“Nothing,” I said. “Only she’s pestering us to sell McPhee’s building.”
“So?”
“So,” I said. But to talk about how attached I was to the pub, I’d have to tell her that, instead of being raised by the owner of our shared DNA, I’d been crawling through all that building’s nooks and crannies with an arm broken by her negligence. I’d be pointing out the obvious, too, that I was back at the pub again, still dependent on it, even as a grown-ass adult.
But it wasn’t just the pub. She was trying to take Jefferson Park apart, block by block.
Here’s the thing about the city of Chicago. It’s diced up in a hundred ways. There were divisions you lived by, parishes if you were Catholic, wards for who to blame for the trash not getting picked up. North Side, South Side; that was baseball. There were divisions made by nature, too—the Y of the Chicago River, the hard stop of the lake at the east. We had official names for places, but neighborhoods were both more and less than their boundary lines—neighborhood was your pride, your protectorate, the flag you flew high. And people like Edith couldn’t keep their hands off. MAXimize your property value!
And if Edith ever hit a number Alex couldn’t refuse, yeah, I’d be out of the only real home I’d ever had.
“She’s not related to—” Sicily started. Whatever she had meant to say cut off so abruptly, I could hear her internal brakes squeal.
“Are you getting stuck on the ‘related tous’part?” I asked. “Leave me out of it. You can just say she’s not related toyou.”
“Well, that’s what I thought,” Sicily said. “But this morning I would have saidyouweren’t related to me. So now I don’t know. Maybe she’s related to you but not me, or me but not you, or neither of us. Orbothof us and it’s just another lie my mom told me.”
Sicily swung onto the expressway a little too close to the car that had already been in that lane. We rightly received a punitive honk from the other vehicle. The kid didn’t react. She drove with hands atten and two, shoulders hunched, and nose over the steering wheel like someone who had learned to drive last week. Maybe she had.
I was no expert here, either. I was the sort of Chicagoan who got almost everywhere she needed to go on foot or by L train, as God intended, or by bus, if that was the best option, or rideshare when all else failed. If that made me a nervous passenger in other people’s cars, so be it. It wasn’t ten thirty in the morning and I was suddenly moving too quickly through a Thursday reverse-commute to a place where I didn’t want to go.
I had been concentrating too hard on Sicily.
“What?” she said. “You have to admit my mom lied to me about… everything.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Only the more cynical you get, the more I see the family resemblance.”
She scowled into the windshield. “I can’t believe she never told me— Why wouldn’t she tell me that I had… I alwayswanted…”
We were both studiously avoiding the wordsister. It couldn’t be the right word.Sistermeant a closeness that I hadn’t invited with this… thisdoll. A spike of anger went through me.
“A pony?” I sneered. “What in the world did you ever want that you didn’t get, Sicily?”
In response, her chin jutted out further, ready to take a punch, or throw one—
Oh, man. Sicily didn’t remind me of Marisa.
She reminded me ofme.
Which was the weirdest feeling I’d ever had, including the time I’d nearly electrocuted myself trying to plug in a blender over the back bar with wet hands. In fact, the sensation was pretty much identical: a surprising, not-unpleasant zap and my feet lifting ever so slightly off the ground, and then I was plunged back down to earth, having gone somewhere I never expected to go.
I’d only beenjokingabout the family resemblance.
“You think I had some perfect life,” Sicily said. “Don’t you?”
“It looks pretty perfect from here so far,” I said.
“I’m not going to apologize for having two parents who loved me, or a whatever it is I got that you didn’t.”
Security, I thought. Solid footing and a sense of self. Straight teeth and a college fund. “Okay,” I said.
“I’mnot.”
“Okay,”I said. “I’m not asking for an apology from youorher, or anything from either of you, really, but are you missing the part where I don’t care where Marisa is, but here I am, trying to help you find her?”
She opened her mouth to argue, then closed it. The road raced under us, and I watched a pair of brake lights in the not too far distance ahead of us with dread until Sicily finally hit the brakes.
“Why, though?” she said.
