Chapter 3

I didn't see or hear anything more from Dan Noonan until the following Sunday. I was over at the golf course, waiting for my afternoon loop when Dan came into the caddy shack looking for me. At first, I thought he might have come by to start a fight with me.

"Can I talk to you a minute, Jackie?" Dan didn't sound like he was mad at me when he asked me that. I got up from where I'd been reading some comic books and followed him back out of the building. We went over to the shade of a nearby tree.

"What do you need, Dan?"

"I wanted to find out if you're still planning on helping me out tomorrow?"

"You're planning to work on Labor Day?"

"I've got people who want me to help them clean and store their outdoor furniture at their summer houses. Don't worry, Katie won't be coming with us. Frank decided he didn't want to work for the money I was going to be paying him. My dad will drive us over to the places where we need to go, but we'll need to walk home from there."

"My cousin Lenny can borrow my aunt's car and help us with the work too. He could use the extra money, and he's a good worker."

"Would he pick us up and drop us off back home too?"

"For ten bucks he would. How much were you planning on giving me for working tomorrow?"

"Six dollars, and your share of any tips we get. I'll pay Lenny the ten dollars, but only if he's a good worker. I'm not paying that much for him to just drive us around."

"He's out on the course now, but I'll make sure I talk to him before he leaves here. What time do you want him to come get us, eight again?"

"I'd like to be over at the beach by eight. Can he come get us at seven thirty?"

I arranged with Dan that I'd stop off at his house to confirm everything with him when I got home from the golf course. I waited around for Lenny after I was finished caddying for the day. It was almost eight o'clock before he finished up and was ready to leave.

"Lenny, I've got us a little job for tomorrow. You need to borrow Aunt Betty's car though."

"What kind of job, Jackie? Tomorrow is a holiday. I was planning on coming back here to look for lost balls."

"A ten dollar job. Dan Noonan is helping some of the summer people close up their houses down at the beach. He needs us to help clean up their outside furniture and make it ready to put in storage for the winter. You should do this tomorrow, because if we do a good job, he'll have other work we can do for him later. His cousin was driving him, but he decided to quit."

Lenny didn't say anything. I gave him some time to think about it. Lenny was usually very deliberate when it came to deciding things. He trusted me, but not most other people, because he'd been tricked and taken advantage of before. Lenny was about twenty four years old, and he still lived at home with his mother.

If you gave him enough time, Lenny could usually figure things out for himself. He hadn't done very well in school, quitting in about the tenth grade, but he wasn't really stupid. He was slow to learn though. Nothing seemed to come easy to him. He was a great caddy, but he was already the oldest caddy on the golf course.

Most people stopped caddying when they got through with high school. They went on to bigger and better things. A caddy only had work in the summer. Not Lenny though. He worked every summer. Sometimes, he got some kind of other work in the off season, but he always quit when the golf course opened up in the Spring again. Lenny didn't think caddying had no future. He liked it, and he was always hoping to be made the Caddymaster someday.

"I don't know, Jackie. Will you be there to help me if I have any questions about things?"

"I'll be right there with you, Lenny. It will be good, you'll see. If we finish up early enough, I'll come back here with you and help you look for golf balls until it gets dark."

Lenny didn't like to look bad in front of strangers. He worried because people always assumed that he could understand complicated things with very little explanation. Lenny knew I could figure things out, and he knew that I would be patient with him if it took him some time to figure things out for himself. Lenny looked perfectly normal, and he was, for the most part. His brain didn't work quickly though, and that was why he did poorly in school. By the time he figured something out, the rest of the class had moved on to something else. For him, this was very frustrating. When he went to school, they didn't have classes for slow learners like they do now. You either learned with the rest of the class or you got left behind. Lenny never failed a grade, but he had to work extra hard just to get C's and D's on his report cards. Lenny lost a lot of his confidence when he was a student. Maybe that was what kept him from taking on any new challenges.

Lenny showed up at my house a little before seven thirty the next morning. My mother got him a cup of coffee and then she and my father sat down with him to try to catch up with what he and my Aunt Betty had been up to. Everybody in the family liked Lenny. He was always well thought of in the family, a very sweet man, and was always ready to help anyone out at any time. He didn't have much, but what he did have, he'd share it with you if you let him know that you needed his help.

Dan showed up at my door at about a quarter til eight, and he had Kathleen with him. From the embarrassed look on his face, I knew he wasn't happy that he had been told to bring her along with him. As soon as my father saw Kathleen, he got an angry look on his face. I was afraid he was going to spout off again, ruining Lenny's and my chance to make some money with Dan. For whatever reason though, for once he held himself in check until after the four of us had left. My mother told me later that she'd had to listen to quite an earful from him about how stupid Mr. and Mrs. Noonan were to keep letting their daughter get into those kinds of dangerous situations.

We spent the whole morning and the early afternoon working. Dan always kept Katie close by him, and I kept Lenny close to me too. We did work at four different summer houses. Lenny and I put up two sets of storm windows as well as cleaning off and storing all the outside furniture at three of the houses. Lenny and I made a good team when carrying things. Lenny was pretty strong at that time, and he was a very willing worker. We were fed sandwiches at two of the places where we were helping out, and all of them brought drinks out for us. Katie and Dan worked inside some of the houses, covering up furniture with blankets and sheets. All four of us worked together at the last house, cleaning and storing the outside furniture.

We must have done pretty good jobs too, because Dan gave me twelve dollars for my share. I found out that he gave Lenny twelve dollars too, plus another two dollars for the car. Lenny seemed very satisfied with the money he was given.

