“Pardon me, Frances?” Aunt Jane May said. “You got somethin’ to say, speak up.”
Too smart to repeat the caustic remark she’d uttered under her breath, Frankie replied, “I said that as soon as we’re done here I gotta go clean the wax out of my ears ’cause I thought you just told us that we couldn’t go over to Mud Town after—”
“Nothin’ wrong with your hearin’,” Aunt Jane May spit out, “and nothin’ wrong with mine neither.”
“But,” I said, “we promised Jimbo that we’d—”
“Then you ought to be more careful what you promise,” Aunt Jane May barked. “What goes on after dark across the tracks is …”
She was searching for the right words, but if I’d been asked to fill in her blank, I would’ve had no problem coming up with “mysterious” and “delicious” and “religious.”
The girls and I had been visiting Mud Town our whole lives and loved it much more than we did Summit proper. If we could manage it, we’d slip out of St. Thomas’s Sunday Mass and ride over to Emmanuel Baptist to sit beside Jimbo and Dell and get treated to a lively sermon by Reverend Archie and singing that made our choir sound soulless. We’d play Ghost in the Graveyard in the cemetery on Wickers Avenue with our friends over there, and we couldn’t get enough of Jimbo and his front-porch stories. And not only did Earl Spooner’s Supper Club serve far and away the best food in town, the back door was left open on steamy summer evenings. The girls and I would eat slices of chiffon pie and watch couples on the dance floor move nothing like the couples at our church mixers. Their hips undulating to that low-down saxophone music made the high insides of my thighs tingle in a way the polka never did, though I couldn’t have told you why.
Aunt Jane May flicked her tongue over her lips again and said, “I’m givin’ the three of you fair warning. If I should hear from Jimbo or Bigger or anybody else that you were seen over in Mud Town after the sun sets”—she smacked her fist down on the table like it was a gavel—“there will be severe consequences. Ya hear me?”
Frankie nudged me under the table to let me know what she was about to do, then turned to Aunt Jane May and said, “Jesus Christmas, of course we can hear you. Sam Osbourne could and he’s been dead and buried for a week.”
Now, I gained no pleasure from challenging the powerful forces that ruled our world—our aunt and the Almighty—but if Frankie hadn’t distracted her with that blasphemy, I would’ve placed my hand down on the kitchen Bible and sworn to stay on the straight and narrow and make sure the girls did as well. I would’ve been lying, of course, and if Aunt Jane May ever found out, she’d kill me. “Spinnin’ a tall tale is one thing, and holding back a truth that could hurt feelings is allowable in certain situations,” she’d lecture us, “but the Lord detests lying lips, and He and I are on the same page.” She meant the page of the Bible she was quoting from. “Mark my words, girls, I ever catch you prevaricating to me I will cook your gooses beyond recognition and bury them under the willow out back.”
Since her parenting philosophy was similar to everyone else’s at the time: raise children like you would mushrooms—keep them in the dark and feed them lots of bull crap—the girls and I had to rely on our keen powers of observation to determine what future she had in mind for us. A tapping toe promised an afternoon of chores. Calling any of us “Missy” was a lit stick of TNT. And when she gave her lips a tongue lashing? That meant she was hiding something from us, and judging by how vigorously she was going at it that morning—it was something big.
When she finished reprimanding Frankie for taking the Lord’s name in vain, she moved on to the Tree Musketeer who’d usually be giving her the business. “You’ve been suspiciously quiet this morning Vivian,” she said. “You got somethin’ on your mind needs airin’ out?”
“Actually, I was thinking these flapjacks are the best I’ve ever had and … oh, yeah.” Viv smacked her forehead, like this idea had just dawned on her. “I’ve been meanin’ to tell you how much I love your new French twist. It’s very oo là là.”
Aunt Jane May didn’t want to be charmed by Viv, but I saw a hint of a smile coming onto her lips before the grandfather clock in the front hallway chimed a warning that tempus fugit. “Lord Almighty,” she said, “it’s eight already?” She dabbed at her mouth with her napkin. “I have a million and one things to do today and you foolish girls and this heat have me—”
“Fit to be tied?” Viv said as she plopped the jump rope she’d been holding in her lap down onto the table.
Given the mood she was in, I was sure Aunt Jane May would not find that amusing, but she chuckled. With gusto! Even Frankie, who found Viv funny but hated to let on that she did, grinned. I did, too, but only because I was relieved to learn the rope was not intended for Frankie’s neck.
Viv was so pleased with herself for pulling that gag off, but she wasn’t about to rest on her laurels. Sure now that she had our aunt eating out of her hand, she snatched Frankie’s newly created paper fortune teller off the table and impishly asked her, “Three’s your favorite number, right?” After she manipulated the paper the requisite number of times and flipped up the flap, she pretended to read what she found in the mysterious voice gypsies used in werewolf movies to tell fortunes in their caravans in the woods. “It’s a goood thing you are loooking like a million bucks, because you’re about to meet a tall, dark, and handsome man or maybe yooou already have.” She dropped the act. “You got somethin’ on your mind needs airin’ out, Auntie?”
That was so out of line, even for her, that I cringed at the dressing down she was about to receive, but Aunt Jane May turned as red as her clutch purse and bolted out of the kitchen so fast she created the breeze the girls and I had been hoping for all week.
Granted, she could’ve just been in a hurry to get to her chores, but it looked to me like her hasty exit coming on the heels of the fictional fortune meant that it’d hit a nerve. Judging by the smarmy look on Viv’s face she thought so, too, and given her passionate desire to catch our aunt in the act, I feared that trouble was coming our way, just as Aunt Jane May had warned us it would if we strayed from the straight and narrow.
Chapter Four
Back then, kids were kept under adults’ thumbs nine months out of the year, but during the summer, they led their lives and we led ours, and the twain rarely met except at Sunday suppers and in church pews, which is where the girls and I were when we received the news that could put the kibosh on the freedom we’d been enjoying the past few weeks.
Doc, his younger brother Walt, who was the sheriff of Summit, and Aunt Jane May and I were expected to sit in the dedicated Buchanan pew up front. Viv was with her family a few rows behind us. Frankie and the Maniachis back further still. Frankie was a Baptist at heart and would’ve liked to have been over at Emmanuel Baptist wedged between Dell and Jimbo, but those church busybodies and the group of Germans would notice if the “orphaned relative of the Italians” didn’t show up at Mass with them.