I stretched and headed to the kitchen to watch Mr. Contreras fix her a big bowl of dry dog food mixed with scrambled eggs and vitamins. His absorption in the process was so complete that he didn’t respond to any of my questions either about his Las Vegas Night or Mitch Kruger.

I figured I was an unneeded third at this point. Some friends were playing softball and making a picnic over by Montrose harbor and I’d told them I’d try to join them. I undid the bolts to the back door.

“What’s up, doll? You going someplace?” Mr. Contreras paused briefly in his stirring. “You run along. You can be sure I’ll look after the princess a-okay. Eight”—he beamed to himself—“Eight and she did it just like a champ. My, oh my.”

As I closed the back door a horrible noise came from the old man. I was halfway up to my apartment before it hit me: he was singing. I think the song was “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.”

2

Black Tie Optional

“So you’ve become an obstetrician?” Lotty Herschel mocked me. “I’ve always thought you needed a backup profession, something with a more reliable cash flow. But I wouldn’t recommend obstetrics these days: the insurance would overwhelm you.”

I flicked a thumbnail at her. “You just don’t want me muscling in on your turf. Woman reaches the top of her profession and can’t bear to see the younger ones scrambling up behind her.”

Max Loewenthal frowned at me across the table: that was about as unfair an accusation as I could make. Lotty, one of the city’s leading perinatalogists, always had a spare hand to stretch out to younger women. Men too.

“What about the father?” Max’s son Michael quickly changed the subject. “Do you know who it is? And are you making him pay child support?”

“A good question,” Lotty said. “If your Peppy is like the teenaged mothers I see, you won’t get many dog biscuits out of the father. But maybe his owner will help out?”

“I doubt it. The father’s a black Lab who lives up the street from us. But I can’t imagine Mrs. Frizell helping care for eight puppies. She’s got five dogs of her own and I don’t know where she gets the money to feed them.”

Mrs. Frizell was one of the stubborn holdouts against the gentrification of my stretch of Racine. In her eighties, she was the kind of old woman who terrified me when I was small. Her wispy gray hair stuck out from her head in uncombed elflocks. Summer and winter she wore the same array of faded gingham dresses and shapeless sweaters.