“She’s here, at Lionsgate Manor, in our rehabilitation wing, although it’s hard for me to be hopeful. She and Miss Ella shared a bed in that little apartment until Miss Claudia had her stroke.” Karen shook her head mournfully. “All those years of working their fingers to the bone, both of them, and they couldn’t afford two bedrooms, even at Lionsgate Manor. It doesn’t seem fair.”

Maybe that was what lay behind Miss Ella’s hostility: the rank unfairness of life. Life is unfair. Of course it is. When it snows, the rich ski downhill and the poor shovel their sidewalks, my mother used to say. But Gabriella loved life, me, music—above all, music. When she sang, especially Mozart, she moved to a different world where rich and poor, fair and unfair, didn’t matter, only sound. What did Miss Ella have that brought her to such a place? What did I have, come to think of it?

A heart-stopping thud on my car window brought me back to Racine Avenue. It was Mr. Contreras, my downstairs neighbor. Mitch, the giant lab-golden, jumped up on the car, his paws on the Mustang’s roof, and began to bark. I got out of the car, pushing him out of the way.

“We began to wonder if maybe you had a stroke out here, doll, you was sitting so long. And you got company, cute young gal, says she’s a cousin, although she’s so young I thought maybe she was a niece or something. But, then, families do stretch out both ways, don’t they? She’s on your pop’s side, I guess, since she says she’s a Warshawski. I didn’t know you had any relatives …”

Mitch punctuated the old man’s flood of words with hysterical barks. He and Peppy, his mother, had both been clinging to me since my return home. In my absence, a dog service had run them twice a day, but they needed the reassurance that I wasn’t going to abandon them again. Mitch ignored my commands to be quiet and to sit. By the time I’d wrestled him out of the street and into position on the sidewalk, I was panting. Peppy, who’d sat through the whole proceeding with the saintly expression that makes other dogs hate golden retrievers, now started threading herself through my legs, giving little whimpers of greeting.

“Could you start at the beginning?” I asked my neighbor, my hand on Mitch’s collar. “Like my cousin. Who is she? Where is she? And so on.”

Mr. Contreras beamed. He loves family—my family, anyway. He seldom sees his married daughter, Ruthie, or his two grandchildren. “Didn’t you know? Your own cousin, didn’t her ma tell you? She’s come to work in Chicago, and she’s renting a place in Bucktown.”