Hall took a long drink from the bottle Nell handed him and then wiped his mouth on the back of his arm and said, “You know, your mother and me”-and then he burped extra loud-“we been havin’ some problems for a while now and on toppa that, things aren’t goin’ so well over at the shoe store.”
“Big surprise,” Troo said in her sassiest voice.
Hall reached across the table so quick I didn’t even see it coming, and neither did Troo. He slapped her on the back of her head. Hard. She just looked at him through her hair that had been knocked around her face and didn’t say a word. So he did it again. Harder. Hall should’ve known that Troo would never cry, if that was what he was waitin’ for. When he hauled his arm back again, he lost his balance and fell off the kitchen chair and just stayed there on the dirty tan linoleum and started crying out, “Helen… Helen… Helen.”
We sisters looked at one another and got up and went out on the front porch and listened to the crickets and didn’t say much. Because there was not much to say about something like that. About a man who you lived with but you hardly even knew, and didn’t want to know, laying down on your kitchen floor crying out your almost dead mother’s name. Later, when the streetlights came on, Troo, who hardly ever could stay quiet for long, said, “What a goddamn dickhead.”
The next morning, Nell poured Wheaties and what little milk was left into our bowls. And then she started scraping last night’s supper dishes under the running sink water because the smell of the crusty tuna was so bad. “Mother has something else wrong with her besides her gallbladder. I wanted to tell you last night, but then…”
Troo looked up from her bowl and said crabby-like, “What’s she got wrong with her now?” and took another bite of cereal. As much as I loved Troo, I had to admit that she could be ornery like Mother if she didn’t like you.
“Dr. Sullivan gave me this.” Nell wiped her hands on her shorts and pulled the chair out next to me. We watched as she took a piece of paper out of her blouse pocket and ironed it down on the table.
Hepatitis.
“Isn’t that when you got really bad breath?” Troo said. “That’s what Willie told me. He said Dr. Sullivan has it and-”
“You nincompoop,” Nell spat out. “That’s called halitosis.” I was impressed with Nell knowing that. Or maybe she’d just made that up to make Troo and me feel stupid, which she could mostly do.
“Dr. Sullivan says hepatitis is a sickness in Mother’s liver.” Nell’s voice suddenly got all wobbly. “It’s not good.” She ran into her bedroom and slammed the door. Nell had her own room and didn’t have to share like me and Troo. If I had to list the order of like around here, I would say Nell was in first place, Troo a very close second and me-well, there was something about me that always made a sad look come onto Mother’s face when I caught her staring at me. I had no idea what it was about me that made her look at me like that. Probably my imagination.
After that hepatitis talk, maybe a week later, Nell told us that things were getting even worse. Now Mother had something called a staph infection, which was a very bad sickness. Much worse than anybody could’ve ever imagined. Even me. Nell cried and cried until Troo went into her bedroom and slapped her and told her to shut the hell up.
Mother was at St. Joe’s Hospital almost the whole month of June. And it looked like she might miss the Fourth of July, which was a darn shame because once I heard her tell her best friend, Mrs. Betty Callahan, that she should’ve named Troo Bottle Rocket-that’s how much Mother loved the Fourth.
By then, Hall had pretty much stopped coming home for supper. He would wake us up later when he crashed into the living room furniture and started cursing a blue streak, sometimes in another language, which I took to be Swedish. And Nell had begun to get on Troo’s nerves so much that Troo could barely look at Nell in her white blouse and saddle shoes, going on about Elvis… Elvis… Elvis. I thought Nell was okay. Not great. I always tried to keep in mind what Daddy had said about her being only the third worst big sister in the world. But Troo, who never liked Nell much in the first place, started getting so fed up with her that she would chase Nell around the house and hold a toothbrush up to her lips and sing “You ain’t nuthin’ but a hound dog” over and over real loud until Nell had had it up to here and smacked her a good one. Then I’d have to settle Troo down and give her something of mine, like my favorite steely marble, so she’d promise not to try and smother Nell in her sleep.
After Nell told us about that staph infection, I thought it would be a good idea to head up to church and do a little praying that morning, even though I thought God had some kind of deafness and wasn’t listening to one darn thing I was tellin’ Him. Nell didn’t want to come with us because she was gonna go walk up to Fillard’s Service Station and see her boyfriend, Eddie Callahan, who worked up there and was Mrs. Callahan’s son. That was how Nell was spending her days. Going gaga over Eddie Callahan. When Mother came home, Nell would be in big trouble for minding Eddie Callahan instead of Troo and me, the way Mother had told her to. Troo already had her tattletale list with a capital T all figured out. She even wrote it down.
1. Nell says you didn’t tell her she had to do me and Sally’s wash so she isn’t.
2. Nell broke the turn-on knob off the television and now Sally can’t watch Sky King and that made her cry more than once. (I told her to take that crying part out, because Mother would only get mad at me.)
3. Nell will not give us money to go to the Uptown so we had to miss a Sandra Dee and Troy Dona hue movie.
And so on. The tattletale list was longer than Troo’s Christmas list. And every day she grew more excited about showing it to Mother when she came home.
I mostly liked Mother of Good Hope church and school because they were only six blocks away and the O’Malley sisters could walk to them. The part I didn’t care for was that we had to pass Greasy Al Molinari’s house to get there. One of Troo’s most favorite things to do in the whole world was to stand in front of the Molinaris’ gray house and holler very loudly, “Greasy Al is such a little shit.” She also called him other names like wophead and spaghetti for brains, and sometimes, when she was really out of sorts, she would sing that Harry Belafonte song “Day-O,” but instead she would say, “Dago… da da daaago.”
Troo was sure Greasy Al was the one that had stolen her bike last summer, and that’s what she was so mad about. I could never stop her, even though God and Daddy know I tried, so we always ended up getting chased halfway to school by Greasy Al, who threatened to bronze our butts if he ever caught us, which he wouldn’t, because his right leg was sort of withered up from polio. Greasy Al couldn’t run exactly, but he could walk very fast in a hunched-up limpy kind of way if he wanted to go after you. I always said to Troo, “What are you gonna do if he ever catches you? He’s got that switchblade, you know?”
Troo would laugh and laugh and this wild look would come into her eyes, like she didn’t care if Greasy Al caught her. That bothered me. Almost every day I wished Daddy was here to calm her down because I didn’t think Troo would be long for this world if she kept this sort of wild thing up.