Chapter 2
Cora
The bag swung back and I hit it again. Left jab, right cross, left hook—the chain rattling against the basement ceiling like loose teeth in a jaw. Five forty-five in the morning. The Kedzie Avenue YMCA smelled like bleach and old sweat.
Nobody was down here. Nobody was ever down here at this hour except me, which was the point.
Dolores at the front desk didn't check membership cards before seven.
She barely looked up from her phone before seven.
I'd been walking through those doors three mornings a week for four months, and the most Dolores had ever said to me was watch the step, which I appreciated more than she knew because the step was uneven and I'd almost gone down on my face the first time.
I drove my fist into the bag and felt the impact travel up my arm and into my shoulder, a shudder that said good and stop at the same time.
The leather was cracked in two places, patched with duct tape that was starting to peel.
Someone had drawn a smiley face on one of the patches in black marker.
It stared at me every time the bag swung back, this dumb cheerful circle, and I hit it in the mouth.
My hands were wrapped in medical tape I'd taken from the CVS on Pulaski.
Not bought. Took. There's a difference, and the difference is eighty-three dollars in your bank account and a working understanding of which aisles have cameras and which don't. The tape was the good kind—the white athletic stuff, not the paper garbage that unraveled the second you started sweating.
I'd lifted three rolls. Two for training, one for Midge's paw when she cut it on glass last month.
Left jab, right cross, left hook. Repeat. I'd learned the combinations from YouTube videos on the library's free Wi-Fi—a woman in a tank top with beautiful form and a calm voice who said things like rotate through your hips and keep your guard up and you're doing great.
I didn't train for sport. I didn't train for fitness or stress relief or any of the reasons the posters upstairs suggested, the ones with stock photos of smiling women in clean sports bras who had clearly never been grabbed by the arm outside a shelter on West Madison at two in the morning.
I trained because a woman who can throw a punch is a woman who can fight back.
And I needed to be able to fight back.
The specifics weren't interesting. They were the same specifics that belonged to every woman I'd ever met in a transitional housing unit or a welfare line or the back row of a free clinic waiting room.
Hands that came out of nowhere. Situations that turned.
The particular combination of being small and female and alone in a city that didn't care about any of those things except as categories on an intake form.
So I hit the bag. I hit it until my lungs burned and my shoulders screamed and the smiley face blurred into a white smear through the sweat in my eyes.
My knuckles were a wreck. The skin across both hands had split and re-split so many times along the same ridges that the cuts didn't bleed properly anymore.
They just opened—white, stinging, dry—and then closed again over the next few days, leaving another line of scar tissue on top of the last one.
My hands looked older than the rest of me.
From across the basement, Midge watched me.
She was sitting in my unzipped gym bag by the wall, her one good ear cocked forward, her eyes tracking every movement with the suspicious devotion of an animal that had also learned not to trust the world but had made exactly one exception.
I'd found her behind a dumpster on Lawrence Avenue two winters ago—shaking, feral, missing half her left ear to something that had teeth.
She'd bitten me when I reached for her. Drew blood.
I respected that. I wrapped my hand in my scarf and picked her up anyway, and she'd been mine ever since, or I'd been hers, depending on who you asked.
Seven pounds of ugly chihuahua mix with trust issues and a talent for growling at men. She was the best thing in my life, and that was not a joke or an exaggeration. It was just a fact.
I stopped. Stood there breathing, hands on my knees, sweat dripping off my chin onto the concrete floor. My shoulders throbbed. My left wrist ached—I'd been favoring it for a week, landing wrong on the hook, and the joint had opinions about that.
I pulled my phone from the side pocket of the gym bag, careful not to disturb Midge, and checked my bank balance.
The screen was cracked from corner to corner — a spiderweb pattern I'd gotten used to reading through.
The number loaded slow, the way it always loaded slow on this phone, giving me three full seconds to hope for a miracle.
Eighty-three dollars and fourteen cents.
Rent was due Friday. Rent was four-fifty, which was already a number I couldn't hit, and that was before whatever new figure Gil was going to pull out of his ass this month.
