The Mighty Miss Malone

  “Thank you, Mother.”

  “Please, Miss Malone, thank you.”

  Mother had pulled herself together.

  She sniffled and said, “But there are two conditions. First, you’ve got to promise to tell me all about Mrs. Needham again and again and again, I’ll never get tired of hearing that!”

  “OK.”

  “And second, you cannot wear those patent leather shoes to bed, my shins would look like ground beef the way you toss and turn.”

  I thought I knew what it meant to be really scared. I thought Jimmie had given me enough practice so that nothing would ever bother me. When we were younger he’d sneak up on me and go “Boo!” or would jump out showing his teeth and growling, anything to try to make me cry. Mother explained that he was a boy and couldn’t help himself.

  Then one day it didn’t work anymore. I figured all the scaredness in me had got used up.

  I’ve never been more wrong about anything in my whole life.

  There is nothing more terrifying than waking up and not being sure where you are and hearing your mother scream from a long way off. If there is, I don’t want to know.

  I jumped out of bed and flew down the stairs.

  Mother was on the floor, halfway in the front door, being held by our neighbor Mrs. Kenworthy and howling.

  I froze.

  Mrs. Kenworthy said, “Peg, they don’t know for sure. Mr. Rhymes is outside.” She looked up, saw me and said, “Oh, Deza. Peg, Deza is here.”

  Mother took a huge breath, stood up, wiped her eyes and told me, “Sweetheart, I’m going to have to go out for a minute, don’t wake Jimmie.”

  She ran past me to go get dressed.

  Mrs. Kenworthy said, “Hello, Deza, how are …” She stopped and walked to where I was standing. She ran her hand over my head.

  “Is Father …”

  She said, “No, no. We don’t know anything yet. Mr. Rhymes is carrying us to the hospital.”

  “The hospital? That’s good, right? He’s just hurt? That’s not a funeral place or anything, right?”

  She said, “It’s not good news, but it’s not bad news either. We simply have to wait.”

  Mother was back. “I won’t leave you and Jimmie alone for long.” She kissed my cheek and ran out, letting the screen door slam.

  I walked to Jimmie’s bedroom door and tapped. If he was awake he’d sing for me. I tapped again, then opened the door. He had pulled his pillow tight over his head.

  I sat on the floor next to his bed and waited.

  I would have found a more comfortable place if I’d’ve known how long it would be before we heard what happened to my poor father.

  Chapter Twelve

  Mother and the Hobo

  I was back in the porch chair when Mr. Rhymes’s car stopped in front of our house.

  I ran out to the street. The car door opened and I stopped breathing. Grandma Sutphen, Mother’s mother, got out of the car. Then I saw it was Mother, looking like she’d got fifty years older at the hospital.

  She thanked Mr. Rhymes, smiled at me and said, “Come inside, Deza. Get Jimmie up.”

  I wanted to ask what happened, but she would’ve told me if there was bad news, wouldn’t she? But why did she want to talk to me and Jimmie together? That’s what you do if you’re about to say something so horrid you can’t bear to say it twice.

  I ran to Jimmie’s room. “Come quick, Mother wants to talk to us.”

  “Tell her I just need a couple more—”

  I snatched the covers off. “Get up now!”

  “OK, OK, sis.”

  “Hurry up!”

  I sat next to Mother on the couch. It was a good sign that instead of hugging me she just smiled. A sad and puny smile, but it was a smile.

  Jimmie came in rubbing his eyes. “What’s wrong?”

  Mother patted the couch next to her. “Sit here, dear.”

  Jimmie didn’t move. “What’s wrong?”

  I said, “Please Jimmie, it’s about Father.”

  He sat next to Mother. “What?”

  Mother told him about the fishing trip and how Father hadn’t come home yet. Then, “Mrs. Kenworthy came by earlier and told me they’d found two Negro men.”

  My head started spinning.

  Mother squeezed my knee. “It wasn’t your father. Hank Williams was found in the lake by some fishermen and Carlos Coulter was found on shore.”

