“Your mother told you she went to college?”
Sicily frowned at her fingernails, chewed at a cuticle. “She did, though.”
“She didn’t,” I said.
“That’s where theymet,” Sicily said.
“Maybe she worked as a janitor there, but your mother—ourmother—went to the school of hard knocks with a major in teen pregnancy and a minor in slipping comatose on the floor of a shooting gallery.”
All I got was a blank stare.
“She was a drug addict,” I said.
“That’s alie.” The chair scraped as Sicily leapt up, knocking a pile of stuff off the desk to the floor. She lurched to the door and turned back, pink spots on her cheeks. Disney rage. “What is this? Some kind of joke? If you didn’t want to help me, why make it all up that your… that my mother… Why not just say so?”
“It’s the truth. You can ask her when she eventually turns up. Probably high—hey, maybe that’s what happened. She relapsed.” I realized I sounded flippant, even victorious, as though that loss was my gain, but that wasn’t true, either. I didn’t wish that on anyone. “I’m sorry,” I said, meaning it.
“Is this all some kind of game to mess with me? What’s the con? I don’t have any money—”
“Holy hell, Crystal Gayle, will you sit down? Iamyour—whatever. Half. I am,” I said. “Andshewas. An addict.” The computer was finallygrinding to a reluctant readiness to serve. “But maybe Marisa also got herself together and now lives the life of a saint in the suburbs. I have a hard time imagining how those two crazy coeds your parents met, butbothof our versions of Marisa could be true. Let’s see where she went when she left here last night, just a start.”
I made room on the chair behind the desk, next to me.
“I’ll never believe it,” she said. She scraped up the pile of mail she’d knocked over and tossed it on the desk as she came around.
“Then don’t believe me,” I said. “But you came here for some help, right? You came here to track down your mama, right? So let’s bring her home, country roads.”
“Huh?”
“Let’s find her.”
12
Sicily finally moved to my side of the desk and sat down, her hip sharp against mine. She hadn’t inherited Marisa’s caboose, like I had, the one that made all my vintage dresses just a little clingy at the back.
Clingy in a way no oneminded.
I navigated the sticky mouse across Alex’s desk to get to the files for McPhee’s security cameras. I was no expert here. The system was always recording into the cloud but usually no one ever needed the files. If we watched the footage every night, we’d see a lot of dudes relieving themselves on the lamppost and clutches of drunk chicks telling each other he wasn’t worth it up against the windows next door. Occasionally someone would notice a camera and flip us off or drop their pants. A few times, fights had broken out on the street—once, a hit-and-run—and the cops had come in to see what we had.
Chicago was supposed to be some crime hub, right? The city had its problems, sure, but it was also a beautiful place, green in the right seasons, with a downtown lakeshore held for public enjoyment, not sold off to be industrialized and polluted. And it was friendly, a totally Midwestern town in that people looked you in the eye and said “ope!” or“may I have this dance” when you tried to pass one another on the sidewalk and both of you zigged the same way, laughing.
A city with its heart on its sleeve, city of big shoulders and big sleeves and big hearts right out there to be broken, every year at World Series playoffs, every day when you saw the same cardboard sign at the same intersection or heard about another senseless act of violence, so close to home.
But mostly the presence of McPhee’s cameras was the security system, and we didn’t need to review the footage. The files were automagically deleted after a week or so.
“Here we go,” I said. I’d finally located the most recent files for the security camera that shot out from the front door of the pub, angled north to include a slice of the street. I scrolled through to the clip for the day before, afternoon.
I let the file play a bit, but it was just a typical weekday on Milwaukee Avenue, grainier than real life, grayer. Cars parked, unloaded, reloaded, drove away. A car trying to parallel park nudged another car’s bumper.
Our beer distributor pulled up in his big logo truck, double-parked. The delivery guy appeared at the back of the truck and began unloading beer cases onto a handcart.
“That’s what thealleyis for, Kyler,” I mumbled.
“He’s kinda cute,” Sicily said.
A guy whose car had been trapped in its parking space by Kyler’s truck came along and gestured a lot, probably swearing and yelling, but Kyler strolled his cargo past, mouth formed in a silent, to us, whistle. He did everything but wink into the camera.
“Really cute,” Sicily said.
