Good Graces by Lesley Kagen

would fall asleep and I was sure that Hall had passed out, I’d slip outta our bed and go sit with our neighbor. We didn’t talk so much. We held hands and listened to the creaky sound the porch swing made. I’d like to do that again, but I’m not sure Mr. Kenfield would. Sometime between last summer and this one, he got a reputation for being the neighborhood crank.
    “ C my name is Carol and I come from California with a carload of candy ,” Troo sings.
    “Wait a sec,” I tell her when she dribbles past our old duplex. There’s a Yellow Taxi parked out front of 5081 Vliet Street, which is something you don’t ever see around here. This is the closest I’ve ever come to one. The trunk is open and there are some suitcases jammed in. “Something’s goin’ on at the Goldmans’.”
    Troo doesn’t glance up. She just keeps on singing in her high soprano voice that she inherited from Mother, “ D my name is Denise and I come from . . . come from . . . damn it all, Sally, look what you made me do? Now I can’t think of a place that starts with D .” She spikes the ball. If you mess up you gotta start over and even hell-with-the-rules Troo O’Malley plays by that one. “Who gives a crap about the Goldmans anyway?”
    “I do,” I say, feeling bad again about letting our old landlady down. I promised Mrs. Goldman I would stay her friend even after we moved out of this house, but I haven’t.
    She is standing on her front porch in a crisp blue shirt and a pleated black skirt, her special sturdy shoes in size 10 peeking out from beneath the hem. Her dark curls used to be braided and wound around her head but now her hair looks pixie cute. She is instructing a man in a T-shirt with rolled-up sleeves, “Careful vis it. Careful.”
    I wait until the man passes me by carrying a big black trunk and grunting something under his breath to call out to her, “Yavol!”
    Mrs. Goldman brings her hands up to her cheeks and says, “Liebchen!”
    Her calling me sweetheart in her language is making me feel even worse about not showing up the way I told her I would, but she looks happy to see me, so I race up the house steps two at a time and wrap my arms around her spongy waist.
    “ Mein Gott , how you’ve grown,” she ho . . . ho . . . ho s. “Your legs—”
    “I know, I know,” I say, looking the long way down.
    “And vere is your sister the Trooper?”
    Everyone always asks me that if they come across me when I’m alone because they’re used to seeing the O’Malleys roaming the neighborhood’s nooks and crannies together.
    “She’s right down there. See? Hey, Troo!” I excitedly point to Mrs. Goldman like we’ve been searching for her for months. “Look who I found!”
    “Top o’ the morning,” our old landlady yells down to the curb. (I taught her that.)
    Troo gives her a blank-eyed stare. My sister is still holding it against our old landlady for liking me better than she likes her, and also for not letting our dog Butchy live with us so he had to stay in the country with peeing Jerry Amberson, who lived on the farm next to ours and would hose you down with his wiener for no reason. Dave drove out and got Butchy back for Troo last summer, which I thought was so nice, but Butchy didn’t. That dog couldn’t get used to living in the city. He broke through two chains and ripped Mimi Latour’s pants right off her body when she tried to pet him, so he had to go back to live with the Ambersons, which made Troo hate Dave even more and call him an Indian giver.
    There are also some other people in the neighborhood that have grudges against our old landlords; my sister isn’t the only one. Even though we come from different countries and like different food, there is one special thing that holds us together. We’re all Catholics. The Goldmans aren’t. They are Jewish, and everybody seems ticked off at them in general for killing Christ, but I think that’s unfair. That’d be like blaming me for the