I stared at the rubble. When I was a child and we had to wash the windows every day because of the thick smears of smoke that settled on them, I would long for twenty-four hours without the mills, but I could not have imagined them gone, those giant sheds, the miles of conveyor belts ferrying coal and iron ore, the orange sparks filling the night sky that told you they were pouring. How could something so big disappear into a pile of rubble and weeds? I couldn’t fathom it.
My mother insisted on facing unpleasant chores head-on, whether washing windows, or talking to people like Sandra Czernin. I always thought it would be better to play first and see whether there was time left in the day to do the dirty work, but I could hear Gabriella’s voice: the longer you indulge yourself over that steel mill, the harder it will be in the end to do the job you came here for.
I squared my shoulders and walked up to the front door. On a street of sad and sagging houses, the Czernins’ place was neatly painted, all the siding intact, the small yard tidy, with a lawn that had been trimmed for the winter and some chrysanthemums lining the short walk. Sandra’s anger at least took a constructive turn, if it drove her to maintain her home like this, or to push Bron into doing it.
Sandra came to the door within seconds of my ringing the bell. She stared as if she didn’t recognize me. Her stiff bleached hair hadn’t been washed or combed recently and stood out from her head at wild angles. Her blue eyes were bloodshot, and the shape of her face indistinct, as if the bones had dissolved behind the skin.
“Sandra, hi. I’m sorry about Bron.”
“Tori Warshawski! You have one hell of a nerve coming around here now, two days late. Your sympathy doesn’t mean shit to me. You found him, that’s what that cop told me. And you didn’t think you owed me even a phone call? I found your husband, Sandra, go order a coffin, because you’re a widow now?”
Her anger sounded forced, as though she were trying to whip herself into feeling something, anything, and anger were the only emotion she could come up with when she couldn’t muster grief. I almost started justifying myself-my night in the swamp, my day in the hospital-but I swallowed it all.
“You’re right. I should have called you right away. If you let me in, I’ll tell you what I know.” I pushed forward, not waiting for her to decide if she could stand for me to be in her house, and she backed up automatically, the way people do.
“He was with that English whore, wasn’t he?” she said when we were in her entryway. “Is she dead, too?”
“No. Very badly injured, too much to talk and tell the cops who attacked them.”
“Yeah, dry your eyes while I start playing ‘My Heart Cries for You’ on the violin.” To my dismay, she rubbed the tip of her middle finger against the top of her index finger, the way we did as kids when we were being sarcastic-a flea playing “My Heart Cries for You” on the world’s smallest violin, we used to say.
“How’s April holding up?” I asked.
“Oh, she was Daddy’s little angel, she can’t believe he’s dead, can’t believe he was with this English reporter, even though all the kids at school knew about it and told her.”
“Bron thought he’d be able to find money for her defibrillator. Do you know if he’d come up with anything?”
“Bron and his ideas.” She contorted her face into a horrible sneer. “He probably thought he could steal a load of TVs from By-Smart. If he ever had a good idea above his waistline, I never heard about it. There’s only one thing that could help and that’s if he died working for the company.”
Her bitterness was so hard to listen to that it took me a minute to understand what she meant. “Oh. So you could collect his workers’ comp indemnity. He didn’t have life insurance?”
“Ten thousand dollars. By the time I’ve buried him, there’ll be about seven left.” Tears spurted from her eyes. “Oh, damn him, what am I going to do without him? He cheated on me every five seconds, but what am I going to do? I can’t keep the house, I can’t look after April, damn him, damn him, damn him.”
She started sobbing in a rasping, dry way that shook her thin body so hard she had to lean against the wall. I took her arm and gently moved her into the living room, where the prim furniture was encased in plastic. I took the cover off the couch and sat her down.
33 Happy Families Are All Alike, Unhappy Families…
The Czernin house was laid out like every other bungalow on the South Side, including the one where I grew up. I moved by instinct through the dining room to the kitchen. I put water on for tea, but, while waiting for it to boil, I couldn’t resist opening the back door to see if they had a little lean-to like ours. My dad had stored his tools there; he could repair most things around the house. He’d even replaced a broken wheel on my roller skates. It seemed satisfying to find an identical one behind Sandra’s kitchen, although it wasn’t as tidy as my dad’s. My dad would never have left cut-up pieces of rubber lying around the work surface like that, or the frayed ends of old lengths of wiring.
I was turning back to the kitchen to hunt for tea when April appeared in the doorway. She was clutching the giant bear Bron had given her in the hospital; her face was still puffy from the heart meds she was taking.
“Coach! I didn’t know-didn’t expect-”
“Hi, honey. I’m sorry about your dad. You know I’m the person who found him.”
She nodded bleakly. “Were you looking at his shop? He taught me how to use a soldering iron. I even worked on a project with him last week, but I don’t think Ma will let me use his tools now. Does she know you’re here?”
“She’s in the living room, pretty upset; I’m trying to find tea.”
April opened a canister on the counter and pulled out a tea bag. While she got mugs down from a shelf, I asked how she was feeling.
“Okay, I guess. They’re giving me these drugs that make me sleepy, that’s all. You know, they’re saying I can’t play anymore, can’t play basketball.”
“I know: it’s a shame; you’re a good player, and we’ll miss you, but you can’t risk your health running around the court. You can still be part of the team if you want, come to the practices and help chart plays.”
Her face brightened a little. “But how am I going to get to college if I can’t get a scholarship?”
“Academics,” I said dryly. “Not as glamorous as a sports scholarship, but they’ll carry you further in the long run. Let’s not worry about it today, though-you’ve got enough going on, and it’s a year before you have to start applying.”
The kettle started boiling, and I poured water into the mugs. “April, have you talked to Josie since she came to the hospital?”
She turned away from me and became very busy at the counter, moving the tea bag from one cup to the next until all three had turned a pale yellow.
“Josie disappeared the same night your father died, and I’m very worried about her. Did she run away with Billy?”
She scrunched her face unhappily. “I promised not to say anything.”
“I found Billy’s sports car wrecked under the Skyway around one in the morning. I think the English reporter had been in it, but where were Billy and Josie?”
“Billy gave Daddy his car,” she whispered softly. “He said he couldn’t use it anymore, and he knew Daddy didn’t have a car, if we wanted to go out he had to borrow a car from a buddy, or sometimes he drove us in the semi if he thought Mr. Grobian wouldn’t find out, you know, it was By-Smart property.”
“When did he give your dad the car?” I tried to keep my voice low and level, not to make her more nervous than she already was.
“Monday. He came to the house Monday morning, after they brought me home from the hospital. Ma had to be at work; they only gave her one hour off to bring me home, but Daddy was working a late shift so he didn’t leave until three. And then, then Josie came. I called her and told her to come here before she went to school. She and Billy used to meet here, see, it was a place she could come and be doing her homework so her ma didn’t mind, and my ma, she just thought Billy was a boy from school, we didn’t tell her he was one of the Bysens, she would, like, totally lose it if she knew that.”