Project Sweet Life (12 page)

“We’re not sure yet,” Haleigh said. “But here’s the deal. We’ll loan you the money today, and then tomorrow you come back and agree to do whatever it is we tell you to do.”

That was, of course, a ridiculous bargain. Only a fool would agree to it.

A fool, or someone who had no choice in the matter.

“We’ll do
one
thing you say,” Curtis said. “We’re not agreeing to be your personal slaves all summer. If that’s
the case, we might as well get real summer jobs.”

Haleigh shrugged. “Fine.”

“And you can’t make us do anything embarrassing,” Curtis added.

Haleigh just smiled. “Well, I’m not so sure we can agree to
that
.”

Once we’d settled on the deal, we all went to Victor’s and my bank, which happened to be the branch of Capitol American where we had solved the bank robberies. We drove the teller insane twice depositing and withdrawing the same fifteen hundred dollars, but I figured they owed us for catching their robbers. At least I didn’t have to worry about running into my parents, since I’d told them I’d be here.

After that, we had to walk down the street and annoy the teller at Curtis’s bank so we could temporarily deposit the money into his account.

But at the end of an hour, Curtis, Victor, and I all had deposit slips showing totals of $1492.43 in our bank accounts—for the sake of realism, Curtis had insisted upon an odd, not exact, figure. And Lani and Haleigh had their money safely back in their own bank accounts.

That night over hamburger stroganoff, I showed my dad a bank deposit statement that read “$1492.43.”

“Thatta boy!” he said. “There. Now doesn’t that give you a nice feeling of satisfaction, seeing that little piece of paper?”

I couldn’t deny it—mostly because it would mean the punishment to end all punishments if that little piece of paper hadn’t been there.

The next day, we met the girls at the gravel pit again. I admit I was nervous. I could only imagine what their devilish little minds would put us up to.

“At the start of the summer, Lani’s mom and my mom decided that we had to do volunteer work all summer long,” Haleigh said. “Like we’d committed some crime, not just finished a grueling year of school.”

We could relate.

“So they signed us up for something called Junior Community Service,” Haleigh went on. “And we’ve gone every Saturday for six weeks. But we want this Saturday off.”

“What are you saying?” Curtis said. “You want us to
do your volunteer work this week?”

Lani nodded. “This Saturday. At the Evergreen Assisted Living Center. You’ll be doing makeovers on the women.”

“Saint Embarrassus,” Victor mumbled, able to speak around Lani at last.

Still, a deal was a deal. So that Saturday afternoon, we showed up at the Evergreen Assisted Living Center. The woman behind the front desk looked surprised to see us.

“
You’re
the kids from Junior Community Service?” she said.

“Yeah,” Curtis said. “So?”

“So I was just expecting…” She shook her head. “The women are waiting for you in the dayroom.” She pointed us to a doorway down the hall.

The dayroom was surprisingly homey: a large sun-room with big picture windows and comfortable couches covered in plastic. A huge bouquet of hydrangeas sat on the wicker coffee table, along with all the beauty supplies.

There were eight women waiting for us, all at least
seventy. Each wore a robe or sweatsuit. Two were in wheelchairs, but there were also canes and walkers leaning up against the wall. The room smelled like a dozen different powders and lotions—not to mention a couple of unpleasant body odors.

But Curtis confronted the women with a huge grin on his face. He introduced us all, then said, “Someone told us you gals are interested in a little makeover. But I know that can’t be right, because you all already look so pretty!”

Eight yellowed but beaming smiles greeted us.

“Oh, well,” Curtis said. “Let’s get that hair in curlers anyway! Let’s get those fingernails painted!”

I admit there are times when Curtis’s utter self-confidence and larger-than-life personality annoys me. But this was not one of those times.

That said, none of the three of us knew beans about makeovers. Fortunately, there’s this thing about women and hair and makeup: They’ve done it so many times in their lives that you can give them a little push, like pick up an eyebrow pencil and wave it in their direction, and off they go.

As they worked, we talked.