Katie kept her distance from me. I could tell that she was upset over what I'd done. I assumed that she had gotten into trouble because of what I had told my parents, and what my father had later said to her parents. I tried not to let her being upset with me bother anything. All I wanted was to do the work, and then get paid for it.

After Lenny dropped off the Noonan's, he and I drove over to the golf course. It was after six already, but we spent another hour and a half looking for lost golf balls. We didn't do as well as we'd hoped, but we did find a few good ones. Lenny figured the balls we found were worth about a dollar to us and offered me fifty cents for my share. I took it gladly, figuring he'd have to wait until April to turn those balls into cash again.

Lenny and I worked for Dan several more times on weekends, right up until around Christmas time. Several times, Katie went to work with us as well. Nothing much happened out of the ordinary when she was there. Dan always made a point of keeping a close watch on her when she was with us out working.

I had gone over to Lenny's house after one of these work days, and was walking back home at around eight at night when I was once again accosted by Katie. This time she stood right out in the open path, in plain sight, obviously waiting for me. She was dressed in the same jeans, heavy coat and boy's shirt she'd worn while we were out working earlier in the day. I stopped about ten feet short of where she was standing.

"Katie, did you sneak out of the house again?"

"Where's that other boy?"

"Lenny? He isn't a boy, Katie, he's twenty four years old."

"Where is he? Dan said you were going with him somewhere after you dropped us off."

"He went home. Did you come out here expecting to see him too?"

"He was in your house again when we came over this morning."

"Yes, but he lives in his own house, not ours. That's where he is now."

"Is it far from here?"

"Over a mile from here. It would be dark before you could walk there. You should forget about Lenny and go on back home."

"Lenny is nice. He isn't like you at all."

"He has a girlfriend already, Katie. A woman girlfriend."

I was trying to figure out a good way to push past her and head as quickly as I could over to my house. I was afraid she'd just follow me like the last time, and then I'd have to risk another confrontation with my father. I sure didn't want to risk that.

"Are you going back home now? You can see Lenny isn't with me. If you leave now, I promise I won't tell your parents that you came out to meet me in the woods again."

"I've seen you in the woods with all those other girls."

"When?"

"Before, with those three new girls. I saw your brother with them too. How come you didn't make them go home too?"

I knew she was talking about the Gordon sisters and their cousin. They'd moved into the house connecting with ours over the summer. Ray and I were both chasing after them, but Ray was doing better with them than I was. I was hoping to change that, but I had a lot less free time than Ray did. Now that caddying season was over and winter was well started, I expected to begin making progress with the older sister, Shannon. She was playing hard to get, but there was something about her that appealed to me much more than the other two.

"Because they're older, and because they don't have a brother who is a friend of mine."

"Dan has stopped doing things with me because he said I told you about it. You weren't supposed to say anything about what I told you."

"He told me what he did. It wasn't anything bad, just some hugging to get you calmed down."

"Hah. It wasn't just hugging. He used to rub me with his peter. On my crack. Now he doesn't do that any more. That isn't just hugging."

My first reaction was to be angry at Dan for his having lied to me. My second reaction was to be worried that she might be capable of making that kind of story up. If so, she could easily lie again and tell people I'd done that to her too. If a girl said you did something to her, people would automatically believe her. It wouldn't matter how much you tried to deny it.

"You better just turn around and go back home now, Katie. If you don't, I'm going back over to your house and I'll tell your parents what you just told me."

"I'll say you're lying. You can't prove we did that."

"Go home, Katie. Go home now, and I'll forget what you told me."

Surprisingly, she did turn around after I said that. I watched her walking back towards her home. In bed that night, I couldn't get the thought of her doing things with her brother out of my mind. It was fascinating to me, like a train wreck. From the way she had spoken about what Dan did to her, I had to believe she was telling me the truth.

I could picture the two of them in my mind's eye. It excited my senses, but, at the same time, it went against almost everything I'd ever been taught. Dan was violating the trust of his whole family. I was ashamed of some of the thoughts I was having about Katie.

I knew I'd have to sneak off to another parish on the following Saturday afternoon to make my confession. I believed in the sanctity of the confessional, but I wasn't one hundred percent certain that our parish priests wouldn't drop broad hints to my mother if they had something really bad to report on. Why take a chance?

So many new things had been happening that I put Dan and Katie out of my thoughts. I was so busy with school and my own social situations that I didn't have any time to spare to give any more thought to Katie and what she'd said to me. Dan didn't approach me after that about doing any more work for him, and I didn't see Katie around very much in the winter anyway.

It was early in April before the rumors started circulating about Katie being pregnant. Our whole family had experienced several upheavals since right before school had started back up again. My father had gotten caught fooling around with LaVerne Gordon, and the repercussions from that had fueled the neighborhood gossips until well past Christmas. By the time I started hearing anything about Katie Noonan, I was just relieved that all the gossiping and tongue clucking wasn't about what was taking place with our family anymore.

The first real trouble started when Mr. Noonan made some comment that got back to my Aunt Margaret. Supposedly, he had said something about suspecting that I was the one responsible for Katie's pregnancy. The wife of the man he'd supposedly made the comment to had spoken with my aunt, and she ran straight to my mother to tell her the news.

By the time I got home from school that afternoon, everyone in our neighborhood already believed I was the one who had taken advantage of poor Kathleen Noonan. When I walked in my house, my mother and aunt were sitting at the kitchen table glaring at me.