The Undertaking of Tess

by Kagen, Lesley

  Forgetting about the church funeral altogether and going straight to the cemetery might be a brighter idea. We could climb the black iron fence and hide behind mausoleums until we got close enough for a good look. But there’s a risky part in that plan too. Sometimes Birdie can be as unpredictable as Mom, but in a different way. Not mean. I can’t count on my sister not to do something really weird. Like all of a sudden decide to run out from where we’re hiding yelling, “Hello! Hello everybody!” and our mother would blow a gasket.

  Nuts.

  I hate to let Daddy down and throw in the towel, but we learned in school that the state of Wisconsin—chief exports: cheese and milk—has the motto Forward, and I try to remember that at all times. So since #1 on my TO-DO LIST is now dead in the water, I’ve got to get busy working hard on #2 this morning: Convince Birdie that Daddy is really dead so Mom doesn’t send her to the county insane asylum.

  I thought at first it’d be easy to talk my sister into the truth, but it’s turning out to be much harder than I thought because I forgot to figure in her stubborn streak. She seemed like she believed me when we first talked about how Daddy died the night the men brought me home after they found me in the boat on Lake Michigan. She cried and cried in my lap, and even gagged when I told her how when he fell into the lake some of the water splashed into my mouth, but now the Finley sisters have parted on this subject like the Red Sea. Birdie is 100% positive that our father is still alive and I gotta get to the bottom of this once and for all before she blows it and tells our mother.

  Death Makes You Smarter and Can Taste Great Too

  Even on a hot, calm day like this one, if you sit on the back porch of our house and you turn your face to the left, toward Lake Michigan, even though it’s miles and miles away from where we live, you can catch a whisper of wind on your cheek. I know it’s dumb, but I like to pretend that a part of Daddy is in that breeze. He smelled fishy alotta the time too.

  I told Birdie we should come out here to get cooler after Mother left, and that we could play a game and I’d paint her toenails the pretty shell pink that’re the same as Mom’s because she wants to be just like her, and that only goes to show again how her brain isn’t working right. But the real reason we’re out on the back porch is because Holy Cross backs up into the yard of our house. Even though the cemetery is gigantic and does a great business, I’ve got my fingers crossed that we might get lucky and see Daddy’s fake funeral through the iron fence with the spears on top that circles the cemetery like a black necklace.

  Birdie and me always like to look at the flowers, pictures, and presents that people leave on the graves of the ones who left them behind. One lady who works at Melman’s Hardware store on Vliet Street, I think her name is Evelyn, she places a heart-shaped box once a month on the grave of a man named Leonard Lindley. Born April 23, 1920 – Died March 6, 1949. Mr. Lindley used to be a plumber until he and his wife got burned alive in a house fire. What Birdie and me learned from his death is that it’s not a good idea to smoke in bed, and that Mr. Russell Stover makes excellent chocolate-covered cherries.

  See how educational and delicious death can be? Much more than what you can learn at school if you don’t count geography, which I need to know when Birdie and me run away someday. We don’t wanna wander around like Hansel and Gretel, who had to be the two biggest dummkopfs in all of Germany—chief exports: warm potato salad and war. For crissake, what kind of stupid schlemiels go for a walk in a place called, “The Black Forest?” That’s just asking for something Grimm to happen! (That’s a joke I made up. Daddy loved it.)

  Reading is also an important subject at school. Like the sign on the wall at the Finney Library reminds you whenever you check books out Knowledge is power.

  That’s a famous saying that I only agree with a little. Knowing stuff is good, but there is nothing as powerful in the whole world as being lucky. Since Birdie and me have never found a four-leaf clover no matter how hard we look, I decide that instead of going over the cemetery fence to look for the funeral, we better stay put right where we are. I’ll cross out #1 with my ballpoint pen instead of pencil soon as I get a chance.

  Feeling like a broken record, I tell my sister, “Daddy’s dead.”

  “Your turn,” she says. “No, he’s not.”

  Clue and checkers are much better games, but we’re playing Candy Land. It’s her favorite board game because it doesn’t have reading or thinking, and it’s also about her favorite food group. I am the blue piece. She’s yellow, same as always.

