No matter how many times I repeated what happened on the afternoon that Daddy died, she wouldn’t believe that he wasn’t ever coming back. That might seem like she was just being her weird self, but it was more than that. Unless you actually see someone die before your eyes, the way I did, I know from years of watching what goes on in the cemetery from our back porch that it can be very hard to understand that someone you loved with your whole heart, someone who inhaled your exhales, someone who you could never imagine living without, has ceased to exist. That’s why God invented funerals and burials. As proof.
So when Louise refused to take Birdie and me to Daddy’s pretend funeral and burial, and when she wouldn’t show us where his gravestone had been sunk in Holy Cross, Birdie, who needs help understanding even the simplest things, had the worst time coming to grips with Daddy’s demise. And after she saw the picture postcard in the rack at Dalinsky’s Drugstore with the sunburned man on the front that I had to admit did look a lot like our handsome father holding up a fish with a pointy nose next to an ocean, my sister got convinced that Daddy was gone, but he was coming back. She 100% decided that after he hit his head on the motor and fell out of The High Life, he got amnesia and paddled to Boca Raton, Florida, and once she gets something stuck into her mulish mind, believe me, there is no budging it. From that day on, I lived in deathly fear that Louise would find out Birdie was thinking something so loonatic that could get her sent to the county asylum quicker than you could say The Three Faces of Eve.
Figuring the only way my sister would ever know for sure that Daddy was in a better position to do some deep-sea fishing than she’d let herself believe, I was positive that seeing his pretend grave with her own eyes would do the trick. Since our mother wouldn’t help us out, I went to our friend, who also happens to be Birdie’s and my godfather, by the way, Mr. McGinty. After I explained to him the awful pickle I was in, I begged him to take me to where Daddy’s casket had been sunk, but he told me that he was sorry, that it wasn’t “his place,” which really hurt my feelings, because if Holy Cross is anybody’s place, it’s his.
I spent every minute I could searching the cemetery for Daddy all by myself, but it’s so big and very hard to find what you’re looking for when your eyes are watering and the tombstones start to bleed together, so the Finley sisters were really down for the count. There Birdie was, feeling like her daddy would be home any second with a sandy tan and a pointy-nosed fish to fry up for supper, and I was feeling so sad and so bad about not saving him and worried to death about Louise finding out about my sister’s undying belief in his Boca Raton amnesia that I was about two ticks away from saying goodbye cruel world and diving into the closest open grave.
But . . . see?
That only goes to show you how smart Daddy was when he’d punch his bag and make our basement floor slippery with sweat and tell me his most famous saying of all, “No matter how bad things get, Tessie, you gotta always remember, come Hell or high water, a Finley never, ever throws in the towel,” because just when I was about to do just that . . . lo and behold . . . we found him!
EDWARD ALFRED FINLEY
REST IN PEACE
SEPTEMBER 2, 1931–AUGUST 1, 1959
Half-Irish kids like Birdie and me are only half-lucky, so us being led to his tombstone by a flock of fireflies during a crackling storm that lit up the night sky with so many lightning forks that it looked like God’s silverware drawer, well, need I say more?
FACT: Miracles happen to Catholic kids.
PROOF: The Blessed Virgin Mary magically appeared to three shepherd children in a place called Fatima, Portugal, and she also stopped in to say hello to a girl named Bernadette in Lourdes, France, so fireflies showing up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, one night to light up the way to our daddy’s pretend grave is something that really could happen, and did.
9:51 a.m. When I see our all-time favorite tombstone in the distance, I get a good grip on Birdie’s hand when she starts to veer that way, and tell her, “Honey, hold up,” and then I remind her about how important good timing is and our life-changing, great-good-luck murder and our Mutual Admiration meeting. “Sorry, but before we go visit Daddy, we need to swing by the Gilgood mausoleum to look for clues like footprints or something like . . . ummm . . .” I probably shouldn’t tell her that we might find Sister Margaret Mary’s dead body back there. I’m not sure how’d she take that because she’s so fragile and this has never come up before. “And what about Charlie? The poor guy is probably already sitting under the willow tree waiting for us to show up for our meeting.” I swipe her too-long bangs out of her slightly bulging eyes that are looking a tad sad. “But I sister-promise, we’ll pick up those chocolate-covered cherries offa Mister Lindley’s grave and then we’ll visit Daddy for as long as you want on our way home instead, s’awright?”
Se?or Wences from The Ed Sullivan Show is another one of Birdie’s favorite impressions of mine. She gets such a kick out of that little hand man that I was pretty sure she would do what she always does whenever I imitate him, because sometimes she can be predictable.