“How long have you lived in Tacoma?” I asked Mrs. Duffy, a frail-looking woman with short hair parted like a man’s.

“Oh, far too long!” she said. “Would have moved away years ago if my husband hadn’t wanted to live near his mother. But the city’s much better than it used to be. It was such an ugly, backward place.”

“Now
that
is the danged-darn truth,” said Mrs. Forsythe, who had a Southern accent. “What was
that
about?”

“Inferiority complex,” said Mrs. Gladstein, a platinum blonde with saggy stockings. “It never got over being outdone by Seattle up north. But jealousy makes a city bitter and small-minded. Just like people. One of my brothers was a different person after my other brother bought that mansion out on American Lake.”

“I like that Tacoma is a city of secrets,” said Mrs. Martin, a plump woman in a flowered housecoat.

“Secrets?” I said, trying—unsuccessfully—to help Mrs. Duffy with her eyeliner. How were you supposed to use that stuff without poking a person in the eye?

Mrs. Martin preened in a hand mirror. “Oh, yes. People expect a big city like Seattle to have secrets. They
don’t expect it in Tacoma. But what people forget is that Tacoma
was
a big city. That makes its secrets even more interesting, because most people have forgotten all about them. But we women? We don’t forget.”

I hadn’t expected to be interested in anything these women had to say. Suddenly I was.

“What kind of secrets?” Victor asked.

“Well, if we
told
you,” Mrs. Forsythe said coyly, “they wouldn’t be secrets, would they?”

“We know one of the city’s secrets,” I found myself saying. “The China Tunnels. We’ve even been down in them.” I wasn’t sure what made me say this. It just seemed that since the women were sharing things, we should too.

Mrs. Duffy looked up at me from her wheelchair with a big smile. “Oh, you
have
, have you? So they really exist! I’ve been hearing about those tunnels my whole life. Any chance you’ll show me where they are?”

Mrs. Duffy was probably ninety years old. So of course I said, “I’d be
happy
to take you down in those old tunnels! But it’s cold down there, so you’ll have to bring a sweater.”

“
Ha!
” Mrs. Duffy said. “It’s a
deal
!”

“I know a secret,” said a woman who hadn’t spoken before. “Something I haven’t thought about in a long time.” It was Mrs. Yee, a small Asian woman with nimble fingers.

“Oh?” Curtis said, clearly trying to humor her. “What secret is that?”

Mrs. Yee raised an eyebrow. “There’s a treasure hidden right here in Tacoma.”

“Is that right?” I said with a smile. But when I looked over at her face, I saw that her mouth was even, her jaw firm. Victor, Curtis, and I all met one another’s eyes. The air in the room smelled better now, of perfumed face powder and fingernail polish.

“What kind of treasure?” Victor asked quietly.

“It all happened over a hundred years ago, in 1885. It was the year Tacoma kicked out the Chinese people.”

“A
terrible
time,” Mrs. Duffy said. “Just goes to show that Tacoma had its faults even before it lost its rivalry with Seattle.”

“Back then, the Chinese were all anyone could talk about,” Mrs. Yee went on. “Everything that was bad with the city was all their fault. They were treated like
dogs, or worse. Finally, the city ordered all the Chinese to leave town by Tuesday, November third. One group of Chinese men decided to get back at the city. They’d leave town, sure, but only after robbing the city bank. They knew the combination to the vault because none of the white people noticed the old Chinese man who cleaned the bank floors while they worked. And they knew they could get in and out of the bank without detection because they’d helped dig the China Tunnels, and they knew about a secret entrance in the basement of the building.”

The China Tunnels!
We knew for a fact that they did exist. Did that mean that Mrs. Yee’s story, whatever it was, might be true too?

“But a woman named Lei-Lei Tang was out tending her chrysanthemums,” Mrs. Yee continued. “And she overheard the men planning to rob the bank. Lei-Lei hated the idea. Not only was it wrong to steal, Lei-Lei was certain the white people would blame the Chinese people left behind, and punish them harshly.