  “Yeah, he really is dead, Bird.”

  “Is not.”

  That’s when it hits me how dumb I’ve been. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. I got so caught up explaining to her that Daddy is gone, that I forgot to ask an important question that could solve this problem in a snap. I really have to work on grilling people. I should put that on a future TO-DO LIST.

  “Okay,” I tell my sister, “if you don’t believe that Daddy is at the bottom of the lake then where is he?”

  “Boca Raton.”

  Well, that stopped me on my hop over to the Candy Cane Forest. “Boca … what?”

  “Boca Raton,” Birdie says like I’m deaf and dumb. “It’s a city.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I have never heard of it and I know a lot more cities and states and capitals and exports than she ever will. “Where is it?”

  “Florida.”

  Chief exports: oranges and fourth runner-up in last year’s Miss America show.

  I’m gonna win that bathing-beauty contest someday. When I get older, and grow big bellows. Seems like being pointy in the chest is really important in all of life, not only if you wanna wear that crown. Boys and men like bellows to be big under a tight sweater or your school uniform. The Italians seem to grow them larger and faster than anybody else. Example: Mary Sarducci. Even though she’s only going into the sixth grade, hers are already so huge that her hand sticks out about a foot when she’s pledging the allegiance to the flag. But large bellows aren’t the only important part of winning, having a talent is a big deal too. I’m planning to sing My Favorite Things because it’s Birdie’s favorite tune on the record that Mom plays on the hi-fi. I might throw in a little yodeling like Shirley Temple does in Heidi because who isn’t in love with her? My mother, who can always guess the winner of the show when we watch it on TV, told me, “I wouldn’t get my hopes up if I were you, Theresa. You take after your father’s side of the family.” She’s right. My ears do stick out like Daddy’s, but on the upside, his mom, my and Birdie’s gammy, has bellows the size of feather pillows, so I’ll probably inherit those too. As soon as the judges get a load of them, they’ll forget all about my ears. But probably the best thing I’ll have going for me is that you have to be able to talk to Mr. Bert Parks and not sound stupid and even my mother agrees that I’ve got a smart mouth.

  I draw another card out of the Candy Land deck and tell Birdie, “I never heard of Boca Raton being in Florida.” The only city I ever heard of is Miami Beach. “You sure ’bout that?”

  “A hundred percent positive.”

  I love her to death, I would take a bullet for her or jump off a cliff for her, even eat liver and onions for her, but Birdie makes stuff up a lot of the time, or borrows ideas from someone else that she tries to pass off as her own. She told me once that she invented aluminum foil. But there was something different in the way she said, “Boca Raton.” She seemed really sure of herself.

  I reach across the board and swipe off the beads that have popped up on the side of her little ski-jump nose with the Kleenex I always keep in my pocket for when she picks scabs or gets too sweaty. “Did you learn about Boca Raton at school?”

  She moves to the next yellow square and says, “Nope,” with a teasing smile. She likes it when she thinks she knows something that I don’t. Loves lording it over me, really, because her being smarter than me doesn’t happen very often, in fact, just about never. “I heard about it at Dalinsky’s. There’s a picture postcard
taped on the side of the cash register and the man on the front of it is Daddy! He’s holding up a huge silver fish with a pointy nose and wearing a blue shirt. Mister Dalinsky told me it says, “Greetings from Boca Raton! Wish you were here!”

  Oh, boy.

  I slowly draw another card to give myself some time to think. It’s purple, so I kiss it because it’s my favorite color. Most Catholics love it because it stands for penance, which is really popular around here.

  “So …,” I say as I move my piece, “lemme get this straight. You think that Daddy is on a postcard that’s sticking to the cash register at the drug store and … and that he’s sending you a secret message that he wishes you were in Boca Raton with him?”

  The pigtails I put into Birdie’s hair this morning bob up and down many times.

  That’s a weird thing to think, but I am not completely thrown like some people would be if they heard her say something like that because I’m her sister. Nobody knows the Bird like I do.

