Fire Sale (29 page)

Sandra came to the door within seconds of my ringing the bell. She stared as if she didn’t recognize me. Her stiff bleached hair hadn’t been washed or combed recently and stood out from her head at wild angles. Her blue eyes were bloodshot, and the shape of her face indistinct, as if the bones had dissolved behind the skin.

“Sandra, hi. I’m sorry about Bron.”

“Tori Warshawski! You have one hell of a nerve coming around here now, two days late. Your sympathy doesn’t mean shit to me. You found him, that’s what that cop told me. And you didn’t think you owed me even a phone call? I found your husband, Sandra, go order a coffin, because you’re a widow now?”

Her anger sounded forced, as though she were trying to whip herself into feeling something, anything, and anger were the only emotion she could come up with when she couldn’t muster grief. I almost started justifying myself—my night in the swamp, my day in the hospital—but I swallowed it all.

“You’re right. I should have called you right away. If you let me in, I’ll tell you what I know.” I pushed forward, not waiting for her to decide if she could stand for me to be in her house, and she backed up automatically, the way people do.

“He was with that English whore, wasn’t he?” she said when we were in her entryway. “Is she dead, too?”

“No. Very badly injured, too much to talk and tell the cops who attacked them.”

“Yeah, dry your eyes while I start playing ‘My Heart Cries for You’ on the violin.” To my dismay, she rubbed the tip of her middle finger against the top of her index finger, the way we did as kids when we were being sarcastic—a flea playing “My Heart Cries for You” on the world’s smallest violin, we used to say.

“How’s April holding up?” I asked.

“Oh, she was Daddy’s little angel, she can’t believe he’s dead, can’t believe he was with this English reporter, even though all the kids at school knew about it and told her.”

“Bron thought he’d be able to find money for her defibrillator. Do you know if he’d come up with anything?”

“Bron and his ideas.” She contorted her face into a horrible sneer. “He probably thought he could steal a load of TVs from By-Smart. If he ever had a good idea above his waistline, I never heard about it. There’s only one thing that could help and that’s if he died working for the company.”

Her bitterness was so hard to listen to that it took me a minute to understand what she meant. “Oh. So you could collect his workers’ comp indemnity. He didn’t have life insurance?”

“Ten thousand dollars. By the time I’ve buried him, there’ll be about seven left.” Tears spurted from her eyes. “Oh, damn him, what am I going to do without him? He cheated on me every five seconds, but what am I going to do? I can’t keep the house, I can’t look after April, damn him, damn him, damn him.”

She started sobbing in a rasping, dry way that shook her thin body so hard she had to lean against the wall. I took her arm and gently moved her into the living room, where the prim furniture was encased in plastic. I took the cover off the couch and sat her down.

33

Happy Families Are All Alike, Unhappy Families…

T
he Czernin house was laid out like every other bungalow on the South Side, including the one where I grew up. I moved by instinct through the dining room to the kitchen. I put water on for tea, but, while waiting for it to boil, I couldn’t resist opening the back door to see if they had a little lean-to like ours. My dad had stored his tools there; he could repair most things around the house. He’d even replaced a broken wheel on my roller skates. It seemed satisfying to find an identical one behind Sandra’s kitchen, although it wasn’t as tidy as my dad’s. My dad would never have left cut-up pieces of rubber lying around the work surface like that, or the frayed ends of old lengths of wiring.

I was turning back to the kitchen to hunt for tea when April appeared in the doorway. She was clutching the giant bear Bron had given her in the hospital; her face was still puffy from the heart meds she was taking.

“Coach! I didn’t know—didn’t expect—”

“Hi, honey. I’m sorry about your dad. You know I’m the person who found him.”

She nodded bleakly. “Were you looking at his shop? He taught me how to use a soldering iron. I even worked on a project with him last week, but I don’t think Ma will let me use his tools now. Does she know you’re here?”

“She’s in the living room, pretty upset; I’m trying to find tea.”

April opened a canister on the counter and pulled out a tea bag. While she got mugs down from a shelf, I asked how she was feeling.

“Okay, I guess. They’re giving me these drugs that make me sleepy, that’s all. You know, they’re saying I can’t play anymore, can’t play basketball.”

“I know: it’s a shame; you’re a good player, and we’ll miss you, but you can’t risk your health running around the court. You can still be part of the team if you want, come to the practices and help chart plays.”

Her face brightened a little. “But how am I going to get to college if I can’t get a scholarship?”

“Academics,” I said dryly. “Not as glamorous as a sports scholarship, but they’ll carry you further in the long run. Let’s not worry about it today, though—you’ve got enough going on, and it’s a year before you have to start applying.”

The kettle started boiling, and I poured water into the mugs. “April, have you talked to Josie since she came to the hospital?”

She turned away from me and became very busy at the counter, moving the tea bag from one cup to the next until all three had turned a pale yellow.

“Josie disappeared the same night your father died, and I’m very worried about her. Did she run away with Billy?”

She scrunched her face unhappily. “I promised not to say anything.”

