“Just one last question and I’ll get out of your way. Who is Magda? Your sons told me—”

“Magda?” Red spots appeared on her face, fury sending blood to her head. “Has that bitch reappeared? I thought we were rid of her for good, little goddamn bitch of a sycophantic pseudoscientist.”

I backed away involuntarily, as though her vitriol could eat through my own skin. The stack of books wobbled and fell over.

“Get out of my house,” Shirley hissed, her face still blotched. “Get out of my house, and don’t ever dare come back into it.”

I stood on shaking legs. “Rid of her for good when? Last week or last century?”

She hurled her pen at me. Her aim was good. I got my hands up fast enough to protect my face, but my wrist took a stinging hit.

I retreated toward the kitchen but stopped long enough to say, “I called the hospital this morning. Sonia’s still in a protective coma. I talked to her brothers yesterday. They were both distressed and wished they’d known sooner that she was hospitalized.”

“If you dare bother my children again, I’ll get the police involved,” Shirley spat.

“Does that include Sonia?” I asked. “Have you been to the hospital yet?”

This time she threw a book, but I was out of range. I walked down the dusty hall and let myself out through the front door.

I wished I hadn’t deposited Peppy at Free State. I could have used a little puppy therapy about now. As a poor second, I drove to the end of the street and lowered my car seat so I could lie back, eyes closed.

Shirley’s anger was so extreme it singed. Who was the more damaging person in that marriage, Shirley or Nate? He was volatile and abusive, she was drunk and vitriolic. What a sea for a poor little polar bear to swim in. I found myself blinking back tears for Sonia.

I massaged my temples. Breathe into Shirley’s anger, let it wash away from you. I thought of my own parents, my father’s deep, protective love for my mother and the nights she and I had stayed up, sick with worry, while he worked the free-fire zones on Chicago’s West Side.

My mother died when I was sixteen, on a cold March day. My father and I had spent the night in her hospital room, my father inserting himself between the tubes and wires in her bed so that he could cradle her in his lap. I was at her side, holding her hand. For sixteen years we had been a little triangle of love, with me as the apex they both supported. I’d spent too much time on self-pity, the loss of my mother heavy in my heart, weighted further by my father’s death a decade later. I had never stopped to think how exceedingly lucky I’d been.