  Jimmie said, “Found? Does that mean they’re …”

  Mother took his hand. “Yes.”

  Jimmie jerked his hand away and stood up. “What are you saying? How do you know Pa went out with them? He probably didn’t even go with those men.”

  “James—”

  “No! Pa ain’t dead! I can’t believe you think he was! I’d know if he was and he ain’t!”

  He ran to his room and slammed the door. He yelled, “Daddy’s all right! I’ma show you!”

  Me and Mother melted together and it wasn’t two minutes later that Jimmie whipped his bedroom door open and ran out of the house.

  I yelled, “Jimmie!” and started off the couch to catch him but Mother held me tight.

  “No, Deza, let him go. We’ve each got to learn how to handle this. If burning off energy searching for your daddy is what Jimmie has to do, we’ll let him.”

  I eased back into her arms.

  “So what will you do, Mother, and what about me, what do I do?”

  Mother covered her face with both hands. “Oh, Deza, I don’t know, I just don’t know.”

  We sat on the couch stuck together for the longest time.

  We handled the next week by being in a daze. Time crawled by and nothing seemed changed and nothing seemed the same. The only good thing was that no policemen knocked on our door with news of someone else being found.

  Every morning Mother would go to work and Jimmie would go out looking for Father.

  Mr. Steel Lung’s wife, Mrs. Henderson, doesn’t have any family in Gary and her mother was coming from California to be with her so she spent her days at our house.

  Me and Mother let her think she was looking after me, but Mother really didn’t want her to be alone. Me neither. Clarice was a true champ and came and sat with me most days.

  Mrs. Henderson started teaching us how to knit. On the seventh day Father was gone I was learning what the saying “a stitch in time saves nine” means and was unraveling what I’d done.

  Jimmie came in and slumped down beside me.

  “Hey, sis. Hello, Mrs. Henderson.”

  “Good afternoon, James.”

  Jimmie asked me, “How come you’re tearing up that—”

  There were heavy footsteps on the front porch, then lightning hit me when I heard Mother sounding horrible and strange and weak. “Jimmie! Deza!”

  Jimmie threw himself on the floor and curled into a ball with his fists against his ears.

  Me and Mrs. Henderson jumped bolt up. Her yarn fell from her lap and bounced across the floor until it bumped into Jimmie.

  Mother’s cry came again.

  Jimmie kept his fists in his ears. “No, no, no …”

  I ran to open the door and saw Mother looking like she’d completely lost her mind.

  Her arms were wrapped around a man. A very poor, very raggedy man.

  She said, “Deza, sweetheart! Jimmie was right! Look, darling! Look!”

  I looked at the man.

  “It’s your daddy!”

  Then I understood, this was just another nightmare. It wasn’t Father at all. I looked down to make sure I was dreaming, to make sure I was still in bed with my patent leather shoes on.

  But all I saw was ten toes on the wooden front porch.

  Oh, no! This was real. This was real.

  I kept my eyes down and looked at this man’s feet.

  He was wearing blue cloth slippers. His legs were gray and ashy, like they hadn’t been near a jar of Vaseline in a hundred years. He had on too-big blue jeans and one of those white hosp
ital shirts.

  I looked at Mother and got even scareder. Her heart was so broken that she’d found some poor hobo from the park and had brought him home thinking he was Father.

  The man said in a hoarse voice, “My Darling Daughter Detha, don’t you recognithe your Deareth Delightful Daddy?”

  I looked again.

  The man’s voice was rough and hacky, like Father’s after a long night of coughing, but Father never had such a bad lisp.

  He was too small to be my father. He was bony and scraggly-looking.

  His hair was snarled and he had a stubbly beard.

  The skin around his eyes was dark and bruised like he’d been in a fight. There were big clumps of dried white stuff in their corners and trails of gray running down his cheeks.

  What really let me know this wasn’t Father was his mouth. That same mouth that sounded a little like my father was nothing like Roscoe Malone’s. The man’s lips were twice the size of Father’s and a big cut with stitches ran from his nose across his top lip into his mouth.

