“I know, I know,” I agreed wearily. “My dad probably had the secret plans for building a gasless car, but I’m not going to look for them tonight. I’m beat. I’m going to bed.”
Petra had drunk a fair amount of Spumante, which made her argumentative and insistent on going to the third floor at once. I got tired of arguing long before she did, and announced I was going to bed. I suggested that she stay the night. I didn’t want her driving in the state she was in. Finally, around eleven, when Mr. Contreras chimed in on my side, she let us put her into a cab.
I helped him clean up, letting his waterfall of talk wash over me. Yes, Petra was a good kid, wonderful news about her promotion. Yes, maybe I was too hard on her. Didn’t I remember being young and enthusiastic? And then he was off to the races on his own youth. I left him in front of the television with a glass of grappa and took Peppy upstairs with me.
In my dreams, though, a saber-toothed tiger was charging me. When I fell helpless to the ground in front of it, it changed shape and became my father.
20
TRUNK SHOW
PETRA SHOWED UP THE NEXT MORNING JUST AS I WAS returning from the lake with the dogs. She’d come to collect her Pathfinder, but when she saw us she climbed out of it and jogged over. The dogs raced to her, fawning and barking, covering her white cargo pants with water and sand. She was as bright as ever, showing no after-effects of her evening with Spumante.
“You know, we could look at that trunk of yours before I go to work,” she said, playing with Mitch’s ears.
“What’s with you and my trunk?” I demanded. “Do you think there are going to be false teeth or rubies or something?”
She grinned at me. “I don’t know. I guess since coming to Chicago, I’ve gotten more interested in my family’s history. I mean, my mom’s family, they’ve been in the Kansas City area for centuries. One of her ancestors was a colonel in the Confederate Army, and another came out to Kansas with the anti-slavery pioneers in the 1850s, so I grew up on all her stories. And her family is, well, so WASPy that Dad’s story was always kind of looked down on. You know, Polish meatpackers. Now I want to know more about the Warshawskis. They seem more interesting since I’ve been in their city, and met you and so on.”
I’d taken her to look at the bungalow on Fairfield Avenue where my grandparents lived when they moved from Back of the Yards. Now Petra wanted to see the house on the city’s Northwest Side, where Grandma Warshawski moved after the ’sixty-six riots, and the tenement in the stockyard district where my dad grew up and her own father had been born.
She followed me up the stairs, energetically planning an outing for the end of the workday that would include Back of the Yards, my childhood home in South Chicago, and Norridge Park, where our grandmother lived out her old age.
“Petra, darling, calm down. How about one house at a time, being as how just getting from Norridge Park to South Chicago will take us a couple of hours?”
She gave her self-mocking pout. “Sorry! Mom always says I take off like a rocket ship when everyone else is still riding in buggies. Let’s go see Back of the Yards and your house today. We can go to Norridge Park tomorrow.”
“Or even on the weekend, my little Saturn booster. I have plans for tomorrow night.”
I put my stove-top espresso maker on to heat, asking my cousin to turn it off when the pressure built up, while I rinsed sand out of my hair and off my skin. When I returned to the kitchen, there was espresso all over the stove and floor and no sign of my cousin. I turned off the flame, cursing loudly, and began mopping up coffee.
“Oh! Sorry!” Petra suddenly appeared in the doorway. “I didn’t know how long it would take, so I thought I’d just try to find your trunk.”
“Damn it, Petra, why couldn’t you stay in here long enough to turn off the stove?”
“I said I was sorry!”
“That doesn’t solve the problem. I don’t want you helping yourself to my home, especially not when you don’t do a very simple task that would have kept this explosion from happening!”
“I’ll clean it up while you get dressed,” she muttered.
I’d used the towel I’d dried off with after my shower to soak up the worst of the mess. I put it in her arms, wet grounds and all, and stalked back to the bathroom to rinse coffee from my hands. When I returned to the kitchen dressed for work, Petra was standing in front of the stove, anxiously monitoring my little espresso pot. The floor was washed and the bath towel I’d dumped on her was hanging on the porch railing outside my back door.
She looked at me with an expression so much like Mitch’s after he’s been caught digging up the backyard that I couldn’t help laughing.