The Undertaking of Tess

by Kagen, Lesley

  I’m not sure if Birdie and me should hole up where we are, or take off as fast as we can in the opposite direction, but whatever we do, we gotta do it ASAP! I don’t think Louise would climb the fence and come after us because her gray skirt is too tight to swing her leg over, but if she’s having one of her tempers because she came home and found us gone and the house a mess … there’s no telling what that moody woman would do.

  “Robin Jean!” Louise shouts louder. That was foxy of her to leave me out of it. She knows that Birdie will answer her before I ever would.

  “Oh, Tessie, oh, no,” my sister slobber-pants on my arm.

  “Shhh. We … we … you gotta….”

  I look over at Daddy’s grave hoping that seeing it will knock sense back into me the same way I was hoping it would knock sense into Birdie, which I still think it will once she sees it, when outta the blue, I get the funniest feeling that he knows that we found him and that he’s playing a Gotcha! joke and Louise is in on it. Is … is that possible? Supposedly, all things are, but I just don’t know anymore. My brain that’s usually so quick and sharp feels like it’s exploding inside my skull. Like I stepped on a land mind the same way Mr. McGinty did and all my smart ideas are blowing up into a million little pieces. Should I laugh? Cry? Tell my sister, “Eureka!” because we finally found Daddy’s grave, or should I rush over to Mr. McGinty’s shack and thank him over and over for pulling some strings so our poor daddy’s pretend grave could be in the ritziest part of Holy Cross, or … or maybe I should just pick up Birdie’s hand and we should run away to join the freak show at the Wisconsin State Fair, or just keep going all the way to Oklahoma?

  The only thing I know for sure is that I wanted this to be a happy-ending day for Birdie, a big celebration, and here she is hiding next to me, sweating, shaking, and letting me know in her tiny voice that I let her down. “You told me we could get the chocolate-covered cherries off Mr. Linley’s grave and I could eat them all.”

  She tries to stand up like she’s gonna head over there, but I yank her arm hard, put her face in my hands, and make sure she’s looking deep into the windows of my soul when I tell her, “I’m sorry, I forgot.” I could kick myself for not picking up that box of Stover’s off his grave first thing. I could use it right about now. Candy always makes her less jumpy. “We’ll get them later. I promise.”

  I try to slow my thinking down the way I do when I play checkers with Mr. McGinty, who I beat all the time. What should Birdie and me do? We should … we should … wait until we see what Louise’s next move is before we can know what our next move should be. Yes!

  I lean my back against the mausoleum, close my eyes, and rub Daddy’s Swiss Army knife really hard. When a few minutes go by without a peep from Louise, I think it worked and our luck took a turn for the better, so I’m just about to grab Birdie’s hand and make a run for it when our mother shouts from the back porch like she knows for sure that we’re over here and was just waiting for us to let our guard down, “Girls? Time to finish up what you’re doing and come home!”

  Huh.

  Now that I’m over the shock of first finding Daddy, and then Louise showing up to ruin the surprise for Birdie, I’m thinking clearer. And what I’m thinking is that something’s fishy. I know all our mother’s voices by heart and this isn’t her Goddamn-it-all-I’m-going-to-give-you-a-spanking-that-you’ll-never-forget one. It might be her get-in-the-car-I’m-going-to-drop-you-off-somewhere-and-not-come-back-for-three-hours one, but it doesn’t really sound like that either. Louise sounds sorta … excited? Happy?

  Birdie must hear that in her voice too, because she’s stopped making that kitten mewling noise and is taking in a deep breath like she’s gonna shout back to Louise, “Hello! We’ve over in the cemetery looking for Daddy’s grave. Be right there!”

  But I know how foxy Louise is. She could just be pretending to sound happy, so I quickly slap my hand over my sister’s mouth and tell her in my Edward G. Robinson you-dirty-rat voice, “Zip it, or I’ll zip it for you, sister,” then I slowly stick my head out from the side of the mausoleum to get a better gander at our mother. I wish I already had that pair of binoculars I’ve been saving up for because if I could only see her face clearer, I’d know in a jiff if she’s trying to pull a double cross. Her right eyebrow would be arched.

  Birdie peels back one of my fingers and whispers, “What’s she doin’?”