“That night, Monday night, the men went through with the plan to rob the bank, stealing more than twenty
thousand dollars. But Lei-Lei was watching. Then she made a decision of her own. While the men were preparing to leave town, she decided to steal the money from them and sneak it back into the bank vault. That way, the Chinese men would accuse one another of taking the money, and the white people in town would never know about the bank robbery in the first place.

“Lei-Lei took the money, intending to return it to the bank. But one of the men quickly noticed that the money was gone. They began searching Chinatown and the China Tunnels for the missing loot. Rather than draw suspicion to herself and knowing she’d never get back into the vault that night, Lei-Lei hid the money in a safe place, planning to return it to the bank early the next morning while everyone else was still asleep.

“But something terrible happened early the next morning. Before she could return the money, white men came to Chinatown. Lei-Lei tried to slip away to get the money from its hiding place, but they wouldn’t let her. And that Tuesday morning happened to be the day that the whole Chinese community was rounded up by the city of Tacoma and put on a train to Portland.”

“Did Lei-Lei ever come back to Tacoma to get the money?” Curtis asked.

Mrs. Yee shook her head. “For months, she tried to come back to return the money to the bank, but she couldn’t afford to make the trip.”

“
Why
?” Mrs. Forsythe said. “After what Tacoma had done to her, why’d she want to return it at all? It sounds like the city got exactly what it deserved!”

Mrs. Forsythe had a point. Still, I knew why Lei-Lei had tried so hard to come back. It was the reason Curtis, Victor, and I had broken into Mrs. Shelby’s house: to make it clear that we didn’t steal, that we were better than she was. Lei-Lei wanted to prove, once and for all, that she was better than the people who had done her own people so wrong.

“A few months after the incident, Lei-Lei stopped trying to come back,” Mrs. Yee went on. “She had learned something that changed her mind. Eventually, she died in Portland, in a home surrounded by a big garden of chrysanthemums. But before she died, she told her daughter the whole story. Who told her daughter. Who told me.”

“Lei-Lei was your great-grandmother?” Mrs. Martin said, but I wasn’t surprised. I had already figured that part out, and I knew that Curtis and Victor had too.

Mrs. Yee nodded.

“Did she ever tell you where the money was?” Curtis asked.

“No,” Mrs. Yee said. “Lei-Lei never told anyone that. I guess she decided that the obligation to return the money ended with her. She didn’t want the money either, since it wasn’t hers to begin with. But my mother did say that her mother told her it was in a very safe place where no one would ever find it.”

As Mrs. Yee finished her story, the room fell so quiet you could almost hear the fingernail polish drying. I had no way of knowing if the story was true, but I was certain that Mrs. Yee
thought
it was. Was there really something to the idea that women were the keepers of secrets in a community? After all, back in Lei-Lei’s day, the Chinese men had secrets from the white people, but the Chinese women knew the secrets of the men, and also had secrets of their own.

I also thought how ironic it was that if my dad hadn’t wanted to see my bank balance, we wouldn’t have had to
make that deal with Haleigh and Lani, and we wouldn’t have ever heard this story.

“I hate to say it,” Curtis said quietly, “but we’re just about done here.”

I looked around the room. Curtis was right. The women had been curled and powdered and rouged and lipsticked beyond recognition. Technically, they looked ridiculous; none of them were exactly cover-girl material to begin with, and while they’d applied their own makeup countless times before, these were women with shaking fingers and terrible eyesight. Meanwhile, Curtis, Victor, and I had been absolutely no help whatsoever—and had probably made things worse.

But the afternoon hadn’t been about the quality of our makeup and hairstyling. It was about the expressions on the faces of these old ladies, which were shining like seven-year-olds at the gates to Disneyland.

“Oh,” Mrs. Gladstein said sadly.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Duffy, tears forming in her eyes. “Well, thank you all for coming to visit with us.”

“Thank
you
,” Curtis said. “And do you mind if we come back sometime to visit?”

“We’d
love
that,” Mrs. Martin said.

For once, Curtis wasn’t lying. I knew we would go back to visit these women. Before then, maybe I could figure out how in the world you’re supposed to use eyeliner without poking the person in the eye.