The Mutual Admiration Society(67)
JUST DESSERTS
Find out where the numbskull lives and smear black shoe polish on his Chevy’s whitewalls.
Put a bag of burning dog doo-doo on his porch, ring the doorbell, and run.
Call him at his “alleged” job at the American Motors plant and use that impression you learned from watching gangster movies where the wops are always threatening their enemies: Dis is Three-Fingered Louie Galetti and you-a better stay away from that doll Louise Finley if you-a don’ wanna be fitted for a cement raincoat, ya goomba.
Doctor up his food, if you ever get to meet him face-to-face.
I guess Charlie’s long-awaited kiss did not only fuel my heart, it must be fueling my brain with high octane, because on top of the genius revenge I’m already planning for Leon Gallagher, I’ve just had another brilliant idea! This one for my mother’s opponent in the Pagan Baby election!
“Tessie?” Birdie tugs on the bottom of my T-shirt. “You seein’ what I’m seein’?”
“Only if you’re ESPing me and seein’ the new sign I’m gonna stick in the Tates’ lawn tomorrow night.” I mad-scientist laugh, the way they do in the movies after they’ve dreamed up something really nasty.
“Hark!” Birdie shouts in her old-timey voice.
Still planning out what I’m hoping to pull on what’s-his-name at the fish fry if the timing is right, and what I’m definitely going to pull on Mrs. Tate, I don’t really pay attention to what Birdie is harking about. I figure it’s probably just a robin redbreast sitting on a tree branch or something shiny she’s found sparkling out of a sidewalk crack, until she elbows me hard in the side and says, “A certain unwieldy elderly lady who does not have our best interests at heart, sister dear, has returned from unfortunate Mister Peterman’s funeral.” She raises her arm and points up the block at the white Rambler with the little black flag waving off its antenna that’s coming down Keefe Ave. “To avoid being thoroughly interrogated and enduring the subsequent consequences which are surely to be inflicted upon us after Missus Klement shares our forbidden location with our mater-familias, might I suggest that we return to our homestead posthaste?”
20
O, DIOS MIO, I AM SO MUCHO TEMPTED
The Finley sisters are so used to running away from our putrid neighbor that it isn’t until after we half tripped up our porch steps, yanked open the door of the house, and sagged onto the sofa huffing and puffing that we figured out that we didn’t even need to amscray—another kind of Latin, this one pig—when we saw Gert’s boxy car cruising down the block toward us. Louise told me to go to confession this morning before she left for work and that’s exactly where Birdie and me were coming from.
So between the holy heavenly kiss from Charlie, my glorious new eye-for-an-eye plans, and for once, being where I’m supposed to be when I’m supposed to be, I’m feeling pretty dang cocky by the time #1 on my SHIT LIST stomps up our front porch steps. I am a big believer in the famous saying “Know thy enemy”—I got it in a fortune cookie from Men Hong Low Chinese Restaurant on Lisbon Ave., which has excellent chicken chop suey, by the way—so I 100% knew Gert would show up to check on us and I’m BE PREPARED.
I got the look on my face that the kid in Old Yeller gets on his when his dog gets rabies and he’s got to shoot him when I answer her meaty knock on the front door. “Good afternoon, Missus Klement. Gosh, I was so heartily sorry to hear about Mister Peterman. I hope his funeral went as planned.”
Those black painted-on eyebrows of hers inch up to the edge of her bone-colored hair when she grins with her fake teeth that she keeps in a glass next to her bed and says, like she’s just so sure she’s got me by the short hairs, “And how did you know that I attended the service if you stayed here in the house as you were supposed to, Theresa Marie?”
Geez, maybe listening to Father Joe’s droning grave sermon about the valley of death did make her arteries go as hard as her heart, because she wouldn’t have asked that question if she was thinking straight. Usually Gert is much wilier than that.
“When Birdie and me paid our respects to Mister Peterman from our back porch,” I tell her, still looking very hang-dog, “we saw you standing next to Mrs. Peterman at the grave. Black really suits you, by the way.”
When our enemy gets done harrumphing, still very certain that she’s caught us up to no good, she slyly says, “I came by earlier today, you and your sister must have heard me.” We sure did, you Holy Water–wielding, Dominos vobiscum–ing, exercising-the-devil battle-ax. “If you were home and not out gallivanting, why didn’t you answer the back door?”
Before I can answer, my sister, who is sucking the last drop of chocolate out of one of the Hershey’s kisses I awarded her from my secret stash in the umbrella stand—for some unknown reason, old-fashioned Birdie is a faster runner than weird Birdie and she actually beat me in the race home when she saw Gert’s car coming down Keefe Ave.—calls over from the sofa, “Hi, Missus Klement! We’re so sorry we missed you this morning. We were probably down in the basement doing wash. Our machine hasn’t been working right, so we can’t hear anything when the clothes are spinnin’ around, can we, Theresa Marie?”