“I found Billy’s sports car wrecked under the Skyway around one in the morning. I think the English reporter had been in it, but where were Billy and Josie?”

“Billy gave Daddy his car,” she whispered softly. “He said he couldn’t use it anymore, and he knew Daddy didn’t have a car, if we wanted to go out he had to borrow a car from a buddy, or sometimes he drove us in the semi if he thought Mr. Grobian wouldn’t find out, you know, it was By-Smart property.”

“When did he give your dad the car?” I tried to keep my voice low and level, not to make her more nervous than she already was.

“Monday. He came to the house Monday morning, after they brought me home from the hospital. Ma had to be at work; they only gave her one hour off to bring me home, but Daddy was working a late shift so he didn’t leave until three. And then, then Josie came. I called her and told her to come here before she went to school. She and Billy used to meet here, see, it was a place she could come and be doing her homework so her ma didn’t mind, and my ma, she just thought Billy was a boy from school, we didn’t tell her he was one of the Bysens, she would, like, totally lose it if she knew that.”

Those school projects that Josie was so intent on, her science and health studies homework she had to do with April. Maybe I should have guessed that they were a cover story, but it didn’t matter now.

“Why was Billy so angry with his family?” I asked.

“He wasn’t angry with them,” April said earnestly. “Worried, he was worried by what he saw at the plant.”

“And what was that?”

She hunched a shoulder. “You know, everybody works hard for not enough money. Like Ma. Even Daddy, he made more driving a truck, but Billy said it wasn’t right, people’s lives being so hard.”

“Nothing more specific than that?” I was disappointed.

She shook her head. “I never listened that hard, mostly he would be talking to Josie, you know, off in one corner, but Nicaragua came in somehow, and Fly the Flag, I think—”

“What are you doing in here, bothering my girl?” Sandra appeared in the doorway, her tears gone, her face set in its usual hard lines.

“We’re making you a cup of tea, Ma. Coach says I can still suit up and be with the team, chart plays maybe.” April handed her mother and me each one of the mugs. “And maybe my academics will get me into college.”

“But they won’t pay your medical bills. You want to do something for April, don’t go putting ideas in her head about academics. Prove Bron was driving for the company when he died.”

I was startled. “Is By-Smart saying he wasn’t? Do they know where he was when he was jumped?”

“They won’t tell me anything. I went to see Mr. Grobian this morning over at the warehouse, I told him I was filing a claim, and he said, ‘Lots of luck.’ He said Bron was violating company rules when he was working, having that bitch in his cab, and they’d fight the claim.”

“You need a lawyer,” I said. “Someone who can take them to court for you.”

“You are so—so ignorant,” Sandra shrilled. “If I could afford a lawyer, Miss Iffy-genius, I wouldn’t need the money to begin with. I need proof. You’re a detective, go get me proof he was working for the company, and that the English whore wasn’t in his truck. It’s your fault she was there. Now you go make it up to me.”

“Bron’s behavior was not my fault, Sandra. And screaming about it won’t solve any of your problems now. I’ve got way more to do than take abuse from you. If you can’t calm down enough to talk sensibly, then I’m taking off.”

Sandra wavered, torn between the anger that consumed her and the wish to know about Bron’s death. In the end, the three of us sat at the kitchen table, drinking the weak tea, while I told them about Mitch leading me across the swamp to Bron and Marcena.

Sandra knew that Billy had lent his cell phone to Bron (“He told me he took it so he could stay in touch with April”), but she didn’t know about the Miata. This led to a little skirmish between her and April (“Ma, I didn’t tell you because you’d just do like you’re doing now, yelling about him, and I can’t take it.”).

Their priest had warned them that Bron was so badly disfigured that Sandra shouldn’t look at his body; did I think that was true?

“He looks terrible,” I agreed. “But if it was me, my husband, I mean, I would want to see him. Otherwise, it would always haunt me that I hadn’t said that last good-bye.”

“If you’d been married to that prick, you wouldn’t be so sappy, ‘that last good-bye’ and all that movie crap,” Sandra snapped.

She stopped at an outcry from her daughter, but the two began quarreling again over whether Bron really had a plan to find the money they needed for April’s health care.

“He called Mr. Grobian, and Mr. Grobian said he could come in and discuss it, Daddy told me that himself,” April said to her mother, scarlet-faced.

“You never understood that your father told people what they wanted to hear, not what the truth was. How do you think I ended up marrying him, anyway?” She bit the words off angrily.

“When did your dad tell you about Grobian?” I asked April. “Monday morning?”

“He was making me lunch when we got back from the hospital.” April blinked back tears. “Tuna fish sandwiches. He cut the crust off the bread like he used to when I was a baby. He wrapped me in a blanket and tucked me in his recliner and fed me, me and Big Bear. He said not to worry, he was going to talk to Mr. Grobian, it would be all right. Then Billy came, and he said if I could wait eight years until he got his trust fund he’d pay for the surgery, but Daddy said we couldn’t take charity, even if we could wait so long, and he was going to see Mr. Grobian.”

