Chapter 2 - Sixty Cents and a Cold Wind
Before 7:00 a.m., Karen stepped out onto Alder Street carrying a long, black canvas garment bag.
The air smelled of wet asphalt, coal exhaust, and the bitter autumn frost rising from the Chicago River three blocks away. The black wool coat inside the bag was forty years old. Its owner, a retired postal worker who lived near the docks, had lost nearly thirty pounds over the winter after a long stay in the county hospital. The heavy, double-breasted shoulder seams needed to be opened, trimmed, and completely reconstructed before Thursday morning.
Karen walked through the East Market alleyways because it was the fastest route to the tailor’s stall and because she had two more alterations waiting on her table.
At that hour, the market was a chaotic collision of wet concrete, roaring diesel engines, and sharp noise. Crates of cabbage and cold pork were thrown off flatbeds; hand trucks with ungreased axles shrieked against the curb; vendors shouted prices in the flat, unhurried cadences of men who had worked the same concrete stalls since their youth.
Karen dropped the heavy coat off with Old Man Miller, who gave her forty dollars in crisp cash and asked after Ruth.
“She’s stubborn as ever,” Karen said with a tiny, polite smile.
“Good,” Miller grunted. “Stubborn keeps the frost out.”
Karen stopped at the produce stall on the corner to buy ingredients for the week’s meals: onions, winter carrots, small red potatoes, and a sprig of fresh parsley.
The vendor—a thick-necked man named Doyle who wore a greasy wool cap pulled low over his ears—weighed the canvas sack of potatoes, tossed it onto his counter, and barked, “Three dollars and sixty cents.”
Karen glanced at the scale. She had been shopping in the East Market since she was a little girl carrying Ruth’s basket; her eyes caught the balance indicator instantly.
“The bag is short,” she said quietly, her voice barely carrying over the noise of a passing delivery van. “The scale says two pounds. That’s three dollars flat.”
Doyle wiped his hands on his canvas apron and leaned his thick forearms across the wooden counter. He did not look at the scale, nor did he offer to adjust the price. Instead, he looked directly at the left side of Karen’s face—at the tight, shiny scar tissue that pulled her eyebrow low and smoothed the skin over her missing cheekbone into a flat, unnatural mask.
Speaking loudly enough for two truck drivers leaning against a stack of wooden crates to hear every word, Doyle sneered, “Some people count every copper penny because nobody’s ever going to give 'em a free ride in this world.”
He paused, letting his voice carry across the wet pavement.
“If you’d taken that widower from Bell Street when your grandmother begged you to six years ago, girl, you’d have a man to pay for your groceries. Then you wouldn't have to stand in my alley squinting at my scale like a city inspector.”
The two truck drivers let out a loud, rough laugh. One of them looked away mid-laugh, suddenly finding his cigarette very interesting.
That brief look away was somehow far worse than the joke itself.
Karen said nothing. She did not blush. She did not pull her collar up. She simply kept her right hand resting flat on the canvas potato sack and waited for the moment to pass. She had learned long ago that the fastest way through public cruelty was to stand entirely still until the people laughing grew bored of the silence.
Then the laughter cut off.
It didn't fade away or turn into awkward coughing. It stopped as instantly as a radio wire being snipped with shears.
The surrounding alley went dead quiet. A man pushing a hand truck forty feet away lowered the iron handles to the pavement so gently the wheels didn't make a sound.
A man in a dark gray suit was walking unhurriedly down the center of the wet market aisle.
He was alone. He wore no overcoat despite the freezing wind, and his hands were tucked loosely into his trousers pockets. He walked with the measured, terrifying stride of a man who had never in his entire life stepped aside to let someone else pass.
Everyone he approached moved back against the brick walls or turned their backs to study vegetable crates they had no intention of buying.
He stopped two feet from Doyle’s counter.
He did not look at Doyle. He did not look at the truck drivers, who had both straightened up so fast their cigarettes fell onto the wet concrete.
He turned his head and looked directly at Karen.
Not at her boots. Not at her hands. He looked directly at her face—at the smooth, unblemished skin of her right side, and then across the bridge of her nose to the pulled, shiny scar tissue on her left. He looked without disgust, without pity, and without the slightest hint of haste. He looked at her as if she were a painting hanging in a quiet museum.
Karen had spent twenty years perfecting the art of standing in corners so strangers would not be forced to look at her like this. No one had ever stared at her so deliberately in broad daylight.
“How much did he take you for?” the man asked.
His voice was a low, smooth baritone that seemed to vibrate through the wet air, entirely devoid of anger.
Karen swallowed hard, keeping her head level. “Sixty cents.”
The man turned his head slowly toward Doyle. He didn't raise his voice by a single fraction of a decibel.
“Give it back.”
He didn't wait to see if the command was followed. He simply turned and continued his slow, unhurried walk down the center of the market aisle toward 5th Street.
Doyle’s hand was in his cash drawer before the man in the gray suit had taken three steps. He pulled out two quarters and a dime with fingers that were trembling so badly he dropped the coins twice against the wood. He shoved them across the counter, dropping them into Karen’s open palm without letting his skin touch hers.
He offered no apology. But his mouth was pressed into a white, terrified line, and his eyes were fixed entirely on the wet concrete between his boots.
Karen stood alone in the market aisle, holding the canvas sack of potatoes in her left hand and the sixty cents in her right, as the market slowly began to breathe again around her.
Behind her, near the fish crates, a loader leaned over and whispered a single word to his partner.
May you like
Calvano.
Karen did not turn around. She placed the coins in her coat pocket and walked home by the long way, around the high brick wall of the parish cemetery.