I unwrapped my hands. The tape came away sticky, pulling at the raw skin underneath. I balled it up and shoved it in my pocket because I'd reuse it tomorrow. Waste was a luxury. Everything was a luxury.
Midge stood up in the gym bag when I approached, her stub of a tail going.
I picked her up. She was warm and bony and she tucked herself against my chest with the efficiency of an animal who'd perfected the geometry of being held.
I zipped my jacket over her, leaving her head poking out near my collar, and she settled there with a sigh that sounded like resignation but was actually, I think, the closest she got to peace.
We went upstairs. Dolores didn't look up. The step was still uneven.
Outside, Chicago was doing its early morning thing—grey sky, grey buildings, the L rattling somewhere overhead, a few people moving with the hunched determination of anyone who had somewhere to be at six a.m. and wished they didn't.
I walked home. Midge breathed against my neck, small and alive and completely dependent on me. I kept my hands in my pockets, the scarred knuckles hidden, and I didn't think about anything except the next step. And the next one. And the next.
That was the trick. You didn't think ahead. You didn't think behind. You just walked.
The building smelled of damp carpet and someone else's dinner, layered over something older and more permanent that I'd stopped trying to identify around month two.
Grease, maybe? Mold. The accumulated ghost of a hundred tenants who'd passed through these walls on their way to somewhere better or somewhere worse, leaving nothing behind but the faint evidence that they'd cooked and sweated and existed here for a while.
The three-flat on North Kedzie had been converted sometime in the nineties by someone who understood the word unit in its most generous and legally questionable sense.
What had been apartments became rooms. What had been rooms became halves of rooms. Plasterboard walls so thin you could hear breathing through them, each partition creating the illusion of privacy without any of the substance.
I lived on the second floor, if you could call it living.
I existed on the second floor. I stored my body there between the hours of whatever and whenever.
I was three steps from my door when I saw him.
Gil Pasternak. Landlord. Leaning against the hallway wall in a polo shirt that had been white once and was now the color of weak tea, arms crossed over a belly that suggested very regular meals and zero self-reflection.
He had the stance of a man enjoying himself—weight back on his heels, chin slightly raised, the particular ease of someone holding a card he couldn't wait to play.
"Cora." He said my name like he was doing me a favor by remembering it. "Got a minute, darling?"
I didn't have a minute, and I wasn’t his darling. But Gil wasn't asking. Gil was telling.
"Rent's going up," he said. "Just a little. Fifty a month." He held up his hands—palms out, the gesture of reasonableness. "Building costs, you know how it is. Effective Friday."
Friday. When current rent was already due. Four-fifty becoming five hundred. Just like that.
"And if I can't make the new number?"
Gil's face arranged itself into sympathy. "Then I'd need you out by the fifteenth. Nothing personal. Just business."
Nothing personal. He said it with the warmth of a parking ticket.
Inside my jacket, Midge was a small knot of heat against my ribs. I felt her shift, felt the low rumble start in her chest—she didn't like Gil, had never liked Gil, and Gil didn't like her, which was one of the few things I respected about his instincts.
I looked at him. Kept my face flat. Didn't blink, didn't swallow, didn't do any of the things a body does when it's processing fear, because fear was a currency and I wasn't spending it on Gil Pasternak.
"Fine," I said.
One word. No emotion.
I stepped past him, unlocked my door—the real lock, the padlock I'd installed myself with a drill borrowed from Victor and a YouTube video that was significantly less calming than the boxing one—and closed it behind me.
The click of the padlock engaging was the most satisfying sound in my day.
I stood in the dark for a moment, breathing.
Then I turned on the overhead bulb, which buzzed and flickered and threw a yellowish light across everything I owned.
Which wasn't much.
Mattress on the floor—a twin, dragged up from the curb on Sacramento Avenue, covered in sheets I'd bought from the dollar store and washed three times before using.
Hotplate on an overturned milk crate, plugged into the only outlet that worked reliably.
A plastic storage bin with Midge's food—a bag of the decent kind, not the cheapest, because she'd been eating garbage for God knows how long before I found her and she deserved chicken and rice in small bites, even if it meant I ate nothing but ramen.