Chapter 13
Sicily’s slick silver SUV smelled like apple pie.
We were taking city streets to catch the Eisenhower west toward Naperville—that beautiful horizon, that storied suburban Brigadoon—when we stopped for a light.
Sicily said, “That’s her. That’s my aunt Edie.”
I looked past the swinging air freshener on the rearview mirror. “Where?”
“There.” She pointed at the bus bench on the corner.
The ad on the bench was for the real estate developer whose arrogant smirk and pop-collared white shirt had been pasted all over the toniest parts of the city. “Live WELL with Edith Maxwell,” the ads promised, over that smug grin. MAXimize your investment with—
You get it.
I hadn’t paid any attention—until her urban sophisticate glasses had turned in the direction of the Jefferson Park neighborhood, my little slice of deep-dish pizza.
“Your aunt is freaking Edith Maxwell?” I said. “Are you kidding me?”
“What? Why?”
“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 to us’ part?” I asked. “Leave me out of it. You can just say she’s not related to you.”
“Well, that’s what I thought,” Sicily said. “But this morning I would have said you weren’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. Or both of 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 at ten 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 always wanted…”
We were both studiously avoiding the word sister. It couldn’t be the right word. Sister meant a closeness that I hadn’t invited with this … this doll. 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 of me.
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 been joking about 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’m not.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m not asking for an apology from you or her, 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.
“Why what? Why am I helping you?”
“Yeah.”
“I guess I just want to see what happens,” I said.
“Maybe you’re a nicer person than you think you are,” she said.
I don’t know why I was insulted by that. What kind of person could be?
I could feel her studying me. For a reaction? For hints of that likeness I had mentioned? I said, “Watch the road before you kill us both.” And turned my head away.
THE TOWN EDITH MAXWELL LIVED in was cute.
Too cute. Like a whole Barbie Dream Town, trademark symbol, blown up life-sized, and draped in garlands of LIVE LAUGH LOVE signs—as well as actual garlands, since it was the buildup to Christmas and everything.
The town center was basically an open-air mall.
A catalogue, paper-thin. Everything was charming and for sale, and everyone was beautiful and buying.
Edith lived by her motto of living well in an overly embellished micro-mansion a few blocks on the other side of the shops. The house was a specific color of blue. Sea glass. I could tell that a lot of effort had been made to match the paint to someone’s vacation photos.
What was I doing here?
Following Sicily up a stone path to the house, I thought longingly of a Metra Rail commuter train station and a long ride home in the quiet car, rethinking my life’s choices.
Was that a song? Riding the suburban train back to the city …
“Are you singing?” Sicily said as she stepped up on the porch.
“Huh? No,” I said. “So how do we play this?”
“What do you mean play it?” Sicily grasped a brass door knocker shaped like a dragonfly and banged it with urgency.
Going straight at it, then. And not overthinking what to say or ask when—
The door opened and there she was, Aunt Edith in the flesh.
She was a sprite of a person, tiny and trim, those just-right glasses and a sleek silver bob shining.
She looked a little more tired than she did in her ads, but who among us wouldn’t ask for a little touch-up if we were MAXing out our faces on bus benches?
“Sis, my goodness!” the woman exclaimed. “What a nice surprise. I didn’t know to expect you. I would have baked a little something…”
She immediately had her hands on Sicily, pulling her in and bundling her into a welcome. I didn’t buy the delight. I had some skill spotting a put-on from hanging at McPhee’s, although, yes, it had failed me with Joey.
But this con was easy to spot: Edith’s flare of joy went flat as soon as she had Sicily pressed against her. She was surprised, all right, but not the right kind.
And then Edith caught sight of me, and I could tell she knew exactly who I was.
Sicily disentangled herself. “Aunt Edie, where’s Mom?”
“Your mother,” she said in wonder, still looking at me.
“Well, hey there, Aunt Edie,” I said, with a hint of Doll Devine sassafras.
Her eyes fluttered away from me. “What? Your mother? What do you mean?”
Sicily, impatient, was through the door, calling for her mom, and after a quick glance back at me, Edith hurried after her, pulling the door behind them a bit so that the brass bug on the door nearly hit me in the face as I started to follow them.
I stood on the porch, noticing the ropes of evergreen draped around the doorway and along the windows, the perfectly shaped miniature pine trees lined up in pink-orange clay pots in a conga line along the porch.
Through the front window, I spotted a ten-foot Fraser fir loaded down with white velvet and golden bling.
Around its base, piles of packages, all beribboned in gold.
Fa la dee dah.
Anyway, it was all set dressing. And so was Edith.
At my back, the town was still, clean and bright, and a snow had started, small, hard pellets that wouldn’t stop anytime soon.
The door to the house had been left open a crack despite the cold. That look Edith had given me—she’d meant for me to stay right here. Right here on the other side of this threshold, outside, trash left at the curb.
I hesitated just a second, then wiped my red boots on the rug and pushed the door open, ready to cause just the tiniest bit of trouble.
For Sicily, of course. I was just that nice.