Mary Ann showed her strong teeth in a grin. “It’s hard work being a teacher these days—what you can talk about, what you can’t, what can get you and the school sucked into a lawsuit. Still, Rose Dorrado is a more practical mom than Sancia’s mother. Since Julia’s baby, she’s been on Josie like a hawk, checking who she sees after school, not letting her go out alone with any of the boys. Rose wants that kid in college. April’s folks are pushing her, too.”

“Come on!” I protested. “If Romeo—Bron—Czernin has one thought above his zipper, it’s about himself.”

“Her mother, then,” Mary Ann conceded. “She’s determined that her kid is going to get out of South Chicago. She tolerates the basketball in case it gets April a scholarship, but she’s probably one of a dozen parents in that school sitting on the kid’s head and making her do homework every night.”

The long conversation had worn out my coach. I helped her back into bed, took Scurry for a walk around the block, and then went north to deal with my own dogs. My downstairs neighbor had let them out, but I drove to the lake so they could run. I took Mitch and Peppy up with me to Morrell’s, where I left them when I got up the next morning at five to return to the South Side.

Even though the city was still shrouded in the mantle of night, the expressway was already busy—although, when is it ever not? Trucks, anxious people getting to the early shift, detectives looking for who knows what, filled the ten lanes. It was only when I exited at Eighty-seventh Street and headed east that the streets became quiet.

Fly the Flag stood against the embankment of the Skyway on South Chicago Avenue. I suppose there was a time when the avenue was full of active, prospering factories and shops, but I couldn’t remember it. Unlike the Skyway overhead, where traffic was thick with commuters from northwest Indiana, the avenue was deserted. A few cars were not so much parked as abandoned along the curbs, hoods sprung or axles reeling at odd angles. I left my Mustang on a side street so it wouldn’t stand out among the wrecks, and walked two blocks south to Fly the Flag. Only a CTA bus, grinding slowly north like a bear lumbering into the wind, passed me.

Except for an iron works, whose locked yard protected a modern sprawling plant, most of the buildings I passed looked as though only some defiant opposition to gravity kept them upright. Windows were missing or were boarded over; strips of aluminum waved in the wind. It’s a sign of the neighborhood’s desperate job shortage that people will work in these collapsing structures.