  “She’s turning around and …,” thank you, Saints Peter, Paul, and Mary, “she’s going back into the house.”

  When we hear the screen door slam shut, I let out the breath that I didn’t even know I was holding and tell Birdie, “Quick. Stick your socks in your pocket, get your shoes on, and run!”

  We don’t climb into our backyard, or into Mrs. Klement’s either, that would be dumb. We hoist ourselves over the part of the cemetery fence that’s behind Charlie Garfield’s house that’s two down from ours. I always climb fast, but Birdie sets a new world record because there are worse things in life than getting impaled on one of those black points. There’s Louise.

  “Hi,” bald Charlie says surprised when he sees us. He’s sitting out in the backyard whittling because that’s his main hobby. He can only make slide whistles and straight snakes because he’s not good with curves yet. I told “Cue Ball” Garfield that he should try making pool sticks too, which he really liked the sound of, so I think he’s gonna give that a shot. His other hobby is watching birds, so when I finally save up enough to get those binoculars, I’ll let him borrow them whenever he wants. “Whatcha two doin’?”

  I can’t slow down to explain, no time for that. I point to his whittling knife, make the pirate cutthroat sign across my neck, and hold my finger up to my lips so he knows that we’re up to no good, and then Birdie and me peel past him, through the side yard of his house, and out to the sidewalk.

  We are bent over at our waists and panting like two rabid dogs. We gotta catch our breaths, and look presentable before we go home. I take the scab- and sweat-wiping Kleenex out of my pocket, mop Birdie up, do the same to myself, and say, “I’m gonna tell her a made-up story, so when we get in the house, let me do all the talking.” I grab another breath. “No matter what, even if she’s nice to you, keep quiet.” My sister falls for our mother’s tricks all the time. One kind word is all it takes. “Just smile with a lot of dimple and nod your head at whatever I tell her.”

  I reach down and grab four black-eyed Susans out of the garden in the front of our next-door neighbor’s house. That’s a nice little revenge on Gert Klement who I’ve decided to move to the top of MY SHIT LIST after we get home, if Louise doesn’t beat us to death. I have really had it with that old lady. Every other day this summer, she’s said something mean about me to my mother. “You better keep your eye on Theresa, dear. The girl is a ticking time bomb. Did you notice that she was laughing in the Holy Communion line on Sunday?

  MY SHIT LIST

  Mrs. Gertrude Klement.

  Dennis Patrick

  The greasy man who tries to peek in the gas station bathroom window when you gotta stop to pee because you can’t make it home from the Tosa Theatre after you drink a large root beer.

  Mom. Louise.

  Jenny Radtke.

  After Birdie and me kiss the St. Nick medal around my neck, I remind her, “Dimple-smiling, no talking.” I spit on my hand and stick it toward her. “Promise.”

  She makes a loogie on her palm, gives my hand a hard, wiry shake, and says, “All for one, one for all!”

  I have no idea where she came up with that.

  I rub Daddy’s knife one last time, and I’m so desperate that I even say a prayer. Please … please … please don’t let Birdie blow this. Just this one time.

  We take our front porch steps two at a time. Just to be safe, I check again that we look good. I spin Birdie around, and sure enough, she’s got cemetery dirt on her butt leftover from when she turned into a white statue and timbered to the ground. I swipe it off, pull open the
screen door, and begin to pretend that I don’t know that our mother is home. She’s not in sight, so she’s probably in her bedroom sitting in front of her vanity mirror.

  I squeeze Birdie’s hand hard to remind her of the spit promise, and say real loud as we take baby steps through the living room, “It was such a good idea to put on your beautiful new Playtex birthday girdle and use some of our piggy-bank money to go up to Bloomers and buy Louise flowers to thank her for working her fingers to the bone for us at that horrible hat shop! You’re so smart, Birdie. If only Mr. Yerkovich hadn’ta been in such a hurry because he was working on that big wedding, he coulda wrapped them up in that nice pink paper. His poor floppy wrists. We should pray for him.”

  The whole time I’m saying that malarkey, I’m pointing like crazy at the living room wall and acting like I’m Louise putting on lipstick on the other side of it so Birdie’ll know that’s where she is.

