“ ‘You hate me because I remind you of your mother.’ I mean, you can’t use that line. Maybe Sophocles could have, but—I mean, really. How’s yours going?”

“Still tinkering with act six.”

By 3 a.m. they have polished off one bottle of wine and half of a second, and are now walking Sailor together. Sailor loves this. He pushes his chest out in pride at showing off his family, although at this hour no one except barflies is out and about. This is a real fall night: skittering leaves along the pavement have replaced the summer’s cicada din. A Peapod truck wanders by once, then again.

“Something is definitely off about that,” Graham says. “Do they even offer three a.m. deliveries?” But this doesn’t throw him into a spiral of worry that the van is a secret CIA surveillance vehicle. He is too distracted, teasing apart the threads of Eleanor’s complex personality. Cate doesn’t see any complexity to her at all. While she can subtly delineate any role she plays, in real life Eleanor is just a blunt instrument of ambition, also deeply unpleasant. It’s a mystery to Cate why Graham is hung up on her. In spite of the fact that, at the end of their marriage, she put a live rat in the glove compartment of his car. Cate is at a loss in advising on the more terrifying variants of love.

the scary hand

Down on Blackhawk at her workshop, Cate spray-paints the desk for the sergeant’s office in At Ease. The shop is a small brick building on an industrial block south of the North and Clybourn junction. The rent is ridiculously low. Her landlord appears to have forgotten her. He hasn’t raised the rent in five years. If he does, she probably won’t be able to afford it anymore.

Warm air is coming in gusts, and she is dancing around outside the back door in a mask and goggles, dodging the paint as it plays in the wind. Her workshop is in a neighborhood of factories, but also dance clubs, and she notices that a small pack of large women who all seem to be costumed as Adele are running with peals of hilarity across the street. Warming up for some later, main event. They wave at her, possibly thinking her mask and goggles are a postapocalyptic costume.

Shit, she thinks. Halloween. She’s late. Trick-or-treating has already begun.

She finishes up, then tents a tarp loosely over the desk. She needs it to dry by tomorrow morning, when Stig will come by to help load it into her SUV and get it to the theater.