Windy City Blues

“ Victoria,” Lotty said shortly. “I told her the problem and she got it for me. On the condition that I not ask how she did it. And Max, you know-damned well-that it was not Caudwell’s to dispose of.”

It was Lotty’s. Of course it was. Max wondered briefly how Joseph the Second had come by it to begin with. For that matter, what had Lotty’s great-great-grandfather done to earn it from the emperor? Max looked into Lotty’s tiger eyes and kept such reflections to himself. Instead he inspected Hector’s foot where the filler had been carefully scraped away to reveal the old chip.

STRUNG OUT

I

PEOPLE BORN NEAR the corner of 90th and Commercial used to have fairly predictable futures. The boys grew up to work in the mills; the girls took jobs in the bakeries or coffee shops. They married each other and scrimped to make a down payment on a neighborhood bungalow and somehow fit their large families into its small rooms.

Now that the mills are history, the script has changed. Kids are still marrying, still having families, but without the certainty of the steel industry to buoy their futures. The one thing that seems to stay the same, though, is the number who stubbornly cling to the neighborhood even now that the jobs are gone. It’s a cla

When Monica Larush got pregnant our senior year in high school and married football hero Gary Oberst, we all just assumed they were on their way to becoming another large family in a small bungalow. She wasn’t a friend of mine, so I didn’t worry about the possible ruin of her life. Anyway, having recently lost my own mother to cancer, I wasn’t too concerned about other girls’ problems.

Monica’s and my lives only intersected on the basketball court. Like me, she was an aggressive athlete, but she clearly had a high level of talent as well. In those days, though, a pregnant girl couldn’t stay in school, so she missed our championship winter. The team brought her a game ball. We found her, fat and pasty, eating Fritos in angry frustration in front of the TV in her mother’s kitchen. When we left, we made grotesque jokes about her swollen face and belly, our only way of expressing our embarrassment and worry.

Gary and Monica rewrote their script, though. Gary got a job on the night shift at Inland Steel and went to school during the day. After the baby-Gary Junior-was born, Monica picked up her GED. The two of them scrimped, not for a down payment, but to make it through the University of Illinois ’s Chicago campus. Gary took a job as an accountant with a big Loop firm, Monica taught high school French, and they left the neighborhood. Moved north was what I heard.

And that was pretty much all I knew-or cared-about them before Lily Oberst’s name and face started popping up in the papers. She was apparently mopping up junior te

I actually first heard about her from my old basketball coach, Mary A

“I’ve been watching Lily Oberst play up at the Skokie Valley club,” Mary A

“Lily Oberst?” I shook my head, fishing for why the name sounded familiar.

“You don’t remember Monica? Didn’t you girls keep in touch after your big year? Lily is her and Gary ’s daughter. I used to coach Monica in te

After that I read the stories in detail and got caught up on twenty years of missing history. Lily grew up in suburban Glenview, the second of two children. The Herald-Star explained that both her parents were athletic and encouraged her and her brother to go out for sports. When a camp coach brought back the word that Lily might have some te

Gary put up a net for her in the basement and would give her an ice cream bar every time she could hit the ball back twenty-five times without missing.

“He got mad when it got too easy for me,” Lily said, giggling, to the reporter. “Then he’d raise the net whenever I got to twenty-four.”

When it became clear that they had a major te

Gary Junior didn’t get much print attention. He apparently didn’t share the family’s sports mania. Five years older than Lily, he was in college studying for a degree in chemical engineering, and hoping to go off to Procter & Gamble in Cinci

Lily turned pro the same year Je

So when it was a

Mary A

That sounded like a treat that would appeal to Monica about as much as it did to me. But I had never seen a te

The Skokie Valley Te

When I asked a woman at the reception desk to direct me to Lily, she told me the star’s workout was off-limits to the press today. I explained who I was. She consulted higher authority over the phone. Mary A