“Thank you, Elena.” I opened the refrigerator door and took stock of the meager contents. “I’m sorry I can’t stay to chat, but I want to try to find you someplace to sleep tonight.”

“Aw, Vicki-Victoria, I mean. Don’t rush around like that. It ain’t good for the heart. Let me stay here, just for a few days, anyway. Get over the shock of living through that inferno last night. I promise I won’t bother you any. And I could get the place cleaned up a little while you’re at work.”

I shook my head implacably. “No way, Elena. I will not have you living here. Not one night longer.”

Her face puckered. “Why do you hate me, baby? I’m your own daddy’s sister. Family has to stick by family.”

“I don’t hate you. I don’t want to live with anyone, but you and I lead especially incompatible lives. You know as well as I that Tony would say the same if he were still around.”

There’d been a painful episode when Elena announced her independence from my grandmother and moved into her own apartment. Finding solitude not to her liking, she’d shown up at our house in South Chicago one weekend. She’d stayed three days. It wasn’t my fierce mother who’d asked her to leave-Gabriella’s love of the underdog somehow could encompass even Elena. But my easygoing father came home from the graveyard shift on Monday to find Elena passed out at the kitchen table. He put her into a detox unit at County and refused to talk to her for six months after she got out.

Elena apparently also remembered this episode. The pouty puckering disappeared from her face. She looked stricken, and somehow more real.

I squeezed her shoulder gently and offered to make her some eggs. She shook her head without speaking, watching me silently while I spread anchovy paste on toast. I ate it quickly and left before pity could overcome my judgment.

It was well past nine now. The morning rush was ending and I had an easy run across Belmont to the expressway. When I neared the Loop, though, the traffic congealed as we moved through a construction maze. The four miles on the Ryan between the Eisenhower and Thirty-first, supposedly the busiest eight lanes of traffic anywhere in the known universe, had finally crumbled under the stress of the semi’s. The southbound lanes were closed while the feds performed reconstructive surgery.