  When he looked at me through those swole-up gray-streaked eyes he smiled and I knew I had lost both of my parents, Father to Lake Michigan, and Mother to craziness.

  The man had no front teeth at all. My father is very proud of his teeth and brushes them twice every day. It even looked like the hobo had stitches in his tongue.

  Mother said, “Deza, where’s Jimmie? Get him up! Run and tell him your daddy is ali—”

  Jimmie ran onto the porch.

  The poor hobo reached his hand out and mumbled, “My Genuine Gentle, Jumpin’ Giant, Jimmie!”

  Jimmie’s face hardened. “My Fine, Friendly Father Figure?”

  Mrs. Henderson walked onto the porch, her hand holding the knitting needles over her mouth.

  Mother and the hobo stopped smiling when they saw her.

  Mrs. Henderson had lost her mind too. “Roscoe. Please. Where’s Steve?”

  The man said, “Helen, I’m tho thorry, he didn’t make it. He wath with me and—”

  Mrs. Henderson’s arm jerked and one of the needles left a nasty scratch across her forehead. I snatched the needles away.

  She whispered, “Peg, I’m so happy for you,” and walked past us toward the street.

  Mother said, “Helen, wait!” But Mrs. Henderson kept going.

  “Jimmie, walk Mrs. Henderson home. Stay there until I can get someone to look after her.”

  He gave the hobo a hard look, then ran after Mrs. Henderson.

  I followed Mother and the hobo through the front door. She guided him right to Father’s chair and helped him crumble down into it. She put Father’s blanket over him and ran upstairs to the bathroom.

  The man reached a shaking hand to me. He started crying, washing the old gray streaks off his cheeks. He said, “Detha, I’ve mithed all of you tho much. You’re all that kept me alive.”

  I looked hard into his eyes and saw.

  I dropped the knitting needles and slapped my hands over my mouth.

  My father was alive!

  Chapter Thirteen

  The King of Spain Is a Delightful Conversationalist

  Father was home, but it still felt like we were trapped in those days that he was missing; everything was the same, but everything was different.

  Mother said he was so weak that they didn’t want to let him out of the hospital.

  She told me, with a very prideful voice, “And girl, once one of these Malone men gets an idea in his hard head it just won’t come out. The doctors warned him if he left he might die. Your daddy told those doctors, ‘I’ve gone through all this time without my family, the only thing that’s going to kill me now is if I go through one more second without them. Unless you’ve got a pistol in that coat and are going to shoot me, get out of my way, I’m going home.’ ”

  Mother shook her head. “That’s exactly what your daddy said, and he meant it.”

  She put her hand over her mouth to hide a smile and said, “Well, he didn’t say it exactly like that, he actually lisped his way through the whole argument!”

  We settled into a different kind of day. Every morning Mother would catch the bus to work, Jimmie would go to work for Dr. Bracy and, just like I did for Mother when she had Tic Do La Roo, I would sit next to Father in bed and read. Sometimes out loud to him, and sometimes to myself.

  He slept most of the time, which was good because when he was awake it was terrifying. He would wake up screaming from nightmares about Lake Michigan. Mostly he would shout or cry or yell at Mr. Steel Lung. Sometimes he’d apologize to him. Every time he’d yell I’d set my book down and tell him, “It’s all right, you’re safe at home.”

  He’d look around, then finally would calm down and go back to sleep.

  Every day I did something Mother and Father would do to me and Jimmie whenever we got sick. I kissed Father’s fevered forehead three times and said, “Kisses … kisses … kisses make you stronger.”

  One day when I kissed him the coolness of his forehead surprised me. His eyes blinked open and he smiled, “Yeth, my Darling Daughter Detha, it worked, your kitheth have made me thtronger.”

  I plopped down on his chest and hugged him. “Oh, Father! That’th juth what I wanted. Welcome back, my Deareth Delightful Daddy!”

  For the first time in a million years my father laughed! It was a rusty old laugh, but it was a laugh, and it felt like chains breaking off of him. It made the hairs on my neck stand up.

