I’d had another late night last night, between staying at the school with my warring players, calling on Rose, and then, finally, stopping to check on Mary Ann McFarlane on my way north. Although a home care provider came in four times a week and did laundry and other difficult jobs, I’d gotten in the habit of bringing her food, sometimes dinner, sometimes just extra treats she enjoyed that no one else thought worth shopping for.
Mary Ann lived just north of my old neighborhood in an apartment like my own, four rooms built railway style in an old brick eight-flat. She had been in bed when I reached her last night, but she called out to me in a voice still strong enough to reach the hall. I shouted back a greeting as I bent to pet Scurry, her dachshund, who was turning inside out in his eagerness at seeing me.
What I would do with the dog when—if—he needed a new home was one of my ongoing concerns. I already had a golden retriever and her gigantic half-Lab son. A third dog would bring the health department down on me—not on account of the dogs, but to put me into a locked ward.
By the time I got to the bedroom, my old coach had hoisted herself out of bed and made it to the doorway. She was clutching the edge of the dresser, but she waved off my offered arm and stood panting until she got her breath back. In the bedroom’s dim light she looked ghastly, her cheeks sunken, the skin around her neck hanging in folds. She used to be a stocky woman; now cancer and chemicals had sucked the life out from under her flesh. The chemo had also turned her bald. The hair was growing back, covering her head with a coarse, gray-streaked red stubble, but even when she was as bald as Michael Jordan she had refused to wear a wig.
When I first saw her like this, it had been a shock: I was so used to her muscular energy that I couldn’t think of her as ill, or old. Not that she was old—she was only sixty-six, I’d learned to my surprise. Somehow, when she was coaching me, and teaching me Latin, she’d looked as formidably ancient as her bust of Caesar Augustus.
She waited to talk until she’d walked to the kitchen and was sitting at the old enamel table there. Scurry jumped up onto her lap. I put the kettle on for tea and unpacked the groceries I’d picked up for her.
“How did practice go today?” she asked.
I told her about the fight; she nodded approvingly of the way I’d handled it. “The school doesn’t care if those girls play or not. Or even if they attend—under No Child Left Behind, Celine Jackman is dragging the test scores down, so they’d have been just as happy if you kicked her out, but basketball’s her lifeline. Don’t let her get suspended if you can help it.”
She stopped to catch her breath, then added, “You’re not making any of that tofu slop, are you?”
“No, ma’am.” When I first started cooking for her, I’d tried making her miso soup with tofu, thinking it would be easier for her to digest, and maybe help her get some strength back, but she’d hated it. She was a meat-and-potatoes woman through and through, and if she couldn’t eat much of her pot roast these days she still enjoyed it more than tofu slop.
While she slowly ate as much of the meal as she could manage, I went to the bedroom to change her sheets. She hated my seeing the blood and pus in her bed, so we both pretended I didn’t know it was there. On days when she was too weak to get out of bed, her embarrassment at the condition of the linens was more painful than the tumors themselves.
While I bundled everything into a bag for the laundry service, I glanced at the books she’d been reading. One of Lindsay Davis’s Roman mysteries. The most recent volume of LBJ’s biography. A collection of Latin crossword puzzles—all the clues were in Latin, no English hints at all. It was only her body that was failing.
When I got back to the kitchen, I told her Rose Dorrado’s story. “You know everyone in South Chicago. You know Zamar? Is he likely to sabotage his own factory?”
“Frank Zamar?” She shook her head. “I don’t know that kind of thing about anyone, Victoria. People down here get desperate, and they do the things desperate people do. I don’t think he’d hurt anyone, though: if he’s trying to destroy his own plant, he won’t do it while any of his employees are on the premises.”
“He have kids in the school?”
“He doesn’t have a family, as far as I know. Lives on the East Side, used to be with his mother, but she’s been gone three, four years now. Quiet man, fifty-something. Last year he donated uniforms to our program. Josie’s mom probably put him up to it. That’s how I met him at all—Rose Dorrado got him to come watch Julia play. That’s Josie’s sister, you know. She was my best player, maybe since you were in school, until she had the kid. Now her life’s unraveled, she doesn’t even come to school.”
I slapped the sponge against the counter hard enough to bounce it across the room. “These girls and their babies! I grew up in that neighborhood, I went to that high school. There were always some girls who got pregnant, but nothing like what I’m seeing down here now.”
Mary Ann sighed. “I know. If I knew how to stop them I would. Girls in your generation weren’t so sexually active so young, for one thing, and you had more possibilities in front of you.”