Chapter 22: Her Own Door

The flat was on the second floor of a yellow brick building in Ravenswood.

It had one bedroom, one bay window and a radiator that clanked when you looked at it.

It cost eleven hundred dollars more a month than I could afford, and I signed the lease anyway.

The landlord was a retired schoolteacher with reading glasses on a chain.

She slid the form across her kitchen table.

"Emergency contacts," she said. "Three, please. People who'd come if the pipes burst."

I held the pen over the paper.

Three years ago, I couldn't have filled that line.

I wrote Bea Tillman first.

Then my father.

I wrote the third one slowly, in block letters, and the landlord read it upside down.

"The vet," she said. "Is he good with pipes?"

"He's good at showing up."

"That'll do." She gave me two brass keys on a ring. "A keypad for the door, if you want. It's the push-button kind. Four numbers."

"I want it."

"Then you're the only one who needs to know the numbers."

I walked up the stairs with the keys closed in my fist.

It was mine.

Nobody had approved it.

At ten on Saturday morning, my father's delivery truck pulled up on the street.

Right behind it came the Getaway, a minivan with a dent in the side.

Bea hopped out in a bandana.

"I have snacks," she said. "I have a playlist. I have emotional support."

"You have a bad back."

"And a heart of gold."

My father opened the rear of the truck and the whole of my Logan Square life was inside it.

My bed, three bookshelves, a desk, a green velvet armchair, and a couch that was far too large.

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