What was he doing with matches? Harvey didn’t smoke. He hated smoke. I knew, because he made a big speech about it on the day he threw away my dad’s pipes. I had gone into the trash and taken them back out. I put them in a little wooden box, the same one where I kept a photo of my dad. I never looked at the photo or the pipes, but I kept them anyway. I thought my mom might have found the place I hid them, but so far, she hadn’t ratted on me.
I opened the laundry hamper. Harvey’s wet clothes were in there. I reached in and pulled out his shirt. No lipstick stains, and even without lifting it close to my nose, I could tell it didn’t have perfume on it. It could have used some. It smelled like smoke, a real strong kind of smoke. Not like a fire or anything, but stronger than a cigarette. A cigar, maybe. I had just put the shirt back in the hamper when the door flew open.
“What are you doing?” Harvey asked.
I should have said something like, “Ever heard of knocking?” or made some wisecrack, but I was too scared. I could feel the matchbook in my hand, hot as if I had lit all the matches in it at once.
Luckily, my mom woke up. “Harvey?” I heard her call. It sounded like she was standing in the hall.
“Oh, did I wake you up, sweetheart?” he said. My jaw dropped open. Harvey never talked to her like that after they got married.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“I was just checking on the boy,” he said. He looked at me and asked, “Are you okay, son?”
Son. That made me sick to my stomach. I swallowed and said, “Just came in to get some aspirin.”
“Your leg bothering you because of this rain?” he asked, like he cared.
“I’ll be all right. Sorry I woke you up.”
My mom was at the door then, so I said, “Okay if I close the door? Now that I’m up… well, you know…”
Harvey laughed his fake laugh and put an arm around my mom. He closed the door.
I pulled a paper cup out of the dispenser in the bathroom. I turned the cup over and scratched the street numbers for Mackie and Topper’s, then put the matchbook back where I found it. By now, I was so scared I really did have to go, so I didn’t have to fake that. I flushed the toilet, then washed my hands. Finally, I put a little water in the cup. I opened the door. I turned to pick up the cup, and once again thought to myself that one of the things that stinks about crutches is that they take up your hands. I was going to try to carry the cup in my teeth, since it wasn’t very full, but my mom is great about seeing when I’m having trouble, so she said, “Would you like to have that cup of water on your nightstand?”
I nodded.
Harvey watched us go into my bedroom. He went into the bathroom again. My mom started fussing over me, talking about maybe taking me to a new doctor. I tried to pay attention to what she was saying, but the whole time, I was worrying about what Harvey was thinking. Could he tell that I saw the matchbook? After a few minutes he came back out, and he had this smile on his face. I knew the matches wouldn’t be on the floor now that he had figured out where he had dropped them and that he had picked them up. He felt safe. I didn’t. I drank the water and saved the bottom of the cup.
The next morning I got up early and went into the laundry room. Harvey’s clothes were still in the bathroom, but I wasn’t interested in them anyway. I put a load of his wash in the washing machine, checking his trouser pockets before I put them in. I made sixty cents just by collecting his change. I put it in my own pocket, right next to the waxy paper from the cup.
I had just started the washer when my mom and Harvey came into the kitchen. My mom got the percolator and the toaster going. Harvey glared at me while I straightened up the laundry room and put the soap away.
“You’re gonna turn him into a pansy, lettin’ him do little girl’s work like that,” he said to my mom when she brought him his coffee and toast.
“I like being able to help,” I said, before she could answer.
We both waited for him to come over and cuff me one for arguing with him first thing in the morning, but he just grunted and stirred a bunch of sugar into his coffee. He always put about half the sugar bowl into his coffee. You’d think it would have made him sweeter.
That morning, it seemed like it did. Once he woke up a little more, he started talking to her like a guy in a movie talks to a girl just before he kisses her. I left the house as soon as I could.
Before I left, I told my mom that I might be late home from school. I told her that I might catch a matinee with some of the other kids. I never do anything with other kids, and she seemed excited when I told her that lie. I felt bad about lying, even if it made her happy.
All day, I was a terrible student. I just kept thinking about the matchbook and about Mary Theresa’s father and Harvey and leopards that don’t change their spots.
After school, I took the city bus downtown. I got off at South Street, right in front of Topper’s.
The buildings are tall in that part of town. There wasn’t much sunlight, but up above the street, there were clotheslines between the buildings. The day was cloudy, so nobody had any clothes out, although I could have told them it wasn’t going to rain that afternoon. Not that there was anything to rain on-nothing was growing there. The sidewalks and street were still damp, though, and not many people were around. I was a little nervous.
I thought about going into Topper’s and asking if anybody knew a guy named Mackie, but decided that wouldn’t be too smart. I started down the street. The next address was 1405, Linden’s Tobacco Shop. I had already noticed that sometimes they skip numbers downtown. I stopped, thinking maybe that was where Harvey got the smoke on his clothes. Just then a man came out of the door and didn’t close it behind him as he left the shop. As I stood in the doorway, a sweet, familiar smell came to me, and I felt an ache in my chest. It was pipe tobacco. It made me think of my father, and how he always smelled like tobacco and Old Spice After Shave. A sourpussed man came to the door, said “No minors,” and shut it in my face. The shop’s hours were painted on the door. It was closed on Sundays.
I moved down the sidewalk, reading signs, looking in windows. “Buzzy’s Newsstand-Out of Town Papers,” “South Street Sweets-Handmade Chocolates,” “Moore’s Hardware-Everything for Home and Garden,” “Suds-O-Mat-Coin-Operated Laundry.” Finally, I came to “The Coronet-Apartments to Let.” The address was 1417 South Street. The building looked older than Mary Theresa’s mother.
Inside, the Coronet was dark and smelled like a mixture of old b.o. and cooked cabbage. There was a thin, worn carpet in the hallway. A-3 was the second apartment on the left-hand side. I put my ear to the door. It was quiet. I moved back from the door and was trying to decide what to do when a man came into the building. I turned and pretended to be waiting for someone to answer the door of A-4.
The man was carrying a paper sack and smoking a cigar. The cigar not only smelled better than the hallway, it smelled exactly like the smoke on Harvey’s clothes. It had to be Mackie.
Mackie’s face was an okay face, except that his nose looked like he had run into a wall and stayed there for a while. He was big, but he didn’t look clumsy or dumb. I saw that the paper sack was from the hardware store. When he unlocked his door, I caught a glimpse of a shoulder holster. As he pulled the door open, he saw me watching him and gave me a mean look.