I woke panting and sweating. It was only five o’clock. I tried to go back to sleep, but I was in that gritty state where it was impossible to slide away from my conscious brain. Finally, when the late winter sky was starting to streak red, I got up and took the dogs for a run.

I wanted to go as far as I could as fast as I could. I wanted to get away from myself and my tired gray mind, but at the end of three miles, Mitch

and Peppy both balked: they planted themselves in the bike path and refused to move, despite both commands and bribes.

I finally turned around and took them home at a pace slow enough to please them, but one that left me prey to the uneasy images from my dreams. I couldn’t shake the images, nor the feeling that something beyond mere unpleasantness lay in them.

Back home, I showered and made breakfast-eggs, in the hopes that protein would overcome my gray mood and give me the energy to organize my day. Work felt beyond me this morning, but I didn’t have the income or the upbringing to indulge only myself.

Behind my bleak thoughts, I could see my mother at the kitchen table, mending socks. It was three in the morning; my dad hadn’t returned from his shift and the West Side was an inferno of riots and looting. I had heard her, or felt her anxiety, I don’t know which, and crept down from my bed under the attic dormer. She held me close for a time, then made me a cup of cambric tea, and showed me how to darn a heel.

“We don’t give into our worries, cara,” she said. “That is for grand ladies, who can fancy themselves ill when their lover hasn’t written or the new dress is commonplace. We aren’t like that, self-indulgent. We do some job, like this, we do it well, we make the worries leave us alone.”

My father had come in around five, to find us both asleep at the kitchen table, our faces in his socks. A cop’s daughter, a reporter’s lover, that gave you plenty of practice in showing you weren’t a grand lady, or self-indulgent. I hadn’t darned a sock since I was fifteen, but I had plenty of other chores I could be doing.

I started with a phone call to Luke Edwards, the lugubrious mechanic who’s looked after my cars for years. Car locks are tricky; I didn’t want to tackle Whitby’s with my picklocks, where I might not only jam the lock, but get arrested if some cop saw me using a tool of questionable legality.

Whenever I talk to Luke, I have to endure a long lecture on everything I’ve done wrong to my current machine before he’ll work on it, but he’s kind of like the Car Talk brothers in what he knows about engines. When he heard I wanted to get into a locked Saturn, he made me sit through five minutes on the inadequate safety features of modern American cars,