Sara Paretsky - Fire Sale

If this were Disney, if this were that kind of fairy tale, I’d end by saying that the Lady Tigers went on to win the sectional and the state. I’d say they played their hearts out for me, their battered coach, and for Mary Ann, whose funeral we attended together late in February.

But in my world, things like that don’t happen. My girls won five games during the whole season, where last year they had won two. That was all the victory I was going to get.

I had dinner with Lotty the day after the Lady Tigers’ season ended, and told her how discouraged I felt. She frowned in disapproval, or disagreement.

“ Victoria, you know my grandfather, my father’s father, was a very observant Jew.”

I nodded, surprised: she rarely talked about her dead family.

“During the terrible winter we spent together in 1938, the fifteen of us crowded into two rooms in the Vienna ghetto, he gathered all his grandchildren together and told us that the rabbis say when you die and present yourself before the Divine Justice, you will be asked four questions: Were you fair and honest in your business dealings? Did you spend loving time with your family? Did you study Torah? And last, but most important, did you live in hope for the coming of the Messiah? We were living then without food, let alone hope, but he refused to live hopelessly, my Zeyde Radbuka.

“Me, I don’t believe in God, let alone the coming of the Messiah. But I did learn from my zeyde that you must live in hope, the hope that your work can make a difference in the world. Yours does, Victoria. You cannot wave a wand and clear away the rubble of the dead steel mills, or the broken lives in South Chicago. But you went back to your old home, you took three girls who never thought about the future and made them want to have a future, made them want to get a college education. You got Rose Dorrado a job so she can support her children. If a Messiah ever does come, it will only be because of people like you, doing these small, hard jobs, making small changes in this hard world.”

It was a small comfort, and that night at dinner it felt like a cold one. But as the Chicago winter lingered, I found myself warmed by her grandfather’s hope.

Sara Paretsky is the author of thirteen previous books, including eleven V. I. Warshawski novels. The winner of many awards, including the Cartier Diamond Dagger Award for lifetime achievement from the British Crime Writers’ Association, she lives in Chicago.