“Margaret?”
Margaret put down her clipboard and turned to the doorway. Her blue eyes looked flat and slightly wary. Adele noted again that there was something different about her. Behind her was a table full of canned corn and carrots. She was checking expiration dates before she loaded them onto the pantry shelves. She flicked her eyes at the flash of red dress beneath Adele’s black wool coat.
“Going out I see.”
“Out would be good,” said Adele. “This is more like presiding over a funeral.” Adele threw her black leather clutch on a table next to the canned carrots. “I have to deliver a speech tonight to a coalition of immigrant groups. And when it’s over, somebody’s career is going to be over, too. Either mine or Detective Vega’s.”
“I see.” Margaret grabbed a can of corn and studied an ink stamp on the top. She held it out to Adele. “Do you see an expiration date on this? The stamp doesn’t seem to correspond to anything.”
Adele fished a pair of glasses out of her clutch to check the tiny print. “That’s not a sell-by date,” said Adele. “I think it’s safe to give to clients.” She handed the corn back to Margaret. That’s when it hit her.
“You’re not wearing glasses.” Adele had never seen Margaret without her wire-framed glasses. “Did you just get contacts?”
“I was never any good with contacts,” said Margaret.
“I had LASIK surgery about a month ago. For the first time since first grade, I don’t have to have a piece of glass between me and the world.”
“So you didn’t need glasses on Friday night, I take it?”
“I can see perfectly without them now.”
Great, thought Adele. Vega not only shot and killed a man in front of a witness, he picked one with twenty-twenty vision.
Margaret turned her back to Adele and began stacking the cans on a shelf. There was an uncomfortable silence between them, punctuated by the bass thump of music and teenagers’ voices below. Adele got the sense Margaret had offered up this meeting and then instantly regretted it.
“I spoke to my attorney again, Adele. I don’t see how anything I say to you is going to be helpful to either of us.”
“We won’t know if you don’t tell me.” Adele grabbed a can of carrots off a shelf and studied the label. Some off-brand with a wholesome picture on the front that bore no resemblance to the mushy contents inside. “I lived off this stuff when I was a kid. To this day, I can’t eat anything canned.”
Margaret stopped stacking and turned to her. “Your family shopped—here?”
“There was a place in Port Carroll where I grew up,” said Adele. “Not this nice. Or maybe it was just the times. I remember it stank of cheddar cheese.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” said Adele. “I don’t mention it for the most part. It’s not something I like to dwell on.” Even now, some thirty years later, Adele could still see the pain in her mother’s face when she had to line up in front of that warehouse by the library for stale bread, hunks of cheese gone hard and white around the edges, and nearly expired cans of vegetables.
“Your parents lost their jobs?”
“My parents worked every day of their lives,” said Adele. “They were teachers in Ecuador. Here, they cleaned office buildings. But they dreamed of something better. So they started a business. Sort of like a FedEx store for immigrants. Wire transfers. Courier services. Phone lines in the era before cell phones. That sort of thing.”
“And it failed?”
“No. It was a huge success. So much so that their neighbor stole it from them.”
“You’re kidding,” said Margaret. “Couldn’t they file a police report or something?”
“The neighbor was the business owner on paper. On account of the fact that she was here legally and my parents weren’t. End of story as far as the police were concerned.” Adele still burned with the memory of her father trying to file a theft report—and the police laughing at him.
“There was nothing my parents could do,” she explained. “When you don’t have papers, you don’t count and neither does anything you try to accomplish. My parents lost all their savings. After that, we had to make choices. If my sister or I got sick, a doctor’s visit meant my father couldn’t afford bus fare for the week and had to walk three miles to work. A school trip to the museum meant a week of no lunches for my mother. People used to heckle us when we visited the pantry. They’d shout ‘Learn English’ or ‘Get a job.’ My parents did everything they could to build a better life for our family. And in one fell swoop, it was gone.”
Margaret leaned against the table and studied Adele for a moment. “Is that going to happen tonight?” she asked softly.