The Dark Green

The rain in Chicago doesn't fall -- it attacks. It comes at you like it has a personal grudge, and that afternoon on the South Side, it was definitely personal.

I was standing under the awning of a grocery store on 47th Street, counting change in my palm, when Grandfather called my name. He was sitting on a bench with his lunch box -- the same dented tin box he has carried to work every day for thirty years.

"Vera," he said. "Come here."

I walked over and sat beside him. He was counting pennies the way he always counted things -- carefully, suspiciously, like the world might try to cheat him if he wasn't paying attention.

"You sell everything today?"

"I sold seventeen hair clips and six bracelets."

"Good. That is --" He stopped counting. Looked at me. "How is school?"

"Fine."

"Fine. Good." He went back to counting.

That was Grandfather. He could talk about the weather, the price of cabbage, the number of pennies in a roll, but ask him how his day was and he'd stare at you like you'd asked him to solve a differential equation.

I was eighteen and I had learned to read his silence the way other people read books. When he counted slowly, he was worried. When he didn't count at all, he was sick.

Today, he wasn't counting.

He collapsed three days later. At the corner store, reaching for a loaf of bread he would not eat because he saved the white bread for special occasions. He fell in the aisle between the soup cans and the canned beans, and the store owner had to call Dr. O'Malley.

Dr. O'Malley was a neighborhood doctor -- kind, experienced, and limited by the fact that he was working out of a two-room office that shared a wall with a barber shop.

"Stress," he said, after checking Grandfather over. "Old man stress. He needs to rest. Maybe take it easy for a while."

But I saw the way his eyes lingered on Grandfather's stomach. I saw the slight frown he tried to hide.

"Dr. O'Malley," I said, "what are you not saying?"

He sighed. "The girl is smart. I will tell you what I would tell my daughter. You need a real hospital. Presbyterian. See Dr. Lin."

Dr. Margaret Lin was an oncologist at Presbyterian Hospital -- one of the best in Chicago. She was a calm, precise woman with eyes that didn't blink enough.

"Stage III," she said, after running tests. "Stomach cancer. We need surgery, then chemotherapy. The surgery alone will cost --"

"How much?" I asked.

"Ten thousand dollars."

I had eight hundred and forty-three dollars in a savings account at a bank on Cermak Road. The rest was in Grandfather's tin box -- pennies, nickels, dimes, and the occasional quarter.

"Can we pay over time?" I asked.

Dr. Lin looked at me for a long moment. "What do you have?"

"Enough," I said. It was a lie. But it was the kind of lie that people in Chicago tell every day.

Grandfather refused the surgery. "I am not spending my last dime on a dead man," he said. His voice was quiet but firm. "Save your money, Vera. You will need it."

"I will," I said.

But I didn't. I needed the money for him.

Chicago's underground wasn't just about booze and gambling and the kind of men who wore pinstripe suits and carried .38s in their jackets. There was also a gem trade -- stolen stones, smuggled jade, pieces of jewelry that had changed hands too many times to count.

I found my way into it through Mike Donovan, a PI who had been a soldier in the war and came back with a limp and a habit of talking to himself.

"You need money fast," Mike said. It was not a question.

"I need ten thousand."

Mike laughed. It was a dry, humorless laugh. "Kid, I know people who can make you fifty dollars fast. Ten thousand takes time."

"I don't have time."

"Then you are in the wrong line of work."

But he introduced me to Slick Marino anyway. Slick was a small man with big ears and a smile that didn't reach his eyes. He dealt in gems -- legitimate and otherwise.

"I have something," he said, leaning across his desk. His office was above a noodle shop on Cermak Road. "Big jade piece. Burma. The real thing. I need cash fast. Will sell for three thousand."

I looked at the photo he slid across the desk. The stone was -- I don't know how else to say it -- green. Not just green, but the green of deep water, of ancient forests, of something that had been pressed into stone under a million years of earth.

"How much?" I asked.

"Three thousand cash."

"It is worth more than that."

"It is worth what I can sell it for."

I thought about Grandfather. About the tin box. About the eight hundred dollars in the bank. About the ten thousand that stood between him and a surgery that might save his life.

"Two thousand," I said.

Slick stared at me. Then he smiled. "You got your grandfather's tongue, don't you?"

"Two thousand. Cash. Today."

"Done."

I sold the stone to a collector in the Gold Coast -- a woman who collected jade the way other women collected shoes. She paid eight thousand. After the hospital bill and the surgery and the medication, there was still enough left over to pay Mike for his trouble and put something in Grandfather's tin box.

The surgery went well. Grandfather survived. But when he woke up, he was thinner. Weaker. The kind of thinner that makes a man look like a photograph of himself from ten years ago.

"I owe you," he said.

"You don't owe me anything."

"Yes, I do. Everything."

Tom Wong arrived two weeks later. He was my biological father -- a man I had never met, who had left when I was six months old and only reappeared now that he heard my grandfather was dying and might leave me something.

"I want to make this right," he said. He looked like Grandfather -- same nose, same eyes. It made me sick.

"I don't want you to make anything right," I said.

"But I am your father."

"No," I said. "He is my grandfather. And you are a stranger."

Tom Wong looked at me with a face that was trying very hard not to be angry. "You are making a mistake."

"I make a lot of mistakes," I said. "This isn't one of them."

I went to the hospital after that. The rain had stopped -- for now. I stood outside Grandfather's room and looked through the window at him, sleeping, hooked up to machines that beeped in a rhythm that sounded like counting.

Pennies. Nickels. Dimes. Quarters.

I opened my purse. The gun was still inside -- Slick had given it to me, saying Chicago wasn't safe for a girl who knew too much. I closed the purse.

Outside, the Chicago rain started again. It always did.

Author Note & Copyright: