I felt like wrenching one of the loose slats from the stairwell railing and beating him with it. “I didn’t invite her,” I shrieked. “I didn’t know she was coming. I didn’t want her here. I didn’t want to wake up at three in the morning.”
“There’s no need to shout,” he said severely. “And even if you wasn’t expecting her, you could’a gone up to your apartment to talk.”
I opened and shut my mouth several times but couldn’t construct a coherent response. Anyway, I’d kept Elena in the hall in hopes she’d feel hurt enough to just pick up the duffel bag and go. But even as I’d done it I’d known in my heart of hearts that I couldn’t turn her away at that hour. So the old man was right. Agreeing with him didn’t make me any happier.
“Okay, okay,” I snapped. “It won’t happen again. Now get off my back—I’ve got a lot to do today.” I stomped up the stairs to my kitchen.
Muted snores still seeped through the closed door from the living room. I made a pot of coffee and took a cup into the bathroom with me while I showered. Bent on leaving the apartment as fast as possible, I pulled on jeans and a white shirt and stopped in the kitchen to scratch together a breakfast.
Elena was sitting at the breakfast table. She’d put a soiled quilted dressing gown over the violet nightie. Her hands shook slightly; she used both of them to lift a cup of coffee to her mouth.
She produced an eager smile. “Wonderful coffee you make, baby. Just as good as your ma’s.”
“Thank you, Elena.” I opened the refrigerator door and took stock of the meager contents. “I’m sorry I can’t stay to chat, but I want to try to find you someplace to sleep tonight.”
“Aw, Vicki—Victoria, I mean. Don’t rush around like that. It ain’t good for the heart. Let me stay here, just for a few days, anyway. Get over the shock of living through that inferno last night. I promise I won’t bother you any. And I could get the place cleaned up a little while you’re at work.”
I shook my head implacably. “No way, Elena. I will not have you living here. Not one night longer.”
Her face puckered. “Why do you hate me, baby? I’m your own daddy’s sister. Family has to stick by family.”
“I don’t hate you. I don’t want to live with anyone, but you and I lead especially incompatible lives. You know as well as I that Tony would say the same if he were still around.”
There’d been a painful episode when Elena announced her independence from my grandmother and moved into her own apartment. Finding solitude not to her liking, she’d shown up at our house in South Chicago one weekend. She’d stayed three days. It wasn’t my fierce mother who’d asked her to leave—Gabriella’s love of the underdog somehow could encompass even Elena. But my easygoing father came home from the graveyard shift on Monday to find Elena passed out at the kitchen table. He put her into a detox unit at County and refused to talk to her for six months after she got out.
Elena apparently also remembered this episode. The pouty puckering disappeared from her face. She looked stricken, and somehow more real.
I squeezed her shoulder gently and offered to make her some eggs. She shook her head without speaking, watching me silently while I spread anchovy paste on toast. I ate it quickly and left before pity could overcome my judgment.
It was well past nine now. The morning rush was ending and I had an easy run across Belmont to the expressway. When I neared the Loop, though, the traffic congealed as we moved through a construction maze. The four miles on the Ryan between the Eisenhower and Thirty-first, supposedly the busiest eight lanes of traffic anywhere in the known universe, had finally crumbled under the stress of the semi’s. The southbound lanes were closed while the feds performed reconstructive surgery.
My little Cavalier bounced between a couple of sixty-tonners as the slow lines of traffic snaked around the construction barricades. To my right the surface of the old roadbed had been completely removed; lattices of the reinforcing bars were exposed. They looked like tightly packed nests of vipers—here and there a rusty head stood up prepared to strike.
The turnoff to Lake Shore Drive had been so cleverly disguised that I was parallel with the barrel blocking one of the exit lanes before I realized it. With my sixty-ton pal close on my tail, I couldn’t stand on the brakes and swerve around the barrel. I gnashed my teeth and rode down to Thirty-fifth, then took side streets up to Cermak.