The Mutual Admiration Society(58)

12:41 p.m. Watchful Pyewacket—she has staying on guard at all times in common with her other half owner, Mr. McGinty—immediately spots Birdie barreling toward the Garfields’ back porch, so she hops off Charlie’s lap and streaks past me on the way back to the caretaker’s shack, but my future better half isn’t so lucky.

“Knock it off, Bird,” I say when I reach the two of them just in time to slap my hand over her mouth so she doesn’t juicy smooch Charlie’s cheek again, which he doesn’t seem to mind sometimes, but this is not one of those times. His peepers are close in color to Birdie’s and my birthstone, a light green, and the left one twitches like crazy when he’s worked up about something, which makes it look like he’s winking at me over and over and that’s so adorable, I can’t barely take it. I want to shout from the roof of his house, I love you to death, Charlie “Cue Ball” Garfield and I can’t hardly wait until the day we’re standing at the altar together, even if you are the most wrinkly kid I know next to Birdie! But I’m not sure how he’d take that, so I just peel my sister offa him, flip her into the deep leaf pile next to the porch, and tug my ninety-eight-pound weakling back up again.

“You okay?” I ask him.

He shakes his head, wipes off his slobbered cheek with the back of his hand, and tells me “M . . . M . . . Missus Klement told m . . . m . . . my dad this m . . . m . . . morning that Sister M . . . M . . . Margaret M . . . M . . . Mary went m . . . m . . . missing last night,” Charlie struggles to say. Most of the time he talks like everybody else, but when he gets really upset, he starts talking with this cute little m stutter. (This is just a theory of mine that has not been proven, but I think the reason Charlie’s tongue gets so twisted up on m words when he gets worked up is because that’s the letter mom starts with.) “Ya know anything about that, Tessie?”

FACT: The famous saying “The course of true love is full of potholes,” is so true.

PROOF: I’m having now what is known as mixed feelings. Because we both love Birdie, I thought Charlie and me had hating our principal in common, so I’m disappointed that he’s got himself riled up about her disappearance. But at the same time, I’m feeling this rush of gushy love for him warming up my whole body and dang, I’m desiring very much to stick my finger in that dent in his chin and wiggle it around a little.

“Yeah, I know that Sister went missing and . . . and a whole lot more,” I tell him, “but . . .” I’m saved from veering into a love spat by the clang . . . clang . . . clanging of St. Kate’s church bells informing the neighborhood that it’s 12:45 p.m. “I don’t have time now to explain it all. I’ll fill you in on our way to—”

“The train station,” he says.

“The . . . the . . . WHAT?”

“Tell me the truth, Tessie.” My fiancé looks over at Birdie like he doesn’t want her to hear what he has to say, which he doesn’t have to worry about. She’s sitting in the middle of the red and gold leaves next to the porch that Charlie must’ve been raking before he started staring up at the sky, happily goofing around with her cat’s cradle string and coming up with some newfangled pattern I’ve never seen before. “Did your not showing up for the m . . . m . . . meetin’ under the weeping willow have something to do with Sister M . . . M . . . Margaret M . . . M . . . Mary disappearing?” Charlie says softly, because he hardly ever uses a loud, angry voice. His father does enough of that for the whole family. Birdie and me can hear Mr. Garfield going at his boys late at night, and it takes all I got not to jump out of bed, run over there, and give him a piece of my mind. “Ya didn’t do something ya weren’t supposed to, did ya?” Charlie’s left eye is doing an impression of a Mexican jumping bean, and if he had hair, he would be raking his beautiful fingers through it. “If ya finally did do one of the terrible things to Sister M and M that you been promisin’ to do . . .” He squats down, slides a wad of damp-looking dollar bills out of the side of his hightop black sneakers and presses it into my hand. “I grabbed our treasury m . . . m . . . money outta the tree hole just in case the Finley sisters had to m . . . m . . . make a break for it.”

Oh, Charlie, my Charlie.

See why I can’t help but adore him, wrinkles and all?

This boy . . . he always thinks the best of m . . . m . . . me.





17


STATISTICALLY SPEAKING


’Cause the three of us have lived in this neighborhood our whole lives, The Mutual Admiration Society knows all the best shortcuts.

We didn’t have time for even a short meeting of the minds on Charlie’s back porch, so when we’re racing down the alley that’ll take us the fastest way to church—Charlie is holding one of Birdie’s hands and I got hold of the other to keep her from gallivanting into Mr. Holland’s yard to grab ripe apples off his tree—I announce, “I hereby call The Mutual Admiration Society to order,” and give Charlie the Reader’s Digest version of THE CASE OF THE MISSING NUN WHO MIGHT BE KIDNAPPED AND MURDERED BUT NOT BY MR. MCGINTY as we bust through the crooked white gate in the Baxters’ backyard, duck under the wash that’s hanging on the Muldoons’ clothesline, hop the rickety fence in the Winners’ side yard, and run across 68th St. to our final destination—St. Kate’s.