Ethel and Nell were already sitting in Eddie’s car, waiting for us. I told Troo to go ahead, and then I yelled, “Just a minute,” and went back into the house to thank Mrs. Galecki one more time for letting us stay with her. She was asleep in her kitchen chair, so I just wrote down a little note on a napkin that said, “Thanks a million!” I signed it, “The O’Malley Sisters!” and propped it up on her glass of prune juice.
When I tiptoed out the front door and turned around, there he was waiting for me on the porch steps.
“Morning, Sally.”
I jumped halfway out of my skin. This man was very good at creeping up on people. Rasmussen was all dressed up in a fancy black suit, looking very sharp. He also had on shiny black shoes. Not the spongy kind. “Can I give you a ride over to the funeral?”
“No, that’s okay.” I moved down Mrs. Galecki’s front walk, far enough away from him so he couldn’t grab me. “I got a ride.”
Because no matter what Ethel said about him, I was still mostly suspicious of Rasmussen. And then I don’t know what came over me. I felt real bold with the sun shining and the little dog Lizzie barking at a squirrel that she’d chased up the big oak tree, so I squinted at him and said, “Why do you have a picture of me in your wallet?”
That rattled his cage.
He yelled down to Nell and Eddie to wait a minute and then knelt down next to me. “There’s a lot of things going on right now that you won’t understand for a while. But I promise you, everything is going to be okay. You need to trust me a little. Can you do that?” He tried to put his hands on my shoulders, but I yanked back so hard that he lost his balance and fell forward onto his hands and knees. He got up and brushed his pants off and said strongly, “I think you need to ride over to church with me this morning. We need to talk.” He waved good-bye to Nell and Eddie and off they went with Ethel and Troo, who was smiling at me out the back window of the ’57 Chevy because she thought that was funny, me being left behind with Rasmussen.
“Let me put Lizzie in the house,” Rasmussen said. “And then we’ve got to hurry over to church. I’m one of the pall-bearers.”
He had such a nice house. Picturesque, I’d call it. It was red brick and had some ivy growing up the side of it and white shutters on the windows with red and white geraniums coming out of the window boxes.
After he got the puppy squared away he called to me from the porch, “I’m going to go get the car. Wait for me at the curb.”
I was between the devil and the deep blue sea. Since I was gonna get married to Henry Fitzpatrick I had to get to that funeral even though it would be that devil Rasmussen taking me. So I walked down his steps and tried not to think about Junie’s picture hanging in his dining room, telling myself over and over again that I was going to be okay because even Rasmussen wouldn’t do something like murder and molest me on the way to a funeral. Nobody could be that bad, could they?
He pulled up and got out of his dark brown Ford and ran around the back fender, coming right for me. I managed to get back up on the sidewalk, and was halfway up Mrs. Galecki’s steps before he caught me by the arm. I screamed and screamed so loud that Mr. Gary came running out from the backyard with a bouquet of pink flowers in his hand. He yelled, “Everything okay, Dave?”
Rasmussen just nodded at him.
“Sally Elizabeth O’Malley, what is wrong with you? I was just coming over to open your car door.” Rasmussen let go of my arm and walked back over to his side of the car.
I remembered then how Daddy used to do that for Mother. Opened her car door and bent at the waist and said, “Your chariot awaits you, madam.” I hadn’t seen anybody do something that mannerly in a long time except for Mr. Cary Grant in the movies. So maybe just like Ethel said, Rasmussen was a true gentleman. Or maybe he was just a very, very good actor.
We drove for two blocks without talking and the silence was real loud until Rasmussen said, “You know that your mother and I are friends, right?”
I stared out the car window and let the breeze of the chocolate chip cookies ruffle my bangs.
“I went to see Helen yesterday.” Rasmussen put on his blinker to turn onto Lisbon Avenue.
“Is she okay?”
Rasmussen didn’t take his eyes off the road. “Yes, she is.”
I wanted to ask him so many questions about Mother, just beg him to tell me every little detail-like if she’d asked about me and when she might come home and did she need anything like her gold hairbrush. But I wasn’t a hundred percent sure he was telling the truth, and even if he was, I just couldn’t bring myself to let him know that I wanted something from him.
“Your mother is out of the woods, but…” Rasmussen turned onto Fifty-sixth Street. “There’s been some trouble with Hall and I know this might upset you, Sally, but Hall is… Hall is… ah…”
“A goddamn dickhead?”
Rasmussen laughed but then he stopped real quick and tried to look very serious. “Although I don’t approve of your language, young lady, I think that just about covers it.”
I always looked at his chin when he talked. It had a little scar shaped like a comma at the bottom of it. I would never look into his eyes, no matter what Ethel said. If I looked in his eyes, my soul might jump right out my window and fly into his. Or maybe he would hypnotize me like that doctor did in that movie called The Three Faces of Eve, where that woman had too many people living inside her so the doctor hypnotized Eve and asked for a couple of them to move out. Look into my eyes. Loook into my eyes. No, thank you very much.
“You know that your mother and I have been friends since high school, correct?” he repeated.
I didn’t want to admit it, but I sort of suspected that Mother and Rasmussen were friends because in that hidey-hole graduation picture they were standing next to each other and Rasmussen was smiling at Mother when he was supposed to be smiling into the camera of Jim Madigan from Jim Madigan Photography Studios.
“So, like I was saying, Hall is in a heap of trouble,” Rasmussen said.
“I know about that already.” I started twirling my hair around my finger, which I had started doing recently because it seemed to calm my imagination down. “Mr. Fitzpatrick told us that Hall hit Mr. Jerbak with a beer bottle and he’s in jail and charges are gonna get pressed on him.”
When we turned down Fifty-eighth Street, the Piaskowskis’ street, Rasmussen pulled up in front of their house and looked out the window. “Junie’s been dead now for almost a year. Hard to believe.” He shook himself a little like you do when you know you can’t stand feeling the way you’re feeling and you better snap out of it. “The house is for sale. Gotta get over here and work on that yard.”
I looked out at the Piaskowskis’ and noticed something I hadn’t the day Troo and me had walked past on our way to church right after we found out about Mother’s staph infection. There was a funny little blue birdhouse half hanging off the rain gutter and it had a kid’s writing on the side that I couldn’t read. It was twisting in the breeze.
Rasmussen was looking at it too because in a shaky voice he said, “Junie and I made that little birdhouse together. Blue was her favorite color. She loved birds. Especially blue-birds. She called them happiness with wings.”
I didn’t say anything but I was thinking that Rasmussen’s big, strong outside didn’t quite match up to his gooey inside, and it was a shock to me that he reminded me of a chocolate-covered cherry. Ethel was right. My thinking wasn’t straight, but straight enough to know he was telling the truth about blue being Junie’s favorite color, because I remembered how she just loved her blue Lik-m-aid so much that her lips always looked the same color as a cornflower.