Read Blood Shot for Free Online Page A

like to talk about these things.”
    “No, we don’t,” Ed agreed nastily, turning to her. “Your daughter. You couldn’t control her. For twenty-five years the neighbors whispered behind my back, and now I have to be insulted in my own house by that Italian bitch’s daughter.”
    My face turned hot. “You’re disgusting, Djiak. You’re terrified of women. You hate your own wife and daughter. No wonder Louisa turned to someone else for a little affection. Who was it to get you so exercised? Your local priest?”
    He sprang up from the table, knocking over his beer stein, and hit me in the mouth. “Get out of my house, you mongrel bitch! Don’t ever come back with your filthy mind, your vile tongue!”
    I got up slowly and went over to stand in front of him, my face close enough to smell the beer on his breath. “You may not insult my mother, Djiak. Any other garbage from the cesspool you call a mind I’ll tolerate. But you ever insult my mother again in my hearing I will break your neck.”
    I stared at him fiercely until he turned his head uneasily away.
    “Good-bye, Mrs. Djiak. Thanks for the coffee.”
    She was on her knees mopping the floor by the time I got to the kitchen door. The beer had soaked through my socks. In the entry way I paused to take them off, slipping my bare feet into my running shoes. Mrs. Djiak came up behind me, cleaning my beery footprints.
    “I begged you not to talk to him about it, Victoria.”
    “Mrs. Djiak, all I want is Caroline’s father’s name. Tell me and I won’t bother you anymore.”
    “You mustn’t come back. He will call the police. Or perhaps even shoot you himself.”
    “Yeah, well, I’ll bring my gun the next time I come.” I fished a card from my handbag. “Call me if you change your mind.”
    She didn’t say anything, but she took the card and tucked it into her apron pocket. I pulled the gleaming door open and left her frowning in the entryway.

5
    The Simple Joys of Childhood
    I sat in the car for a long time before my anger cooled and my breathing returned to normal. “How she made us suffer!” I mimicked savagely. Poor scared, spunky teenager. What courage it must have taken even to tell the Djiaks she was pregnant, let alone not to go to the home for unwed mothers they’d picked out for her. Girls in my high school class who hadn’t been as resilient returned with horrifying tales of backbreaking work, spartan rooms, poor nourishment as a nine-month punishment meted out by the nuns.
    I felt fiercely proud of my mother for standing up to her righteous neighbors. I remembered the night they marched in front of Louisa’s house, throwing eggs and yelling insults. Gabriella came out on the front stoop and stared them down. “Yes, you are Christians, aren’t you?” she told them in her heavily accented English. “Your Christ will be very proud of you tonight.”
    My bare feet were beginning to freeze inside my shoes. The cold slowly brought me back to myself. I started the car and turned on the heater. When my toes were warm again I drove down to 112th Street and turned west to Avenue L. Louisa’s sister Connie lived there with her husband, Mike, and their five children. While I was churning up the South Side I might as well include her.
    Connie was five years older than Louisa, but she’d still been living at home when her sister got pregnant. On the South Side you lived with your parents until you got married yourself. In Connie’s case, she lived with her parents even after she married while she and her husband saved money for a house of their own. When they finally bought their three-bedroom place she quit her job to become a mother—another South Side tradition.
    Compared to her mother, Connie was quite a slattern. A basketball lay on the tiny front lawn, and even my untutored eye could tell that no one had washed the front stoop in recent memory. The glass in the storm door and front windows gleamed without a streak, however, and no