LITMIR.BIZ

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      He nodded carefully.

      Had he done something? Was she mad at him?

      But wait. She couldn’t be mad at him. She was all dressed up too, like a princess she looked. A cape thing hung from her shoulders to practically the ground for heaven’s sake. He looked very carefully now, stunned. Her dress was all sparkles and it went all the way to the ground too. Glenda! The Good Witch of the North. Just like her. He looked down and sighed with delight. Red sparkle shoes. Dorothy’s sparkle shoes. Oh, the shoes were so beautiful they put his clean Nikes in the shade.

      He wanted to make her stay. He’d have to talk. Sweat beaded suddenly on his lip. But Glenda wouldn’t hit him. She was good. It was even in her name. Good. He knew that.

      “Yes.” There! And it was a perfect yes. A beautiful yes. It matched the shoes and the dress it was so beautiful, so perfectly formed.

      “My name’s Kristin, glad to meet you.”

      She stuck her hand out from inside the cape and the cape made little flutter motions. The material was sorta stiff and shiny. He couldn’t take his eyes off it. So beautiful. He watched until the cape was perfectly still again. He looked up at Glenda. What had she said?

      She was just smiling now, but it was a sad smile. He hoped she was okay. She held out the money. Two dollars.

      He took it and gave her a paper, doing his business the way it should be done.

      “I’m so sorry about Jimmy,” she said, looking even sadder, like Glenda the Good Witch should when somebody dropped a house on somebody.

      And somebody had dropped a house on Jimmy. That was for sure. He shivered.

      2

      All the fears

      From all the years

      I see the streets

      I know what’s up

      And down.

      “What’s Up?”

      James Maddox, #965

      StreetWise

      Wednesday, May 17, 6 p.m.

      I was just about to call the police and report her missing when Kelly appeared at my front door over two hours late. Kelly is a fourteen-year-old and the daughter of Tom Grayson, a surgeon at the University of Chicago hospital and my, I guess you would say, boyfriend. We’re not lovers, not yet anyway. What other word is there?

      I could see her smug expression through the leaded glass of our front door even before I yanked it open. She knew exactly how angry she’d made me, and that, of course, made me still angrier. ‘Slow down, slow down,’ cautioned an inner voice as I unfastened the deadbolt. ‘She’s a teenager. She’s manipulating you,’ it said reasonably. ‘She’s doing a damn fine job,’ I snapped back at the inner voice. A friend of mine, mother of a teenage girl, had said to me that she was beginning to favor abortion up to age fifteen. I’d thought at the time she was just overreacting. I took a deep breath and opened the door.

      Kelly slouched in, hiding her breasts under a Kurt Cobain tee shirt, complete with the dates of his birth and death. Great. Well, her baggy jeans and clogs fit the grunge look. But no matter how much she slouched, she couldn’t hide that she was nearly my height, and I’m just over 6 feet tall. I’d made my peace with being a tall, blond Viking. Kelly had not, though she had lovely skin and blonde hair as well. Well, it used to be blond, now there was a streak of purple down one side. She wore it dragged back and tied with a strip of leather. This, I suppose you would call it hairstyle, was designed to show off the double pierced ears, a stud and a ring, that had been newly acquired. Tom had been stunned when she’d shown up one afternoon with the pierced ears. He was a new, full-time custodial father, his ex-wife having died in a traffic accident a few months before. He was still learning teen culture, and in this he was a slow learner. I’d tried to console him by describing all the other things she could have pierced. He had become so pale I stopped my description.

      Kelly was angry at her mother for dying, angry that she’d been forced to move to Chicago and leave her friends, angry at being so tall and angry at basically everything. Her eyes were blue like Tom’s, only hers resembled lasers as she stood sullenly just inside the doorway and just looked at me. She wanted me to know how much she hated this witchy interloper in her father’s life. I knew. And my twin sons, aged six, she considered the Devil’s spawn.

      I sighed and fed her my obligatory line.

      “Why are you so late?”

      She just shrugged while she dropped her backpack heavily onto the parquet floor of our entry.

      “Dunno.”

      I knew. She (and privately I agreed with her) thought she was old enough to stay home alone for the evening, but her father didn’t. Usually they compromised by having Mrs. Bronsky, their downstairs neighbor, ‘keep an eye on Kelly’ when Tom was out for the evening, or out most of the night in a long surgery. But Mrs. Bronsky was in Cleveland attending to her daughter and her new grandchild. Tom had cajoled me into letting Kelly come over while he and I went to a reception dedicating a new medical building in the hospital complex. Carol and Giles, a live-in couple, both graduate students, help me take care of the kids and try to keep up with the cooking and the cleaning. I’d known when Tom asked that it was a bad idea, and it appeared I’d been right.

      “Never mind,” I forced out through my teeth. “Giles has dinner for you in the kitchen.”

      “I’ve eaten.”

      She addressed this snotty remark to the hat stand that graces our Victorian hall.

      “Fine,” I managed. Though it wasn’t fine. Giles, a math Ph.D. candidate, who had emigrated from Senegal, did all the cooking and he took it very personally when someone didn’t eat what he had prepared.

      Fortunately, my twin boys ate anything. At nearly seven-years-old they were approaching 4 ½ feet tall and climbing. I bought shoes nearly once a month.

      The boys had heard the door and they came running down the hall with Molly, our Golden Retriever. Molly likes Kelly, God knows why, and she proceeded to jump up on her, wiggling with joy. Kelly swore and pushed Molly down roughly. Molly yiked, more in disbelief than in actual hurt, I thought, but Mike, my oldest by a few minutes, was hugely offended.

      “Hey!” he yelled, grabbing for Molly’s collar and pulling her into a hug. He looked up at Kelly like she was Eichmann in his glass booth on trial for war crimes.

      “Yeah, watch out, you stupid, clumsy ox,” contributed Sam, my less diplomatic son.

      “Who’re you calling an ox, you toad!” was Kelly’s scintillating rebuttal. “And get that creature away from me!”

      Kelly aimed a half-hearted kick in Molly and Mike’s direction.

      “That’s enough!” I stepped between the would-be combatants and then turned to Kelly.

      “You don’t want to be here. All right, you’ve made that sufficiently clear. Take your book bag off my floor and go into the den. Close the door. Stay there.”

      I turned to Mike and Sam.

      “Take Molly into the kitchen, and then go upstairs and do your spelling.”

      Having divided, but having no illusions I had conquered, I called down the hall to Carol that Kelly had arrived. I didn’t include Giles in my announcement. A dedicated pacifist, Giles just hated conflict. His soft brown eyes, magnified by his horn-rimmed glasses, take on the look of a deer caught in the headlights whenever there is yelling. At the sound of Kelly’s loud and angry voice, I’d heard the rapid flap, flap, flap of his flip-flops as he had hurried upstairs.

      Carol came down our long, narrow center hallway, her short, rounded figure topped by a mop of hair cut exactly in a bowl shape. Giles’s culinary skills at work, I always assumed. She looks like she was born

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