeers bars before she left for work, but I’m not all that surprised that threat got through her adorable, thick skull. Candy of any kind is a very important topic of conversation to Miss Birdie Finley.
If she was walking down Keefe Ave. and Mr. Ed Gein pulled up next to her and offered her a piece of disgusting black licorice to get in his car with him after he escaped from the Big House for murdering all those people, my sister would fall for that. She’d tug open the car door and tell that crazy murderer with one of her irresistible smiles—Thanks for the candy, mister. Sure, I’d love to go for a spin! I’m just crazy about your upholstery, by the way.