LITMIR.BIZ

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was sounding out of breath and increasingly desperate.

      “Kristin! Get this . . . dog off me!”

      Vince always had trouble moderating his natural swearing in front of the boys.

      “Charyuht!”

      I yelled that command for attention directly behind the boys. One of the first things we’d learned in class was that not to obey that command could get you thrown out of class. Since the boys would rather be deprived of all video games for a month rather than being denied Tae Kwon Do class, they had learned to respond immediately.

      Commands of any kind had no effect on Molly, so I grabbed her collar and forced her to sit. Luckily she’s so docile most of the time it doesn’t matter.

      “Say, that’s, that’s . . . pretty good,” Vince puffed.

      His face was starting to return to his normal ruddy color rather than the mottled purple it had been a minute ago. His breathing was still ragged, though. I was increasingly alarmed at how little stamina he had these days.

      “Eat, eat!”

      Natalie was ready to serve.

      At least she no longer said, “Mange, mange.”

      When I first met Marco, his mother’s Italianisms used to drive him crazy. I had found it sweet and harmless. Of course, I could afford to, they weren’t my parents. Our own parents can get to us in ways no one else possibly can.

      Natalie staggered across the kitchen with a huge platter of spaghetti and meatballs with red sauce, cheese piled high on top. She deftly elbowed past me when I tried to take the heavy platter from her. So I just cleared a path between children and the dog so she could get to the table unmolested. It was a near thing. I spotted a Matchbox car and kicked it in the direction of the counter before she stepped on it.

      As we all squeezed into the breakfast nook and bowed our heads, my mind wandered to Giles and Carol. I’d better try to mend that fence before we went to class.

      But by the time Natalie and Vince left, we’d barely time to climb into our uniforms and out the door to class. The speed with which the boys could get those martial arts uniforms on was a constant source of amazement to me, especially compared to their glacial pace getting dressed for school in the morning.

      I grabbed my keys and shouted up the stairs to Carol and Giles we were leaving. I’d have to deal with that conversation later.

      When we got back the boys fell on their beds and went immediately to sleep. I pulled off their uniforms from their slack little bodies and covered them up well. I sighed over teeth brushing, vowing to make them do more in the morning.

      I went over to the door that led to Carol and Giles’ apartment on the third floor. Time to face the music about the spaghetti.

      “Giles? Could you come down and help me with something?”

      I really did want to get those ladders locked up and couldn’t do it alone. I figured carrying the ladders to the garage would give us some time to talk.

      “Yes?”

      Giles came slowly down the stairs, his brown eyes cloudy behind his wire-rimmed glasses. His long, narrow face was giving nothing away, but the tension in his shoulders betrayed he was still upset. He was slender, and he dressed exclusively jeans, tee shirt and flip-flops. He wore flip-flops indoors and out until Carol wrestled them away from him in early December.

      “Could you help me move those ladders into the garage?”

      Giles just nodded.

      Great. I’d been surrounded today either by people I wanted to talk to me who wouldn’t, or by people who wanted to talk to me whom I wished would shut up.

      We went out the kitchen door, Molly following us expectantly. Without exchanging a word, we lifted the ladder on top and started to maneuver it to the garage at the back of the small, oblong yard.

      As I tried to avoid tripping over Molly, who was entranced by this new game, I tried to think of how to apologize for Natalie’s rudeness without further offending Giles.

      We slid the first ladder into the garage, along the inside wall, and started to walk back to get the second. I had a brainstorm. I would criticize Natalie’s cooking.

      “Well, at least you and Carol got to have a decent meal tonight. I could hardly do class with Mama’s heavy pasta and sauce in me.”

      We picked up the second ladder and Giles looked at me across its length.

      “It was not good?”

      He looked a little less grim.

      “You know how she is, the more garlic the better. You can’t taste anything else. It ruins the whole meal.”

      I put my end of the ladder down and Giles bent and slid it efficiently next to the other one inside the garage. I locked the door.

      He hummed tunelessly as we walked back to the house. I sighed with my garlic breath (it really had been a little too strong). Another relational fire extinguished.

      I opened my portable computer on the kitchen table and logged on to my email account. I opened the document I’d sent myself about my conversations with Ah-seong Kim. I’d need to add the conversations with Lester too, and I struggled over the wording. Drat. Without the complaint form guidelines in front of me, I was floundering over the formatting. Still, as I typed I realized writing it up while it was still fresh in my mind was crucial. I could cut and paste it into the online complaint form when I got the password. I sent Henry an email asking him if he knew what it was, and then I saved the file and closed the computer.

      I went to put on the night bolt on the kitchen door and the smell of the garlic in the kitchen hit me again. If I didn’t want to have to face that at breakfast, I’d better take the trash out tonight.

      I grabbed the trash bag from under the sink and called to Molly. No woof in response. She was probably sacked out on one of the kid’s beds. She’d been out with Giles and me earlier so I decided to let her be. I normally took her out one more time for a short walk down the alley and back just before bed, but we could skip that.

      The night had turned cloudy and colder with very little moon. I skipped a coat, though. If you start wearing coats in October in Chicago you won’t toughen up for the months to come.

      Our skinny yard, fenced on each side, ended with two garages that opened on to an alley at the back. Between the garages, a walkway stretched to the alley where the trashcans were located. Our yard was floodlit from the back of the house, but it was still a little dim closer to the garages.

      I reached the gate at the end of the walkway and saw that it stood open. I was furious. The kids were strictly forbidden to go in and out of the alley and the open gate meant that Molly could get out.

      The alley could be dangerous for kids and unleashed dogs. It was not well lit, and kids from the high school on the south end of the alley loved to drag race up and down its narrow length. They’d careened more than once into our cans, but you couldn’t relocate the cans. Sanitation workers in Chicago would refuse to take your trash if the cans were not where they were supposed to be. I’d learned that after moving the trash cans to the side of the garage after the last drag race trash can collision. My trash was still in the cans after normal pick-up day. So I’d dragged them back and let them be sitting ducks.

      I didn’t like that gate being opened. It meant somebody had probably cut through our yard or intended to.

      I pushed the gate all the way open. There were no cars in the alley. I turned, pulled off a trash can lid and started to stuff the bag into the already overcrowded can when I heard a noise that made my heart nearly stop. Next to my right ear, somebody took a breath.

      I started to turn in that direction and the next second I saw a shadow rise up. I pulled back as far as I could against the rough brick of the garage wall and a hand holding a knife came slashing down directly where I had been standing a moment before.

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