  The reason she believes this is because the both of us love mystery stories of all kinds, but especially Nancy Drew ones, and that girl sleuth is always finding secret messages in clocks and under rocks. I read the books out loud to Birdie because it can take a whole day of listening to her sounding out words to get past one page of a story and that is very annoying. It is safe to say that she will not be a librarian when we grow up. If we grow up, that seems so far-fetched. I would not be surprised at all if the both of us end up becoming private detectives, also known as private dicks in True Detective that they sell in the rack at Dalinksy’s next to the Look magazines. (The drug store is another place where I learned about the importance of big bellows. There is always a broad who fills out a sweater so nicely that the private detective is happy to take on her case for free.) I will be the brains of the Finley Sisters Detective Agency; Birdie’ll be more like Suzanne who answers the phone on 77 Sunset Strip and is also very cute.

  My sister draws another card out of the pile. Green is the Irish’s favorite color, so Birdie and me only half-love it because the other part of us is English.

  “They looked really hard for three days and they didn’t find Daddy in the lake,” Birdie says very cocky.

  “Yeah, but just because they didn’t find him,” I say, “that doesn’t mean that he isn’t down there.”

  “Doesn’t mean that he is, either.”

  “But … that doesn’t make sense, Bird. If he is still alive, after he fell outta the boat, why didn’t he just get back in? And why didn’t he just come home?”

  “He wanted to, but he couldn’t because he got am … am … am—”

  “His arms got amputated?”

  She flaps hers up and down. She does that sometimes when she gets frustrated. “He didn’t get back in the boat with you because he got am … am … amnesia.”

  Double, oh, boy.

  This is an even kookier idea, but I’m a little relieved she believes this. I thought she was gonna say something much, much worse. Like the reason Daddy didn’t get back in the boat after he fell out was because he was so mad at me for not diving in after him that he just said the hell with that ungrateful brat and swam away.

  No one has said anything to me yet. Not the cops. Not even Mom, but I bet she’s thinking it. Even Birdie has to be wondering why after Daddy fell overboard, I just sat in the white motorboat and laughed my butt off the whole time he was drowning because I wonder that too.

  If I had to do it over again, I woulda dove in and tried to save him even though I can’t swim. That might’ve been for the best, after all. Daddy and me paying a visit to Davy Jones locker together. But what would happen to Birdie if I wasn’t around to protect her? To keep our mother from knowing that she’s going even weirder? She’d call the men in the white jackets to take my sister away, that’s what’d happen.

  Lately, I’ve been suspecting that Mom would like to do that to me too because she’s been giving me funny funnier looks. Just because I can’t eat sloppy joes and chipped beef on toast points anymore because they were Daddy’s favorite. And when she made me go to the grocery store with her last week and I saw a bottle of milk, which he also loved with a little whiskey stirred in before bedtime, I did something that I never do in front of her. I started to cry, which turns her stomach, so I sucked back the tears, held my breath, and closed my eyes, but the sadness came bursting out anyway. I threw it up in aisle four.

  Mom made me wait for her out in the Red Owl lot, and after she came out the doors with the bags in her arms and loaded them into the woody, she was so ticked off all the way home. Even though I told her I was sorry four times. She said, “Are you? Do you even have a conscience? Mrs. Klement told me that she saw you stealing something from the Five and Dime yesterday.” I told her, “I’m innocent!” which was the truth because what I took wasn’t for me, it was a birthday present for Birdie, so it was more like being Robin Hood robbing from the rich and giving to the poor. “Gert made that up! You know how hard her arteries are going!” My mother snorted, and sucked so hard on her L&M cigarette that her cheeks caved in, but every so often I’d catch her giving me not a mad look, but a jumpy sideways look through the cloud of smoke. Like maybe she didn’t have Bonnie Parker on her hands, but a Bad Seed. I’d betcha a dollar that as soon as we got home she’d telephone the school and tell Sister Raphael to call off Friday spelling bees when school starts up just in case I get it into my head to kill one of the kids for their winning medal—probably the girl who sits in front of me, Jenny Radtke. Just because I stare at the back of her perfect blond page boy and try to set it on fire with my eyeballs because she is such a little ass-kisser who doesn’t deserve such beautiful hair, or to win that goddamn spelling bee every single Friday, that doesn’t mean I’d murder her. After letting Daddy die, I promised myself I wouldn’t murder anyone ever again unless they were trying to hurt Birdie.

