Galecki’s was like a thousand restaurants in Chicago. A two-room place of plastic, fake wood-grained tables with their glosses scrubbed off, worn green vinyl benches and chairs and wallpaper yellowed by decades of frying food, it drew bus drivers, real estate and insurance people for breakfasts, cops and shop folks for lunch, and families for the blue-plate specials at dinner. And me, that day. I got there at one, just past the lunch rush.
Mrs Galecki, Jenny’s mother, watched every plate that was served and every nickel that paid for it. But that afternoon, as I walked up to her perch at the cash register, she didn’t see me.
It was a relief. She was dodging.
I continued on into the side room and sat at the booth farthest in the back. They never sat customers at that booth because its back cushion was below the shelves that stored the ketchup. It was a highly trafficked spot. Galecki’s customers loved ketchup.
A waitress brought me a glass of ice water, pointed to the menu in the wire holder against the wall and said she’d be back in a minute.
She wasn’t. Thirty minutes passed. By then, the side room had emptied of everyone, including any sign of a waitress. By two o’clock, the main dining room had quieted into low conversations and gently clattering dishes. I supposed the waitresses were having their own lunches, for there was no noise coming from the cash register, nor was the usually voluble Mrs Galecki yelling at anyone in English or Polish or a mixture of both, as was her custom when the place was busy.
I sipped my water, ate the crackers in the little straw basket and read the newspapers that had been left in the next booth. And I thought about the time Jenny and I had eaten in that same booth when we’d been wary and new to each other, and hopeful, perhaps, of the distances that might come to grow between ourselves and our ghosts.
My waitress finally returned. Or more likely, she’d been dispatched to dispatch me. ‘We had to close the kitchen,’ she said.
‘I’m fine with the crackers,’ I said. ‘The water, by the way, is delicious.’
She stared at me like she was witnessing true idiocy for the first time, which might have been the case, given her young age. She turned and walked away.
Ten more minutes passed, and then another ten. Finally Mrs Galecki stomped up, squeezed her short bulk into the seat opposite me and fixed me with a steely glare.
And said nothing.
‘I’m learning how to cook Peeps,’ I said, after the silence got too irritating.
‘Peeps?’ she asked, elongating the word with several more letters ‘e.’
‘Bunnies. Rabbits.’
‘You cook rabbit?’ She wrinkled her nose but what she was really trying to crumple was my optimism. She wanted me gone.
I shook my head. ‘Not real rabbit. Bunnies. Marshmallow. Marshmallow bunnies.’
‘Eets not Easter.’
‘Peeps are for always and forever.’
‘How you cook such theengs?’
‘Until they form a puddle. It takes a while but I’m a patient man. I can wait and wait.’
She squeezed out, grabbed a handful of Saltines from another booth and dropped them in front of me. ‘You stay,’ she said, and left.
Twenty-five minutes passed. The delivery bell rang at the back door. Mrs Galecki returned and pulled open the door. A huge bearded man in a bulky windbreaker came in carrying a case of ketchup, set it on my table and took a long minute to look around. The windbreaker was not bulky enough to conceal the semi-automatic tucked in his belt. He motioned for me to follow him outside.
A van was squeezed between two cars, backed tight against the service door. Its rear doors were open wide, almost touching the back of the building. No one would be seen going in the back of the van. He told me to get inside and sit on one of the dozen boxes of canned goods. He climbed in beside me, pulled the doors shut, slid down the lock and sat on another of the boxes. A driver started the engine and we pulled away.
The van wasn’t like Leo’s. It had no windows, so I couldn’t see where we were heading. By the number of turns the driver took I would have gotten lost anyway. We zigged and zagged and seemed to turn down every cratered side street in Chicago’s old Polish, Scandinavian and Bohemian enclaves.
We pulled to a stop after twenty minutes and the driver cut the engine. His door opened and closed. Three quick knocks sounded on the back doors and the man who’d ridden silently beside me reached to unlock them from inside.
The man who opened the van’s door from outside was also big and bearded, and he, too, had a semi-automatic, though his was in his jacket pocket. He could have been my fellow passenger’s twin.
I stepped down. We were in an alley behind a brown brick three-flat. The outside man, who I assumed was the driver, motioned for me to follow him up the exposed back stairs to the third floor, my fellow rider following close behind. The man in front knocked twice on the door and twice again. The door was opened by yet another bearded fellow that could have been a third brother of the other two men, and we stepped into a kitchen. The third man kept his semi-automatic in a leather holster on his belt. My driver and my fellow passenger went to the refrigerator, took out beers and sat at the small table.
I followed the third man down a short hall. He knocked on a bedroom door at the end, then opened it and stepped aside so I could go in.
A television, tuned to a cable news channel, was playing in the corner. The sound was set low.
A nurse, sitting beside it, had a newspaper on her lap. Her hand rested on a revolver next to a plate of cookies on a tiny table. The third man nodded. She pulled her hand back and picked up the newspaper.
Only then did I turn to look at the other person in the room. She was sitting on a beige vinyl recliner with her two legs extended on the footrest. Her right leg was in a brace that ran from her foot up to her mid-calf. Her face was black and blue everywhere. One eye was almost swollen shut and her lips were swollen.
‘Hiya, Dek,’ Jenny said.