Chapter 9 - The Tuesday Eviction
Tuesday at eleven-forty-five AM was bright, bitterly cold, and completely unsparing.
The snow along Belden Avenue had been plowed into high, dirty banks that blocked the curbs, turning the street into a single lane of slush and road salt.
Outside number 842, a large yellow moving van from a budget truck-rental outfit in Cicero sat idling, its exhaust pipe coughing white clouds of diesel smoke into the freezing air. Parked behind it was an unmarked white cruiser from the Cook County Sheriff’s Department, its dashboard lights flashing a slow, methodical amber.
I stood on the sidewalk across the street, wrapped in my heavy down coat, holding a paper cup of black coffee from the bakery on Clark.
Beside me stood Sarah, holding Chloe’s hand.
My daughter was dressed in her pink snowsuit, holding a warm cinnamon pastry in her mitten, watching the big yellow truck with fascinated, two-year-old wonder. She didn't know that the people coming down the concrete steps had dumped her dinner down the drain four days ago; to her, it was just a parade of boxes in the snow.
Deputy Sheriff Kowalski stood on the front stoop, checking his clipboard, while two movers in greasy coveralls hauled out the furniture.
They weren't taking the good dining table.
They weren't taking the leather recliner, the sixty-five-inch television, or the memory-foam mattress in the master bedroom. Under the terms of the settlement agreement David Sterling had executed with their court-appointed public defender on Monday afternoon, every piece of furniture purchased with funds from my private accounts remained with the real estate entity.
They were taking their clothes.
Cardboard wardrobe boxes, taped together with cheap brown packing tape, were stacked along the icy sidewalk. Plastic garbage bags filled with shoes, old blankets, and kitchen utensils sat in the slush.
Arthur came out first.
He wore his old work coat from the rail yard—the one with the faded union patch on the shoulder—and a pair of stained denim jeans. He was carrying a single duffel bag in each hand, his shoulders hunched against the biting lake wind, his breath coming in short, wheezing puffs.
He didn't look up at the third-floor windows. He didn't look across the street at me.
He climbed into the passenger side of a battered twenty-year-old Buick sedan that belonged to his brother from Joliet, pulled the door shut, and stared straight through the frosted windshield into nothingness.
Then came Vanessa.
Her leased Audi had been repossessed from the building’s heated garage three hours earlier by a flatbed truck from the financing company.
She walked down the stone stairs carrying two designer suitcases, wearing a cheap nylon puffer jacket she had bought at a discount store in the loop on Monday morning. Her makeup was gone. Her hair was pulled back into an unwashed, frizzy bun beneath a knit cap. She looked like an ordinary, exhausted thirty-year-old woman with a suspended driver's license and eight hundred dollars to her name.
As she reached the bottom step, she saw me standing across the street.
She stopped. For three seconds, our eyes locked across the dirty snowbanks of Belden Avenue.
There was no smirk left. There was no theatrical comment about living like royalty. There was only the vast, bottomless humiliation of a woman who had spent five years pretending to fly, only to find out that the parachute had been purchased with someone else’s money.
She ducked her head, climbed into the back seat of her uncle’s Buick, and pulled the coat around her ears.
Teresa walked out last.
She was carrying a cardboard box containing her porcelain angel figurines and her photo albums.
She stopped on the landing where Arthur had set Chloe’s stroller four nights ago. The wind whipped her thin gray hair across her face, catching the hem of her winter coat.
She looked across the street. She saw me.
She saw her granddaughter eating a pastry in the sunshine, warm, safe, and completely untouched by their ruin.
Teresa took three steps toward the curb, her hands trembling around the cardboard box, her mouth opening as if she were about to deliver one final, blistering maternal sermon on duty, blood, and respect.
I didn't yell. I didn't raise my coffee cup in mock celebration.
I simply reached down, took my daughter’s small, gloved hand in mine, and turned my back on them.
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We crossed the street, walked through the heavy wrought-iron doors of 842 West Belden Avenue, and stepped into the warm, quiet brass elevator.
The hydraulic motor hummed, lifting us up to the fourth floor, leaving the moving truck and thirty years of conditional love down in the freezing Chicago slush.
