I helped him clean up, letting his waterfall of talk wash over me. Yes, Petra was a good kid, wonderful news about her promotion. Yes, maybe I was too hard on her. Didn’t I remember being young and enthusiastic? And then he was off to the races on his own youth. I left him in front of the television with a glass of grappa and took Peppy upstairs with me.

In my dreams, though, a saber-toothed tiger was charging me. When I fell helpless to the ground in front of it, it changed shape and became my father.

20 - TRUNK SHOW

20

TRUNK SHOW

PETRA SHOWED UP THE NEXT MORNING JUST AS I WAS returning from the lake with the dogs. She’d come to collect her Pathfinder, but when she saw us she climbed out of it and jogged over. The dogs raced to her, fawning and barking, covering her white cargo pants with water and sand. She was as bright as ever, showing no after-effects of her evening with Spumante.

“You know, we could look at that trunk of yours before I go to work,” she said, playing with Mitch’s ears.

“What’s with you and my trunk?” I demanded. “Do you think there are going to be false teeth or rubies or something?”

She grinned at me. “I don’t know. I guess since coming to Chicago, I’ve gotten more interested in my family’s history. I mean, my mom’s family, they’ve been in the Kansas City area for centuries. One of her ancestors was a colonel in the Confederate Army, and another came out to Kansas with the anti-slavery pioneers in the 1850s, so I grew up on all her stories. And her family is, well, so WASPy that Dad’s story was always kind of looked down on. You know, Polish meatpackers. Now I want to know more about the Warshawskis. They seem more interesting since I’ve been in their city, and met you and so on.”

I’d taken her to look at the bungalow on Fairfield Avenue where my grandparents lived when they moved from Back of the Yards. Now Petra wanted to see the house on the city’s Northwest Side, where Grandma Warshawski moved after the ’sixty-six riots, and the tenement in the stockyard district where my dad grew up and her own father had been born.

She followed me up the stairs, energetically planning an outing for the end of the workday that would include Back of the Yards, my childhood home in South Chicago, and Norridge Park, where our grandmother lived out her old age.

“Petra, darling, calm down. How about one house at a time, being as how just getting from Norridge Park to South Chicago will take us a couple of hours?”