  While my sister is moving around the Candy Land board (she’s cheating), I take my TO-DO LIST out of my pocket and stare at #4: Decide if I should confess to the cops about murdering Daddy.

  I’m pretty sure that’s what my conscience wants me to do. Walk over to the 51st Street Station House and turn myself in. But now that I’ve really thought if over, after I confessed and they took me away to prison and electrocuted me, that would be the same as me drowning when I tried to save Daddy. I wouldn’t be fried for longer than five minutes before our mother would sign my sister up for the loony bin. Without Birdie and me around, she’d have a much, much easier time finding a new husband, which is #1 on her TO-DO LIST.

  She made Birdie and me sit down last week on the living room sofa, and after she got comfortable in Daddy’s brown chair with the hassock, she lit up an L&M that I bet she smokes instead of the Camels he did because they are her first initials—Louise Mary. She took a deep inhale and told us, “If we don’t want to end up in the poor house, I need to find a new husband. I’m a catch, but nobody in his right mind wants to raise another man’s children. I’ll have to lure him in with my feminine wiles then break the bad news about you two once he falls for me.” She blew a smoke ring that drifted over to Birdie’s head and made her look like an angel with a halo. “So from now on, you two can’t call me Mom or Mommy. Call me by my first name. At all times. Even at home, so you get into the habit. That way any eligible men we come across when we’re shopping and such will think I’m your sister or aunt or a nice neighbor and they won’t get scared off.”

  I was not shocked one iota by that idea. I can’t forget for a second that our mother is not just beautiful, she’s very, very smart. Not in a $64,000 Question way—she doesn’t even know that the capital of North Dakota is Bismarck—but in a foxy way. I’d try to talk her out of this idea if it wasn’t such a good one. We do need some money and getting a new husband would be very easy for her. She can wind men around her little finger. Daddy worshipped the ground she walked on. And when she takes us to the Lake Michigan beach in the summer, men fall over in the sand when they get
a load of her toasty brown skin covered in baby oil when she’s spread out on the white sheet ’cause she looks good enough to eat. And a lot of husbands up at church wink at her during Mass until their wives elbow them hard, and she can’t walk down the street without a man in a car giving her a wolf whistle. If she could trap a rich husband with a good job, I bet her moods might even get better. So what if she wants us to pretend she’s not our mother when she meets Mr. Tall, Dark, and Handsome at the movie theatre or the drug store until she can lure him into her spider web? Birdie and me will say, “See ya later, Louise,” and just wander over to the candy aisle or out the door and all the way to Oklahoma!—I love that movie!

  But it’d be better if she could skip all that looking around for a new husband because that could take some time, and if they turn off the electricity because she can’t pay the bill, that’d upset Birdie because she’s so ascared of the dark. And for another thing, having to call her Louise all the time might not work out so hot either because my sister will have a really hard time remembering to do that since she drifts off and her memory is so terrible.

  That’s why I piped up and told our mother, “Gettin’ a new husband is a swell idea, but if you wanna save on wear and tear, you could marry somebody you already know. Right away! Someone really nice!” My sister and me do NOT ever want another daddy, but I think the caretaker at the cemetery makes a pretty good living and he really likes Birdie and me. “You should get all dolled up tonight and go over to Holy Cross and visit Mr. McGinty after the sun sets.”

  Our mother threw her head back and cough-laughed for about an hour. “Joe McGinty? The man is a half-wit with a withered leg!” she said. “Are you outta your mind, Theresa?”

  Back on the back porch on Daddy’s pretend funeral day, since my sister is taking three turns in a row, I use that time to slide my ballpoint pen out of my shorts pocket and cross out #4: Decide if I should go to the cops and confess to murdering Daddy on my list and get back to working on #2: Convince Birdie that Daddy is really dead so Mom doesn’t send her to the county insane asylum.