Fire Sale

The youths shouted something else at her. When it looked as though she was going to stay to fight, I pushed her up the front walk. The noise followed us up the stairs to the second floor; even though the Dorrados lived in the back of the building, I could still feel the bass rocketing inside my stomach as Josie unlocked her front door.

The door led directly into a living room. A girl was sitting on the couch, dressed only in a baby-doll T-shirt and underpants. She was watching television with a ferocious intensity, her hand moving from an open chip bag in her lap to her mouth. An infant lay next to her on the plastic-coated cushion, staring vacantly at the ceiling. The only decorations in the room were a large, plain cross on one wall and a picture of Jesus blessing some children.

“Julia! Coach is here to see Ma. Put some clothes on,” Josie cried. “What you thinking, sitting around naked in the middle of the afternoon?”

When her sister didn’t move, Josie walked over and yanked the potato chip bag from her lap. “Get up. Get out of this dreamworld and into the daylight. Is Ma home?”

Julia hunched over, so that her face was only a yard from the screen, where a woman in red was leaving a hospital room; a man accosted her. The conversation, in Spanish, had something to do with the woman in the room behind them.

Josie stood between the set and her sister. “You can see Mujer again tomorrow, and the day after and the day after that. Now, go put on your clothes. Is Ma home?”

Julia got sullenly to her feet. “She’s in the kitchen. Mixing María Inés’s formula. Take María Inés out with you while I put on my jeans.”

“I gotta meet April. We have a science project together, so don’t expect me to stay home looking after your own baby,” Josie warned, scooping up the infant. “Sorry, Coach,” she added over her shoulder to me. “Julia lives inside that telenovela. She even named the baby for one of the people in it.”

I followed her through a doorway into a room that doubled as a dining and bedroom: bed linens were folded neatly at one end of an old wood table; plates and silver were stacked at the other. Two air mattresses lay under the table; next to them, a box held Power Rangers and other action toys that must have belonged to Josie’s brothers.

Julia shoved her way past Josie into a small room on our left. Twin beds were neatly made. The linens were startling, bright replicas of the Stars-and-Stripes. I hadn’t realized patriotism was so important to the Dorrados.

A rope slung above the two twin beds was festooned with baby clothes. On the wall above one bed, I glimpsed a poster for the University of Illinois women’s basketball team: Josie’s side of the room. Like most of the girls on the team, the U. of I. women were her heroines, because that’s where Coach McFarlane had gone to school. Despite the clutter in the cramped quarters, everything was neatly organized.

We passed on to the kitchen, a room just big enough for one person to stand in easily. Even back here, the thud from the giant speakers outside still carried faintly.

Josie’s mother was warming a bottle in a pan of hot water. When Josie explained who I was, her mother wiped her hands on her baggy black pants and apologized repeatedly for not being in the living room to greet me. She was short, with bright red hair, so unlike her tall, ski

When I shook hands and called her “Ms. Dorrado,” she said, “No, no, my name is Rose. Josie, she didn’t say you was coming over today,” she explained.

Josie ignored the implied criticism and handed the baby to her mother. “I ain’t staying around to babysit. April and me, we had to stay late at practice, and now we need to work on our science project.”

“Science project?” Rose Dorrado repeated. “You know I don’t want you doing anything like cutting up frogs.”

“No, Ma, we ain’t doing nothing like that. It’s on public health, like, how do you keep from catching the flu in school. We have to set up the study, uh, pamters.” She cast a cautious look at me.

“Parameters,” I corrected.

“Yeah, we’re go

“You get back here by nine o’clock,” her mother warned. “You don’t and you know I’m sending your brother to look for you.”

“But, Ma, we’re late starting on account of Coach kept us late,” Josie protested.

“Then you work that much harder,” her mother said firmly. “And what about your supper? You can’t ask Mrs. Czernin to feed you.”

“April brought an extra pizza home with her Thursday, when Mr. Czernin took us out with the lady reporter. She said she saved that for her and me to eat tonight.” She didn’t wait for further reaction but bolted back through the apartment. We heard an extra jolt on top of the bass as Josie slammed the door.

“Who is this lady reporter?” her mother asked, testing some formula on her wrist. “Josie said something about her on Thursday, but I didn’t follow it.”

I explained who Marcena Love was, and what she was doing with the team.

“Josie’s a good girl, she helps me a lot, like with little María Inés, she should have a treat now and then,” her mother sighed. “She doing okay with the basketball team? You think maybe basketball can get her a scholarship for college? She needs an education. I won’t have her end up like her sister…” her voice trailed away, and she patted the baby reassuringly, as if trying to say she wasn’t blaming it for her worries.

“Josie works hard and she looks good on the court,” I said, not adding that the odds of making a college team from a program like Bertha Palmer’s were pretty abysmal. “She said you want to talk to me about a problem of some kind?”

“Please, let me give you something to drink; then we can talk more easily.”

Given a choice of instant coffee or orange Kool-Aid I started to refuse anything, but remembered in the nick of time the important hospitality rituals in South Chicago. Romeo Czernin was right: I had been away from the ’hood too long if I was going to turn up my nose at instant coffee. Not that my mother ever served it-she’d do without other things before giving up her Italian coffee, bought at a market on Taylor Street-but instant was certainly a staple on Houston Street when I was growing up.

Baby propped on her shoulder, Rose Dorrado poured some of the water she’d been boiling to heat the bottle into two plastic mugs. I carried those into the living room, where Julia, in jeans, had reestablished herself in front of her telenovela. Josie’s two young brothers had come home, too, and were fighting their sister over the cha

I sipped the thin, bitter coffee while Rose fretted out loud about the future of her boys without a father; her brother tried to help out, playing with them on Sundays, but he had his own family to look after, too.

I looked at my watch and tried to push Rose Dorrado to the point. The story, when it came out, wasn’t the tale of personal violence I’d been imagining. Rose worked for Fly the Flag, a little company on Eighty-eighth Street that made ba

“You know, your church, your school, they want a big ba

I nodded politely and congratulated her, but she brushed that aside and went on with her tale. Although Fly the Flag made American flags, those had just been a sideline to their main business until September 11. They’d always produced the outsize flags that schools and other institutions liked to spread across an upper balcony or wall, but before September 11 such enormous flags had had a limited market.