Chapter 1 - The Weight of the Warehouse
The hum of the red line train was a low, vibrating dental drill inside the base of my skull. It was 9:45 PM when the train cleared the 79th Street station, the windows smeared with the grey grease of a South Chicago summer rain that never quite managed to cool the asphalt.
By the time I transferred to the bus and walked the final four blocks to the brick three-flat on custom avenue, the dashboard clock of my internal battery had been flashing red for hours. My hands were stiff, the skin across my knuckles split and blackened around the rims from twelve hours of pulling industrial shrink-wrap around pallets of zinc-coated fasteners.
I stood on the second-floor landing, the weight of my steel-toed boots feeling like lead casings poured directly into my socks. I could smell the building before I even touched the brass handle of apartment 2B—the smell of old boiled cabbage from the first floor, the damp carpet from the laundry room down below, and then, as I turned my key, the sudden, distinct odor of my own home being consumed by people who didn't live there.
It wasn't the smell of Emily’s ginger tea or the lavender floor wax she liked to use on the linoleum. It was the heavy, sweet stink of room-temperature pepperoni grease, spilled orange soda, and the chemical tang of cheap body spray.
I pushed the door open. The safety chain was hanging loose against the molding, clinking against the wood like an old dog collar.
"I’m telling you, he’s not going to say anything," Brittany’s voice cut through the blare of the television before my boots had even cleared the welcome mat. She was sitting sideways on the small velvet armchair Emily had spent three weekends restoring with a staple gun and a bolt of clearance fabric. Her feet, clad in pink plastic slides, were propped directly against the polished armrest. "Ethan’s too scared of Ma to make a scene about a couple of pizzas."
"He better not," Lily muttered from the far corner of the rug. She was twenty-one, her hair pinned up in a messy cloud of bleached curls that smelled faintly of cigarette smoke from the porch. She was picking at a hangnail with the tip of an old butter knife she’d taken from our silver drawer. "The crust on these is like cardboard anyway. Next time tell him to get the stuffed crust from the place by the expressway."
The living room was an obstacle course of small, ugly humiliations. My mother, Teresa, occupied the entirety of our three-seater sofa. She had three of Emily’s hand-crocheted throw pillows wedged beneath her lower back, her knees propped up on a stack of architectural magazines I’d bought for our future house fund.
A half-empty bag of sour-cream chips rested on her stomach, rising and falling with her breath while a reality television show about wealthy women in Beverly Hills screamed from the sixty-inch screen—a screen I was still paying forty-two dollars a month for on a store credit card that carried a twenty-four percent interest rate.
"Ethan," my mother said, not turning her head from the screen. She reached blindly into the bag, her fingers coated in white seasoning dust. "You’re late. The traffic down by the slip must’ve been bad. Go in the kitchen and see if there’s any of that garlic bread left. Kayla ate the last piece with the cheese, but there might be a heel in the wrapper."
I didn't drop my bag. I stood in the narrow throat of the hallway, my eyes taking in the details: the orange soda ring drying into the grain of the end table, the crumpled paper plates wedged between the couch cushions, the bright, blue-white glare of the brand-new iPhone 15 Pro Max Brittany was holding up to her face to check her reflection—a phone that had been added to my wireless account three weeks ago after she claimed she needed it for "job interviews" she hadn't yet attended.
"Where is Emily?" I asked. My voice sounded thin to my own ears, like paper being torn behind a closed door.
Kayla laughed from the floor, where she was text-messaging someone with her thumbs moving like small pink beetles. "Where do you think she is, Ethan? She’s been in her room or the kitchen since four. Pregnancy doesn't mean she’s made of glass, you know. Ma had five of us and she was still pulling shifts at the commercial laundry until her water broke on the floor."
"Your sister’s right," Teresa said, her eyes tracking a diamond necklace on the television screen. She sighed, a heavy, theatrical sound that was meant to remind the room of her sciatica, her high blood pressure, and the twenty years she’d spent raising us after my father’s heart gave out in the driveway of the old house. "Women today make a whole production out of it. A little nausea and they need a parade. I cooked a full Sunday roast for twelve people the night before your brother Leo was born. Didn't ask for a single hand, either."
"She’s eight months, Ma," I said, my hand tightening around the nylon strap of my backpack until the plastic buckle groaned. "The doctor said her blood pressure was spiking at the last check."
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"Doctors," Brittany scoffed, her thumb scrolling through a gallery of her own face. "They tell you anything to get you to buy those prenatal vitamins from the clinic. Look at this lighting, Kayla. Is it making my chin look weird?"
I turned away from them before the heat behind my eyes could turn into words I couldn't recall. The hallway was dark, the bulb in the overhead fixture having burned out three days ago. I hadn't had the time to fetch the stepladder from the basement, and clearly, none of the four grown women sitting forty feet away had considered turning a new bulb into the socket worth their collective effort.