Sandra slapped the tabletop so hard her weak tea slopped out of the mug. “That is so damn typical! Him talking to you and not his own wife!”

April’s lower lip quivered, and she hugged Big Bear tightly to herself. Patrick Grobian hadn’t exactly struck me as the warmhearted Santa of the South Side. If Bron had been going to see him, it must have been to put the bite on him in some way, but when I suggested this April sat up again.

“No! Why are you taking her side against Daddy? He said he had a document from Mr. Grobian, it was all businesslike, shipshape.”

“Why didn’t you tell me before?” Sandra cried. “I could have asked Grobian when I saw him this morning.”

“Because you kept saying like you’re saying now, how his ideas were dumb and wouldn’t work.”

“So neither of you know whether he actually did talk to Grobian, or what this document might be? Sandra, when did you actually talk to Bron for the last time?”

Her response, stripped of all its emotional outbursts, boiled down to Monday morning, when they brought April home from the hospital. They’d borrowed a car from a neighbor—their own car had been totaled in a hit-and-run last month and they hadn’t had the money to get another yet (because, of course, Bron had let the insurance payments lapse, and the other driver hadn’t been insured, either). Bron had dropped Sandra off at work in the borrowed car and then gone home to stay with April until he had to leave for work.

“He’s on the four-to-midnight shift this week. I have to be at the store at eight-fifteen, so lots of weeks we don’t see each other much. He gets up, has a cup of coffee with me in the morning. When April leaves for school, he goes back to bed and I catch the bus, and that’s the story for the week. Only when we brought April home, we didn’t want her climbing those stairs, they’re so steep, the doctor said no major exertion right now, so she’s sleeping with me down here in the big bed. Bron, he’s upstairs, or he was, when he got off shift Monday night he was going to go up and sleep in her bed.

“Tuesday, I made April her breakfast, even if I don’t cut the crust off the bread I make her breakfast every morning, but I had to go to work; you never know how long you have to wait for the bus, I couldn’t hang around for Mr. High-and—” She broke off, remembering the object of her bitterness was dead. “I just thought he was sleeping late,” she finished quietly. “I didn’t think anything about it at all.”

What document could Grobian possibly have signed that would make Bron think that By-Smart would ante up a hundred thousand dollars for April’s medical care? Nothing made any sense to me, but when I tried to push April to see if she could remember anything else, any hint Bron might have dropped, Sandra erupted. Didn’t I see April was tired? What was I trying to do, kill her daughter? The doctors said April couldn’t have any stress and me barging in and harassing her was stress, stress, stress.

“Ma,” April shrieked. “Don’t talk to Coach like that. That’s way more stress than I want.”

I could see fertile new ground for mother and daughter to fight on here, but I left without trying to say anything else. Sandra stayed in the kitchen, staring at the kitchen table, but April followed me back to the living room where I’d left my parka. She was gray around the mouth, and I urged her to go to bed, but she lingered, nuzzling her head against Big Bear, until I asked her what she wanted.

“Coach, I’m sorry Ma is upset and everything, but—can I still come to practice, like you said earlier?”

I put my hands on her shoulders. “Your mom is mad at me, and maybe for good reason, but that has nothing to do with my relations with you. Of course you can still come to practice. Now let’s get you to bed. Upstairs or down?”

“I’d like to go to my own bed,” she said, “only Ma thinks stairs will kill me. Is that right?”

I made a helpless gesture. “I don’t know, honey, but maybe if we took them superslow you’ll be okay.”

I helped her up the steps one at a time to her attic room. The stairs were in exactly the same place as they had been in my childhood home on Houston, and they were the same steep risers, decanting you through a square opening onto the attic floor. The little dormer room had been fixed up with the same care as my parents had put into my space. Where I had had Ron Santo and Maria Callas over my bed—a strange juxtaposition of my parents’ unconnected passions—April had the same poster of the University of Illinois women’s team that Josie did. I wondered how painful it would be for her to wake up every morning to the active life she no longer could take part in.

“Do you know who Marie Curie was?” I asked abruptly. “You don’t? I’ll bring you her biography. She was a Polish woman who became a really important scientist. A different life than basketball, but her work has lasted over a hundred years now.”

I pulled the bedspread down for her and saw underneath the same red-white-and-blue sheets that Josie and Julia had on their bed. Was this solidarity with Team USA, or what?

“You and Josie buy your sheets together?” I asked as I tucked her bear into the bed.

“Oh, these flag sheets, you mean? We bought them at church. My church was selling them, and so was Josie’s, and a bunch of the others. Most of us girls on the team bought them—it was for something to do with the neighborhood, cleaning it up or something, I don’t know, but even Celine bought a set; it was a team thing, we did it together as a team.”

I looked for a label, but all it said was “Made with pride in the USA.” I made sure she had everything she needed—water, a whistle to summon her mother if she needed her in the night, her CD player. Even her schoolbooks, if she felt like doing homework.

I was halfway down the steep stairs when I remembered Billy’s phone. I’d taken it out of my peacoat when I left it at the cleaners and put it in my bag, wondering what to do with it.