  “Ya know what we should do?” I say to my sister, again very loud. “We should go up to the attic after we clean the house super-duper good. We could look for some tissue paper to wrap the flowers in and—”

  “Gotcha!” our mother yells when she jumps out of the hallway outside her bedroom.

  Neither one of us saw this coming. Birdie screams and so do I. “We … we … holy shi—I mean, holey moley … that was a good one!” I tell Louise. “Ha … ha … ha. We were gonna surprise you and … and you surprised us instead!” No joke. “You really got us!” I laugh again, and then my sister does too. Mine is fake, but hers is high pitched and I have to elbow her to stop.

  “Oh, are these for me?” Louise acts like a blushing bride when Birdie shoves the black-eyed Susans I ripped outta Mrs. Klement’s garden her way. “My favorites! Thank you, Robin Jean.” She tilts her head to one side and looks closer at my sister. She is looking at her hair and narrowing her eyes, so I do too. Damnit. The flower I stuck in Birdie’s hair at the cemetery is still fastened to the bobby pin holding back her bangs. How did I miss that? Louise flicks it with her pointer finger and asks, “Did Mr. Yerkovich put this in—?”

  “Yeah, he sure did,” I jump in and say before Birdie can blurt out that we got the daisy from a bouquet that was on the grave of little girl named Cathy. “Hey … how come you’re back so early from work? You look really beautiful. Did the hat shop burn down?”

  When Louise’s laughs, I’m surprised it’s so regular sounding. I thought it would sound more like a rusty gate at a haunted house ’cause I can’t remember her using it since Daddy died. “No, the shop didn’t burn down,” she says with a very sly smile. “Something even better happened!”

  She probably got fired. Now I’ll have to borrow some money from Mr. McGinty, or pick someone off my list and blackmail them tonight, or we won’t be able to buy school lunch tomorrow. Birdie can’t go long without eating.

  “What happened?” I ask Louise.

  “The woody had a flat tire on the way to work this morning and I had to pull into the Clark station to have it checked and … I met a man! We’re going out to dinner and a movie tonight!” She looks down at the watch that Daddy gave her for Christmas. “I better start getting ready!” She rushes toward her bedroom singing, “Love and marriage, love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage.”

  Oh, boy.

  Looks like if our mother has her way, which she always does, she’s gonna spend the whole afternoon making herself irresistible, so she can lure the greasy guy who works at the Clark station into her feminine-wiles trap.

  I wonder if after she marries him if Birdie and me are gonna have to stop calling him “The Peeker” and start calling him Daddy.

  It’s Either a Sign from God or Clark

  “So? What do you think?” the lovely Louise asks Birdie and me after we spent hours cleaning the house. I let Birdie talk to her imaginary friend the whole time because our mother would think she was talking to me, but after she called us into her bedroom, I made my sister promise again that she wouldn’t say a word to, or about, Bee, or our visit to the cemetery or Daddy’s pretend grave or Gammy and Boppa or Mr. McGinty or Mrs. Turner or anything or anybody else that would make Louise have one of her 100% Irish temper tantrums. Birdie said, “Okay, Tessie,” but that and a dime will get you a cup of coffee because face it, she is not a good accomplice. She’s too sweet and honest.

  We’re not usually allowed on their her bed, so Louise must be in a really good mood over this date. I’m lying on my back on Daddy’s side. Birdie is on her tummy with her head in her hands looking at our mother like she really is a movie star. She tells her with a sigh and stars in her eyes, “You look prettier than … than … Ida Lupino.”

  “She means Maureen O’Hara,” I say fast because my sister forgot how much Louise despises Ida Lupino for some unknown reason.

  Didn’t matter really. Louise didn’t hear Birdie’s compliment. She’s too busy admiring herself in the full-length mirror on the back of the bedroom door.

  “Fix TV dinners for supper,” she says to me. “Take an extra good bath, scrub out the tub with Dutch cleanser, lay out your uniforms for school tomorrow, and then go straight to bed.” She didn’t buy Birdie new penny loafers at Shuster’s Shoes today. I guess she got too excited about finding the man named Leon Gallagher to marry at the Clark station. According to her, he’s not the greasy guy I was worried about, and she might be right, because “The Peeker’s” real name isn’t Leon, it’s Gordon, it says so on the front of his uniform.

