Sliding my arms under her arms, I get her to her feet, pull the rubber band out of her remaining messy pigtail and finger rake her hair into a ponytail like mine, hook her bangs that I was counting on Charlie to trim with his sharp whittling knife during the meeting behind her ears, then I lick my finger and rub off the dirt streaks on her knees and the chocolate ring around her mouth.
“That’s better,” I step back and tell her when I’m done spiffing her up. “You look so, so, so, so beautiful. You remind me of Ida Lupino.”
“Thank you, Tessie,” she tells me four times with a wink, and then I wink back at her, and then she winks back at me and that can go on forever, so I put a halt to it by asking her, “Ya ready to look for Charlie now?”
“Roger that, but before I do”—she spins around, lowers her shorts and undies down to her knees, and moons me—“can ya see the stinger?”
There’s a red mark on the heinie cheek where I pinched the heck out of her, but, of course, I have no intention of owning up to that. I just pretend to pull something out and say, “There you go, good as new.”
“Ship . . . ship . . . hurray!” Birdie says when she nuzzles her damp cheek—her face one—against my neck, and then because she is not an Indian giver in her words or her deeds, she tugs her undies and shorts back up to her round tummy and gets to work straightaway looking for Charlie at the willow tree with her red-man-looking-for-settlers-to-scalp stare.
When a few minutes pass by and she doesn’t say anything, I ask her, “Well?” because waiting for the verdict is just about killing me. I can’t remember a time that I felt more desperate to see my fiancé. “Ya see him?”
“Who am I lookin’ for again?”
“Charlie!” And before she can ask me which Charlie, I spell it out for her. “Not Charlie ‘Dogbreath’ Bennett, not Charlie ‘Booger’ Hawkins, and not Charlie ‘Four-Eyes’ Arnold. Do you see Charlie ‘Cue Ball’ Garfield down there? You can’t miss him. He’s got a bald head!”
She looks a few more seconds, then turns back to me and says, “Nope. Nobody with a bald head down there. I’m hungry. I want some Velveeta.”
Damn Mr. McGinty’s Kraft-cheese-sounding voice!
Because I stomped her P B and M to oblivion, her tummy, which has a lot better memory than she does, is complaining to Birdie that it didn’t get its usual morning snack. I was counting on all the Hershey’s kisses she stole out of my pocket during the wild streak tiding her over to lunchtime, but there I go again, being a big assuming dope.
The safest thing to do would be to hustle us straight home so I could make her another sandwich pronto, but I can’t do that. Birdie is not going to forget my sister-promise. So before we can climb back over the black iron fence, what we need to do is swing by Mr. Lindley’s grave to get those chocolate-covered cherries before we go visit Daddy. If I don’t put more food in front of my sister’s face by the time St. Kate’s church bells clang twelve, believe me, things will go from bad to worse around here in a hurry, which reminds me. How much time do I got left before Birdie starts flapping her arms, squawking, licking her lips, and staring at me like that famous saying “You look good enough to eat” is one she wouldn’t mind putting to the test?
Daddy’s Timex is still really tangled up with the St. Christopher medal in my pocket, but I have no problem seeing that it’s 11:41 a.m.
Uh-oh.
“I’m hungry,” Birdie repeats three more times.
“I know you are, honey, but . . .” I show her what I’m working on. “I just need to straighten these out real quick and then off we’ll go to get ya something good to eat.”
The Finley sisters need all the luck we can get and leaving Daddy’s watch and the St. Christopher medal in a twisted mess feels to me as unholy lucky as drawing a mustache on the pretty blue Virgin Mary church statue like some kid did last week. (The Mutual Admiration Society is already on THE CASE OF THE BLESSED MUSTACHE. We have it narrowed down to two possible culprits. Butch Seeback, because he’s always the most likely suspect, but it could also be Chuckie Jaeger, the kid who connects my freckles with a ballpoint pen when I fall asleep at my desk. He’s a nincompoop, but he’s also the best artist in school and that mustache on the Virgin statue was very lifelike.)
“Okay, Tessie, you straighten them out, but hurry. I’m really, really, really, really—” Birdie stops chomping on the bit long enough to point down at my busy fingers. “The medal for sure belongs to Mister McGinty, ya know.”
“Remember, honey? We still don’t know that this is his medal, we only strongly suspect that it is.” I’m having a tough time separating it from the Timex and I can feel my temper starting to simmer again. “The only way we could know that this medal is his for sure is if I checked to see if his was missin’ from around his neck and the only way I coulda done that is if I was wearing stilts.”
“Well, then . . .” she says with a cock of one of her pale eyebrows. “How wonderfully fortuitous that when the gentleman in question bent down toward the bush that I was standing next to when we were behind Mister Gilgood’s mausoleum that I availed myself of the opportunity to inspect his neck.”