  “Oh,” he said, “how tharper than a therpent’th tooth it ith to have a thankleth, bratty little child. You’re actually going to thit there and mock your poor Deareth Delightful Daddy’th new lithp?”

  I kissed him again and again and said, “Yeth, yeth, yeth! And it really ith about time you pulled yourthelf together, mithter! But I’m not mocking you.”

  “No? Well, it thure thoundth like mockery.” He put his hand over his chest. “And it thure feelth like mockery to my heart.”

  I looked to see if he was serious. “No, Father it isn’t, it comes from a book I read.”

  He coughed a couple of times, then said, “I know the book, it’th called How to Be Dithrethpectful and Abuthive to a Good Man.”

  I laughed. “Not that one! I can’t remember the book’s name but it told about how the people who speak a certain kind of Spanish lisp all the time.”

  Father said, “I think I know the thtory, but tell me anyway.”

  “OK.” I cleared my throat and waited for a second, settling into the story.

  “Once upon a time … there was a king of Spain who—”

  Father said, “King Ferdinand, right?”

  “Father! Who’s telling this, me or you?”

  “Thorry, go ahead.”

  “OK.” I put my head on the pillow next to Father’s. “From the day he was born, this Spanish king was kind and loving and showed great character to everyone. But the whole country felt sad for him because when he talked he had a very strong lisp.”

  Father said, “A lithp? That’th juth terrible!”

  “Father!” I put my hand over his mouth as softly as I could. The stitches in his lip poked at my palm.

  “Whenever the king would talk to someone he lisped so badly that people would answer him and lisp too, not to make fun or mock him, but to show him how much they loved …”

  I kissed Father’s cheek.

  “… and respected …”

  Another kiss.

  “… and honored him.”

  Another kiss.

  “That’th what I’m doing, Father, not mocking you.”

  Father smiled and said, “Thank you, Detha, that’th beautiful, but I’m afraid it’th a myth.”

  I said, “What? You’re afraid it’s a miss?”

  Father laughed again. “I thaid it wath a myth. M-Y-T-H, myth, thmart aleck.”

  “You know what, Father, sometimes myths are a lot better than what really happens, that’s why I started that story with ‘Once upon a time.’ ”

&nbsp
; His eyes closed. “Hmm, Detha, you’re right, thometimeth mythth are better than what really happened.” Just like that, he was back asleep.

  I couldn’t wait for Mother and Jimmie to get home so they could see that Father was back to joking and talking and being silly, back to being himthelf!

  Dr. Taylor came by and took Father’s stitches out of his mouth and said he was doing much better. Doc said once all the swelling went down Father wouldn’t lisp as much. That evening, Mother took Father’s supper upstairs, then came back down and sat with me and Jimmie at the dining table.

  “OK,” Mother said, “we haven’t had Chiefs’ and Children’s Chow Chat for a while. Darling Daughter Deza, what new and exciting things happened to you today?”

  I told them everything that me and Father had talked about while they were out working, how he was letting me read to him, and how he was taking himself to the bathroom. He was even practicing putting his tongue up against the bottom of his mouth so he wouldn’t lisp as much. Me and Clarice were very impressed.

  Mother said, “Now to the Genuine, Gentle Jumpin’ Giant, Jimmie. What was your day like?”

  Jimmie told about working for Dr. Bracy, about finding coal along the railroad tracks and about how unbelievably fast trains go through Gary.

  “They’re like rocket ships on wheels! They make your whole body shake!”

  Me and Mother held our breaths when he said that. I could see cut-in-half slices of Jimmie flying through the air after he got the speed of a train wrong, but we both kept quiet.

  Saying anything would make my brother do something insane to prove he wasn’t scared of trains.

  Jimmie and me said together, “What about you, our Marvelous Mammalian Matriarch, how was your day?”

  Mother told us about what was going on with the Carsdales, how things were so bad in the country that even he might lose his job as president of the bank.

  “The poor dears might have to cut back to three vacations this year!”

  Jimmie said, “Oh, no! They aren’t going to have to sell one of their rocket ships, are they?”

  Mother started to answer, but before she could we all froze.