  Louise clips her gold earrings on her lobes and says, “Leon’s the one, girls. Mr. Right.” She crosses herself. “Getting that flat tire had to be a sign from God.”

  I’m about to say, “Or Clark,” but Birdie cuts me off when she asks, “Does he look like Prince Charming?”

  Louise closes her eyes, like there’s a picture of the guy on her eyelids. “He’s a little too thin, but I’ll fatten him up.”

  I am already feeling a little sorry for the poor man. If he’s skinny now, he’ll waste away to nothing if he has to count on Louise’s cooking. Maybe that’s all part of her foxy plan. Marry him, make sure he puts her in his will, and then starve him to death.

  “Leon … Mr. Gallagher’s feet and hands are small, but he’s handsome in other ways, except for his melting jaw line.” Louise spins around and checks the back of the emerald-green dress with the black bow. She really is a breathtaking glamour puss. “And I’ve been saving the best news for last.” She bends down and adjusts the seam on her stockings. “I was so upset that I might have to buy a new tire after it went flat that I let it slip that I couldn’t afford one because I have two mouths to feed and guess what he said?”

  “I have a melting jaw line. You got two mouths. Nobody’s perfect,” I say snotty-like.

  Louise darts her eyes my way and says, “Watch the wisecracks, young lady,” but then, because she likes what she sees in the mirror and her future, she gets happy again. “Actually,” she says, “Mr. Gallagher told me that he likes kids, especially little girls. The more the merrier.”

  Hmmm. “The Peeker” has small hands and feet and he likes little girls, the more the merrier too. Maybe he was wearing a disguise and going by the alias Leon this morning.

  “Are you sure he’s not the really greasy guy who works at the station?” I ask Louise.

  She shoots me one of her dagger looks. “Leon is well-groomed, and he was only pumping gas today because the regular guy didn’t show up and the owner, who’s a friend of his, asked him to help out.” She picks up her can of Aqua Net off her vanity and gives her hair that is flowing down in perfect waves past her shoulders an extra spritz. “He has a very good job on the American Motors assembly line. You know what that means?”

  It means that I don’t have to get a job at the flower shop or blackmail anybody or look for rainbows with pots of gold sitting at the end of them, but it also means exactly what I tell her, “Mr. Gallagher is the answer to your prayers.”

  Louise licks her lips with the tip of
her tongue and smiles like a cat. It’s an excellent imitation of Pye right before he swallows a trapped mouse. “God helps those who help themselves, Theresa,” she says. “You’d do well to remember that.”

  Ohhh, don’t worry your pretty little head about that, Louise. Not a day goes by that I don’t remember that.

  Sure, I was upset at first when she told us about the fella she met because Birdie and me don’t want another daddy, but maybe her meeting Mr. Gallagher really is like Louise said—a sign from God. There is that famous saying, “He works in mysterious ways.”

  We have that in common.

  I spent the whole time Birdie and me were cleaning this afternoon coming up with a plan that’s better than any Nancy Drew caper.

  When Louise goes out the door on her date tonight, Birdie and me are gonna head back to Daddy’s grave so she can finally say goodbye to him. After she recovers from all her joy, I’ll mention that resurrecting idea to her, and then we’ll come home, take our baths, scrub the tub with Dutch cleanser, lay out our uniforms, and crawl between the sheets the way Louise told us to. We’ll spoon, and I’ll plant lavender on Birdie’s back, and then I’ll FINALLY cross #3 off my TO-DO LIST. That’ll make me feel like I really did do a good deed, which might help me to not feel so bad about murdering Daddy. Maybe I’ll even fall asleep tonight feeling not proud of myself because it’s a sin to let your head get swollen up, but, oh, I don’t know … maybe I’ll feel like I didn’t throw in the towel.

  When a car horn makes an ah … oo … ga sound out front, Louise grabs her clutch with the lipstick and compact that she dropped inside. She dabs a little extra Evening in Paris on her wrists and gets an even bigger cat smile and an arched right eyebrow. She’s got something up her sleeve. “I’m paying Mrs. Klement to keep an eye on you tonight, Theresa, so don’t think you can pull any of your shenanigans.”