She's Up to No Good(9)

“We’ll—what?”

“You’re taking me on a date,” she explained slowly.

“I am?” She nodded, and he couldn’t stop himself from grinning.

“Don’t get any ideas now. Remember, two brothers, and I always have a hat pin on me.”

Tony placed his hand over his heart in a pledging motion. “I’ll pick you up at seven?”

“Oh goodness, no. My father would murder you. I’ll meet you there.”

“Um . . . okay.”

“Great,” Evelyn said with a bright smile, then turned to walk away. She took two steps, stopped, and turned back, holding out her hand. “Wait. Here’s your cigarette.”

“You can have it.”

Evelyn laughed. “Oh, I don’t smoke.” She placed it between his fingers. “I’ll see you tonight, Tony.”

“What was that?” Felipe asked as they watched her cross the street to the two girls who gaped at her brazen display.

“I think I just fell in love.”

Felipe shook his head. “That’s the kind of girl who ruins your life.”

“Maybe. But she might be worth it.”





CHAPTER SIX





“What does that mean, you crashed into the movie theater?” We were nearing the Delaware state line.

My grandmother chuckled. “I was infamous for that one. We lived at the top of a hill. It was—that house had some kind of magic to it. It didn’t look that big, but it was like it took a deep breath and expanded when everyone was there. There were only two bathrooms for the nine of us. And on Fridays, you couldn’t use the downstairs tub. Mama kept the fish for Shabbos dinner in there until it was time to kill it and cook it.”

“She kept a live fish in the bathtub?”

“Every week.” She shrugged. “We were used to it. And you’ll never taste a fish that fresh.”

“Okay,” I said, my eyebrows raised. “But the movie theater?”

With a slight shake of her head to clear away the other path her thoughts had taken, she returned to the hill. “The movie theater was down the hill. They had only built it a few years earlier. Maybe in 1935? It was still pretty new. It was the old kind—not like these big ones today—with one screen and a balcony. Papa used to park his car on the street outside the house. I was seven and decided I was going to ‘drive.’ I got some friends, and we hopped in the car and were playing. But I must have knocked the brake off, and then I was really steering down the hill. Crashed right into the front doors.”

“Were you hurt?”

“Nah. But they were showing The Wizard of Oz, and when people came running to see if I was okay, I said something about not being in Kansas anymore. That was the story that went all over town.”

“What happened?”

“Mr. Ambrose owned the theater. He saw I wasn’t hurt, so he marched me home by the ear and delivered me to my mother. Horrible old man. If he’d had a decent bone in his body, he would have taken me to Papa’s store.” She looked over at me. “I was Papa’s favorite. I was never in trouble if he was there. Mama was a different story.”

“What did she do to you?”

“Nothing. I hid under the bed until Papa got home. She got the broomstick to try to get me out, but she couldn’t reach when I got into the corner. And he didn’t care about the car.”

“Explains a lot,” I muttered.

She shrugged. “You can worry about the small stuff, or you can live your life. Papa believed in living.”

I pulled the car toward the left as we neared the rest stop. “I could use a coffee.”

“If you’re getting tired, I can drive.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Because I crashed into a movie theater over eighty years ago?”

“Because you don’t have a license!”

“You and my mother would have gotten along. No fun at all.”

“I’m fun!” My grandmother raised an eyebrow, and I felt my shoulders slump. “Okay, maybe not these days. But normally I am.”

“I’m sure you are, dear.” She patted my arm. “No one said you weren’t.”

“You just—oh, never mind.” I decided to make the coffee a venti.

After parking and helping my grandma undo her seatbelt, I stood on the sidewalk to wait, then realized she was struggling to get out of the car. I went to the passenger side and noticed a large scrape down the side. “Do you need help?”

If looks could kill, she would have been the only one left to drive the car. “I do not need anything.”

“Of course not.” I remembered my mother’s warning and the fact that my grandmother had a bad hip. “My legs are really stiff after being in the car that long. I’m here if you just feel like taking my hand.”

She peered up, checking for sarcasm in my response, but when she saw none, she put a spotted and wrinkled hand in mine and allowed me to heave her up. Once on her feet, she shrugged me off, but I kept my pace slow to match hers. She was really going to try to do this alone, I thought, shaking my head. My mother always told me to smother her with a pillow before she got as bad as Grandma, which I had thought was melodramatic, but if my mother turned into this? Yikes.