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don’t end up in a trash bin with the rest of the garbage of Chicago.
    Is that what happened to Beatrix? Mara demanded. They kept telling her Beatrix was dead, but in such a way that she never believed them: no details given, only a pursing up of the lips, and “too painful for your grandfather to talk about.”
    Harriet, when pushed, reported going to a funeral, Did you see the body? Are you sure it was Mother? Mara persisted, only to have Harriet snap, don’t be a ghoul. But Beatrix’s death wasn’t in the papers, under her married name or her birth name. Mara thought Grandfather and Mephers had thrown Beatrix out, but were ashamed to admit it. Her mother might be one of the army of street people marching unseen through the alleys and underground streets of the city.
    Mara began to inspect every homeless white woman she came upon, searching for a resemblance to her grandfather or Harriet—not to her own face, which must have been taken from her father’s mold, Mrs. Ephers often said, since no one ever saw a Stonds with those cheekbones—trying to imagine Harriet wrinkled, gray-haired, that sleek golden beauty turned to ashes. Their mother would be only fifty or so if she were still alive, but everyone knew life on the streets aged you before your time, Of course, only a terrible mother would abandon her children, and everyone agreed that Beatrix had been a terrible mother—look what she’d done to poor golden Harriet, after all. But Mara couldn’t help thinking it was she herself, some particular defect in her that was obvious from the moment of her birth, that led their mother to disappear so completely. For, after all, until Mara was born, at least Beatrix came around from time to time. But no one had seen Beatrix since she drifted out of the apartment when her new baby was nine weeks old.
    If you and Grandfather didn’t want me, why didn’t you put Beatrix in rehab and help her so she could have her own place with me? Mara asked Mrs. Ephers.
    You can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped, Mara, she must have heard that saying three hundred thousand times or so in her nineteen years. We sent our bucket down into that well many times, probably too many, and it came up dry each time, Beatrix had to learn to come to grips with life herself. We prayed for her, but the Lord had other plans for all of us.
    Mara waited for the day when Grandfather and Mrs. Epherswould throw her out to join Beatrix on the garbage heap of life. They did keep rumbling about how she needed to support herself, she shouldn’t expect some trust fund was going to materialize to bail her out, not if she didn’t show she was responsible enough to manage money. After she’d been home from college for three months, Grandfather put his foot down: you cannot go out drinking all night, then sit in your room all day long, young lady, pretending you’re a writer. It would be one thing if you were in school, but as you’ve chosen to avoid education, I expect you to contribute to your living expenses.
    Even Harriet chimed in, Going out to those bars isn’t the smartest way to use your evenings. Why don’t you register in one of the local writing programs if you don’t want to go back to college? That way at least you’d have some focus.
    And anyway, Harriet added, how do you get into those jazz bars? Don’t you have to be twenty-one to drink in this state? Which of course Harriet knew, being a lawyer and knowing all the laws that ever were, those on the statute books as well as laws of conduct, of the jungle, even of gravity, since she’d been so good at physics in school along with every other subject.
    Harriet tried to find Mara a job in the word processing room at her law firm, but Mara couldn’t type fast enough, and she was always drifting into daydreams when she should have been transcribing some brilliant exposition of securities law.
    Harriet next persuaded one of her clients, the Hotel Pleiades, to give Mara a job in