He hung up before I’d got the first three digits out.

I sat on the living room floor, looking at the phone. My mother died when I was fifteen; there are still nights I wake up missing her so much that a physical pain sucks at my diaphragm. But I’d rather have that pain every night of the year than get to be sixty and still be swallowing an undigested lump of anger.

My stomach interrupted my morose thoughts. My stomach was probably making me more morose than the situation warranted—I hadn’t eaten breakfast and it was long past lunchtime. The kitchen didn’t hold anything more appetizing than it had earlier in the week. I changed into lightweight cotton pants and a T-shirt, stopped at the Belmont Diner for a BLT with fries, and drove south.

14

Luther Revisited

Mitch’s old address on Thirty-fifth Street proved to be another rooming house, but it was quite a step up from Mrs. Polter’s. The house, a shabby white-painted frame, was scrupulously clean, from the well-scrubbed stoop to the living room where Ms. Coriolano talked to me. A woman of perhaps fifty, she explained that she managed the place for her mother, who had started renting rooms when her husband died falling from a scaffolding twenty years ago.

“It was hard to live on Social Security then—now it’s impossible and Mama has arthritis, she can’t walk, can’t get up the stairs no more.”

I clucked sympathetically and brought the conversation around to Mitch. Ms. Coriolano threw up her hands. He had lived with them for three years, brought in by one of the other boarders, Jake Sokolowski. Such a responsible, reliable man, of course they were happy to take in his friend, but Mr. Kruger never paid his rent on time. Not once. And stumbling in drunk late at night, waking Mama, who had trouble sleeping—what could she do? She gave him warning on warning, extension on extension, but finally had to throw him out.

“He set fire to the bedding in his sleep when he was drunk. We were lucky it was one of Mama’s sleepless nights. She smelled smoke—she screamed—I woke up and put the fire out myself. Otherwise we would all be sleeping on benches in Grant Park right now.”

She hadn’t seen Mitch since the morning after the fire, when she’d made him leave, but she was happy for me to talk to Sokolowski. He was sitting in the minuscule backyard, sleeping with the Sunday Herald-Star. I had met him three years earlier when he joined Kruger and Mr. Contreras in trying to defend Lotty’s clinic. When I woke him it was clear he didn’t recognize me, but like Mitch he enthusiastically remembered the fight.