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real loud until Nell had had it up to here and smacked her a good one. Then I’d have to settle Troo down and give her something of mine, like my favorite steely marble, so she’d promise not to try and smother Nell in her sleep.
     
    After Nell told us about that staph infection, I thought it would be a good idea to head up to church and do a little praying that morning, even though I thought God had some kind of deafness and wasn’t listening to one darn thing I was tellin’ Him. Nell didn’t want to come with us because she was gonna go walk up to Fillard’s Service Station and see her boyfriend, Eddie Callahan, who worked up there and was Mrs. Callahan’s son. That was how Nell was spending her days. Going gaga over Eddie Callahan. When Mother came home, Nell would be in big trouble for minding Eddie Callahan instead of Troo and me, the way Mother had told her to. Troo already had her tattletale list with a capital T all figured out. She even wrote it down.
    1. Nell says you didn’t tell her she had to do me and Sally’s wash so she isn’t.
    2. Nell broke the turn-on knob off the television and now Sally can’t watch Sky King and that made her cry more than once. (I told her to take that crying part out, because Mother would only get mad at me.)
    3. Nell will not give us money to go to the Uptown so we had to miss a Sandra Dee and Troy Dona hue movie.
    And so on. The tattletale list was longer than Troo’s Christmas list. And every day she grew more excited about showing it to Mother when she came home.
    I mostly liked Mother of Good Hope church and school because they were only six blocks away and the O’Malley sisters could walk to them. The part I didn’t care for was that we had to pass Greasy Al Molinari’s house to get there. One of Troo’s most favorite things to do in the whole world was to stand in front of the Molinaris’ gray house and holler very loudly, “Greasy Al is such a little shit.” She also called him other names like wophead and spaghetti for brains, and sometimes, when she was really out of sorts, she would sing that Harry Belafonte song “Day-O,” but instead she would say, “Dago . . . da da daaago.”
    Troo was sure Greasy Al was the one that had stolen her bike last summer, and that’s what she was so mad about. I could never stop her, even though God and Daddy know I tried, so we always ended up getting chased halfway to school by Greasy Al, who threatened to bronze our butts if he ever caught us, which he wouldn’t, because his right leg was sort of withered up from polio. Greasy Al couldn’t run exactly, but he could walk very fast in a hunched-up limpy kind of way if he wanted to go after you. I always said to Troo, “What are you gonna do if he ever catches you? He’s got that switchblade, you know?”
    Troo would laugh and laugh and this wild look would come into her eyes, like she didn’t care if Greasy Al caught her. That bothered me. Almost every day I wished Daddy was here to calm her down because I didn’t think Troo would be long for this world if she kept this sort of wild thing up.
    That morning Troo was dawdling behind me, a little cranky because I’d told her I wasn’t in the mood to get chased by Greasy Al, so like Mother said, she better mind her p’s and q’s. She was kicking a rock the way she liked to do when she was thinking and then she said real quietly, so that I almost didn’t hear her, “She’s gonna get better, right, Sal?”
    I didn’t turn around because if I did she’d get real mad. Troo hated it if I caught her being scared because she forgot to whistle in the dark. I figured out what that meant by paying attention to details. Granny wasn’t getting the hardening of the arteries after all. Mother and Troo were two peas in the pod, both of ’em always pretending that things were okay when they weren’t.
    “Yeah, she’ll be fine,” I said over my shoulder, but wondered what would happen if she wasn’t. Would Troo and me